John Holmes

John Holmes (1910-1988). National Secretary and other positions with the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), 1940-43. Department of External Affairs, 1943-60. Positions included Assistant Under-Secretary, 1953-60. Returned to CIIA in 1960. Also held professorships at the University of Toronto and York University.

***

JOHN HOLMES

*Interviewers: Hill, Cox, Pawelek.

 

[HILL]* Good morning. Our guest this morning is Professor John Holmes. We are very pleased indeed that you could join us today Professor Holmes and we are delighted with your readiness to participate in this project. Professor Holmes, as you know, what we are engaging in here is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We are trying to examine the development of Canadian interest in NATO over time and also some of the detailed work inside the NATO organization. However, our approach is not a narrow one focusing on the drafting of this or that particular document at NATO headquarters, but rather a broader effort to look at the development of Canada's foreign policy interests, in both the immediate and long-term senses, for example as a means of pursuing the goal of general international peace and security. So we were very keen to have you with us, owing to your involvement in Canadian foreign policy and international affairs, both as a member of the Department of External Affairs and as a researcher, writer and teacher. The way we will approach this interview is to take the main phases in your career, more or less in chronological order, and to ask some questions about the principal issues which arose in each period, as you saw them at the time or as you have described or assessed them since then. We are interested not only in information and explanation, of course, but also in your reflections about the specific issues or general themes of foreign policy or world affairs.

 

First of all, we normally start with a little bit of biography for the sake of the reader. I note that you began your working life as English Master at Pickering College from 1933 to '38, served as Information Secretary to the Canadian Institute of International Affairs 1940 to 1941, and as National Secretary of the CIIA from 1941 to 1943. You joined External Affairs in 1943 and served first as secretary of the Working Committee on Post Hostilities Problems. There you worked on the question of post war international structures and related issues, if I am not mistaken. From 1944 to 1947 your were at the Canadian High Commission in London, from 1947 to '48 the Charge d’Affaires at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, and in 1949-51 head of the United Nations Division of External Affairs. In 1950 you went to the United Nations as Canada's acting permanent representative. Subsequently you served two years on the directing staff of Canada's Nation Defense College and then served as Assistant Under-Secretary of state for External Affairs in Ottawa from 1953 to 1960. Then came more than a decade as Research Director and Director General of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. In 1967 you were also appointed professor of international relations at the University of Toronto, and in 1971 to a professorship of international relations at Glendon College in York University. If I may say so, this is quite a career, and I haven't even said yet what you did in any of those periods.

 

[HOLMES] Survived …

 

[HILL] I should also like to mention at the outset that I will refer on a number of occasions during the interview to one of your recent contributions to the study of international affairs, that is to say Volumes One and Two of: "The Shaping of Peace - Canada and the Search for World Order, 1943-1957." Perhaps later on, in the second interview, we will also mention other more recent pieces dealing with Canada's relations with NATO and so on. On "The Shaping of Peace," it had, if I may say so, a lot of illuminating things to say about Canadian policy, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, especially with respect to the establishment of the United Nations and NATO.

 

Part I - The Early Years, to 1943

 

[HILL] If we could turn now to the first part of the interview, which is Part One, this deals with your early years and career, which is up to 1943. Professor Holmes, you were born in London, Ontario and I believe grew up in Ontario.

 

[HOLMES] Yes.

 

[HILL] You attended the University of Western Ontario and graduated with a BA in 1932. You took an MA at the University of Toronto and then went on to teach at Pickering College in 1933, remaining there until 1938. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about those early years and particularly how they affected your outlook on the world and on international affairs especially.

 

[HOLMES] I suppose perhaps the most revealing thing was, I think, when I was an undergraduate at Western. I was president, I think founder, of the League of Nations Society, and I was very much caught up in that movement. When I look back on it, I realize how incredibly naive we were, but nevertheless, like I think most young people of that period, there was this enormous worry about the way the world was hurtling. I can remember holding a special assembly at the University to celebrate the Kellogg-Briand Pact. We tried to hold a mock disarmament conference. We were groping around. I was very much in that tradition of looking for world order. The influence of spending 5 years at a Quaker College too, strengthened that very great interest in international relations. Then I was at the University of London in the year before the war, and when it broke out, which was rather a strong experience. I arrived in Glasgow the day after the Munich agreement. What I recall is sitting up late at night celebrating. I had the usual ambivalence; I didn't think appeasement was a very good idea but I was exceedingly glad there wasn’t going to be a war tomorrow. And we all swarmed up in the first class. One of the things I had to do that night I remember was help get a rather drunken Sir Frederick Banting to bed. He was celebrating too much. That was very much the mood, but a lot of it was simply related to the fact that we had had a rather scary trip, and we were going to land and the sun was shining and that sort of thing. That year we went through the hope and then the gradual despair.

 

[HILL] That was very common, was it not? People were very conscious at that time of international affairs. That sounds very trite now, but I believe there was very much a sense that things were going wrong.

 

[HOLMES] Yes. I think one of the errors looking back, so it seems to me, is the idea that the appeasers were all a bunch of anti-semitic pro-Nazi people, sponsored by the Clivedon set; most of the appeasers were appeasers because it was only 20 years after Paeschendale, it was really a hatred and fear of war; you'd do almost anything to put it off. That has been lost now. That isn't an argument that appeasement was the right policy. It's just an attempt to straighten out the motivation.

 

[HILL] In your own background you mentioned teaching at Pickering. Are you a Quaker yourself?

 

[HOLMES] No, I am not.

 

 

[HILL] At that time I believe there was a deep interest in, and awareness of, the world around, and in doing things about it.

 

[HOLMES] Of course, in that period too, the Spanish Civil War was very much for our generation like Vietnam for a later generation. You took rather strong sides and rather simple views on it. You were for or against evil. I don't think I ever was a pacifist, but anti-war and pretty mixed up. I think the best comment on that period was when Frank Underhill said, the truth was that we were all wrong. It’s very difficult to pick up the people in the '30s who had a very clear idea of the future and without contradictions.

 

[HILL] Yes, I think you mentioned that in your book, that quote by Underhill. I was struck by it at the time. I have the impression also that the Depression was something which affected everyone, and yourself no less than everybody else.

 

[HOLMES] Yes. Sometimes, young people now that I talk to - one of the problems is a loss of faith in anything. I'm not sure that is an anarchical attitude, but looking back to the '30s, there was a simple solution to everything and that was Socialism. And if only we could get to that. That wasn't only people on the left, it was just so logical, so simple a solution to the problems of unemployment; if we could plan everything. And so you had that feeling that there was a way to stop wars and to stop poverty and unemployment, things like that. And the difference now is that the young people now are so much more sophisticated, because socialism has been tried in so many different forms and it isn't the answer and neither, I would hasten to say, is something called Capitalism, if that exists. So it was a simplistic time - and I'm happy that the kinds of experiences I had, particularly in the Post Hostilities Planning Group in the Department helped complicate life - complicated one's attitudes.

 

[HILL] What about the two years you spent in London? Did you travel? Of course, then, the war broke out, but prior to that, did you go to the Continent at all?

 

[Holmes] I was in rural France, the Loire Valley, I remember, when they started mobilizing. It reminded me of movies of 1914; people coming into the villages bringing their horses and whatnot and posters going up, and the first night that the lights went down in Paris, so it was a frightening time. But then of course we got back to London and everything was closed down and the University had moved to Aberystwyth and the period of the phony war was on. So eventually after a couple of months I came back to Canada. Nobody seemed to be doing anything and then I started working at the CIIA at that time; I just started the public education programme. I stayed there until I was taken on as a wartime temporary in External. At the time they were taking anybody who had flat feet or poor eyesight. They couldn't take people who were eligible for military service but I had poor eyesight and a little knowledge of international relations. I was recruited as a wartime temporary.

 

Part II - External Affairs, 1943-44

 

[HILL] Did you have any further comment on the period at the CIIA? What was your main function and what was the mood of the membership?

 

[HOLMES] Within the CIIA there has always been what one might call a nationalist group, - I don't like the word imperialist - although some of them probably were rather old-fashioned imperialists. Most of them were somewhat internationalist. The war had reconciled people very much. I think there weren't very many people who opposed the war effort. The nationalists, who had been opposed in principle to Canada's partly getting involved in a British war, as they pictured it, went along, pretty well. It was partly the realisation the war was on and that we were in it, so there was not much point in arguing. But also, I think, it was a move away from the naive expectation that Canada could remain outside a war. And if we are going to be in it, why we had better do our best. It was 1941 - 1943 when I was there. Also, there were people there who were already saying that we had to have a better world afterwards, who talked about it and showed interest in it. And then there were the ones who said we've got a war to win, we can't take time off to plan the future unless we win the war. But one felt a little out of things at home and the prospect of getting involved a little more and getting abroad was interesting, especially because at that point in Ottawa they had decided that we were going to win the war. It was going to take quite a long while, but now with the Americans and Soviets and everybody in, the war would be won, and it was legitimate. The first thing I was assigned to do by Hume Wrong, who was my master and mentor, was to work a month or more on a long memorandum pulling together views from parliament, views throughout Canada, on the future of world order and Canadian attitudes towards what we were to do and that kind of thing. And then we set up this Post Hostilities Planning Committee. That was really inspired by the British, who had set up a Post Hostility Planning Committee, and sent a memorandum to Commonwealth countries and wanted some of our responses. So we had to organize to get some responses. This was a departmental committee with the armed services involved and others; and that was when we really started post-war planning. First of all we were more concerned with the peace settlement, organization for occupation, for a peace treaty and that kind of thing. Then, when the great powers started designing a new United Nations, we began to give our attention to that. I think one of the interesting things here is that, in spite of the fact that everybody kept talking of the "failure" of the League, that was their favorite phrase, I don't think that at any time anybody doubted that we would try that again. There were all sorts of arguments about the shape of it - particularly as far as we were concerned about the role of the great powers - but that there would be one was just taken for granted. I never remember having to argue it. And I don't remember people opposing it. Mackenzie King was never all that keen on the League or the UN, but I think he always realized that the public wanted it, that what's more the great powers were going to have a UN and that we would either be in it or out of it.

 

[HILL] I was struck by that in your book. You mentioned that there was a general sentiment of that kind. But it wasn't naive, a "going in with your eyes closed" approach: it was an expectation that one would set up structures and then they would have to be adjusted to fit situations as they developed. So it was a relatively realistic policy.

 

[HOLMES] I can remember that. It's something I am trying to reconstruct, my own thinking. I was so much influenced by Hume Wrong, I never know what I thought and what I just got from him. You know I was showing some of my students the other day who were doing something on the Commonwealth, a record of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' meeting in 1944. It was a time when the Australians were putting forth proposals for a Commonwealth Secretariat and there was talk of a more united Commonwealth foreign policy. Mackenzie King didn't like that at all. He made the kind of definitive statement on this in the Prime Ministers' meeting, to argue for a new kind of Commonwealth. And as I recall it, Norman Robertson came back to the Dorchester one day at lunch and said to me: "We've got to have a statement; write it". And I scrawled it out in pencil, with Norman's brilliant changes in pen. I still have it, along with Mackenzie King's, with the text as he gave it, and I was showing this to my students. A couple who were working on it were quite interested in this. And I looked at it and I said, you know, it's a very good speech, but that was spirit-writing on my part, I was so indoctrinated by Hume Wrong that I was using his phrases. I really don't claim credit for a rather good speech. He, intellectually, had a tremendous hold over me, and I think that mixture of realism and idealism that he had, I see even today. Memoranda in External seem to come out of that spirit. This is probably a diversion.

 

[HILL] In fact I wanted to ask you a bit about personalities. It seems to me that in that period, from about 1941 on, people were already assuming that the war was already going to be won, and of course by 1942, although there were obvious set-backs, things like Singapore and one thing and another, the very bad years, but nonetheless the planning for the post-war period went ahead. The establishment of the United Nations became a key focus of Canadian foreign policy in that period. And this was something that came partly from the senior officials. I think you mentioned that Mackenzie King was, in a way, supportive of it, but in some degree his support was rhetoric designed for public consumption, whereas the real impulse in policy came from some of the senior officials. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about people like Hume Wrong and Escott Reid.

 

[HOLMES] There was one point I set out before to make and then I side tracked myself, which I think was relevant. You know we were all for the UN and collective security. Universal collective security was a very logical goal, if you looked at 1914 and 1939. What we thought we had to do was what we didn't do over Abyssinia and Manchuria. I was saying this to the Japanese yesterday, and I left out Manchuria. At any rate, collective security was a nice idea but you weren't all that sure of it. And there was a feeling that war was a very tough business, war was not something to be run by a board of directors in Geneva, something we found out later, very clearly, in Korea. The United Nations, after all, began in 1942 as a union of the allied powers, long before San Francisco. This was an attempt to perpetuate an alliance against aggression. I don't think we were naive about the prospects for holding it together, but of course you didn't give up in advance, you tried to keep the Soviets and the Western powers together. In many ways we conceived it more as a perpetuation of alliance against aggression than just the kind of repetition of the League, which had been incapable. Of course, with the Americans on board, this would make all the difference. So this was a more realistic approach. I think that strain of thinking which is more Wrong than Reid—I was going to call my book, at one time, "Reid and Wrong in Foreign Policy", after Jim Eyre's book. This strain comes out again in the support of NATO. There was this feeling that you had to have an alliance of war-capable countries.

 

[HILL] Could you describe the differences between Wrong’s far-sighted realism as opposed to the tempered idealism of Escott Reid?

 

[HOLMES] I think Wrong was essentially a functionalist; he's the man who composed the functionalist theory; Mackenzie King read the speech. That was very much his approach to things. Escott Reid was more utopian. Although I tend to be more of a Wrongian than a Reidian, I think I have said, and I would still say, that they were both essential and that this dialogue between them was extraordinarily profitable and constructive. The danger of a functionalist is he gets complacent and that's my trouble. I still need those phone calls from Escott to shape me up. So I think it was highly profitable. During that period Escott was in Washington and so was Mike Pearson, during the latter part of the war. So what was coming out of Ottawa was much more Wrong, and Robertson and Wrong were both rather pragmatists. Escott in some ways was a compulsive and superb drafter and he liked institutions and he liked frameworks. The dedication to the concept of universal collective security was pretty strong there. It was also with Mike Pearson. Mike on the working level, was a great pragmatist, but on the other hand he was dedicated to collective security. Even to the end, I could never persuade him to stop calling NATO a collective security organisation or distinguishing between the concept of universal collective security and collective defence. All the things we were doing and the memoranda we were writing would go to Washington and London, and come back with comments. I think I mentioned the marvellous time when Escott, bless his heart, on 24 December, sent an entire redraft of the UN Charter back to Norman Robertson to look at during Christmas. We all loved Escott. There was something about him that was exciting, but he was much more a believer in international government, and of course this comes out with an essential difference of approach to NATO. Escott really wanted to create something like a structured North Atlantic Community. It was partly because Hume was on the spot in Washington knowing that that wasn’t on. But also it was his functionalist approach - you build the institution to suit the requirements rather than starting with the philosopher’s dream.

 

[HILL] In a sense Hume Wrong and Escott Reid were two of the main thinkers, I believe. Pearson was more of an operator, I mean in the sense of being a diplomatic practitioner, perhaps?

 

[HOLMES] I think also you will notice some difference. Robertson and Wrong were very definitely in charge up to the end of the war, that whole period. Then of course Wrong went to Washington. Robertson went to London, Pearson and Reid took over in Ottawa. I don't want to overemphasize that as if it was a coup. There was never any kind of feeling that they were not working in collusion, but you will find that the material coming out of Ottawa after that period was somewhat more utopian.

 

[COX] Could I just take you back to your comment about the attempt to hold the alliance together, the Soviets and Western states, but with a certain, perhaps not pessimism, but realistic sense that it was against the odds. Could you talk about that a little bit more, and what were the perceptions of the Soviet Union that made people feel the odds were against a co-operative relationship.

 

[HOLMES] This is awfully interesting stuff coming out with this new life of Churchill. I haven’t yet read it but I have read the reviews and I've been having long discussions over the years with my friend David Dilks (of the University of Leeds) who has been delving into the papers. You see, one day Churchill thinks it is going to work with the Soviets, the next day he despairs. Roosevelt was somewhat the same, except Roosevelt was more confident and a little arrogant too. I think he felt he was the key to it all. And he'd be the moderator between the wicked imperial powers, the Soviets and the British, and the French, this sort of thing, but I cite that because it seems to me that that was very much the feeling. I think the revisionist scholars in the States have it all wrong with the assumption that there was this deep seated antagonism and that we were really spoiling for a fight with the Soviets. It completely fails to understand the mood of people who have been involved in a god awful war for, in our case, six years; and for Americans - four years; but I think this is the way we went up and down. And given this feeling about the UN, as a perpetuation of the war time alliance against aggression, if that could just hold together, nobody expected it to be perfect - we mustn't split apart. Again you see the lessons of 1939 are so strong. At the end of the war it seemed like an era since the beginning of the war, but in fact it was only six years, and we still had that feeling that everything had gone wrong because we hadn't held together against aggression. So you had to hope, I don't think I am atypical, but one always looked for good news, for signs that the Soviets would be co-operative afterwards. I don't know enough about it myself, but I suspect that the Soviets themselves didn't know in advance, that they were fumbling about. I am sceptical of this idea that they had a clear-cut plan right through. And of course their paranoia was so great. It was a hope you clung to more than anything else. Now there's a tendency to go back and say/ well, these were the wise guys who realized all along, and these were the naive people. I think everybody had his wise days and his naive days. If it was naive, I mean I still think the wise thing was to try to get what we could. After all, we still have the United Nations.

 

[HILL] It has worked in a sort of way, not in the way everyone expected, but after all it is still there.

 

[HOLMES] Think what it would be like now if we didn't have one body in which we could all come together. Cynics, and the Heritage Foundation, may think that if you disbanded the United Nations you'd do away with problems, but we'd have them in spades.

 

[HILL] So, really, in that period, at the end of 1943-44, as far as Canada and Canadians were concerned, the United Nations, hopefully based on the continuance of the war time alliance, was the natural focus of Canada's foreign policy.

 

[HOLMES] Yes. I think so. As I was in London during that period, I didn't have a feel for Canadian opinion, but I am pretty sure of that. One thing was that Mackenzie King might well not have liked this, particularly the continuing commitment. It was just that he had no alternative. The public, I think, would have thrown him out of office.

 

[HILL] He did support it.

 

[HOLMES] Oh yes, he did. I don't mean to be cynical about that, I just think he still had his doubts about the League. Some of the things he wrote about the League make sense now. He was dead right about collective security, in many ways. He said that it wouldn't work. I think also that the old Canadian concern about being committed by somebody else really hadn't died, even though we were talking about the need for the surrender of sovereignty. That was one of the themes; sovereignty was rather a bad thing. We would surrender sovereignty to a world body but nevertheless when you come to the negotiations about the role of the Security Council, you find that we were hanging back again. We were not going to have a Security Council commit our troops. We demanded a right to be heard. Of course, we thought of ourselves as defending all the middle powers not just Canada. You get the same concern with NATO. In spite of our commitment to the Alliance, there was very great care about Article Five.

 

Part III - London, 1944-47

 

 [HILL] I wonder if we could go on to the next part, Part Three, London 1944-47. I want to raise some points about world issues in that time as well as your own duties. I wondered if we could start out with the San Francisco conference. As you mentioned, functionalism was an issue. I wonder if you could describe what that was, as Canada saw it, and what did Canada look for in the San Francisco conference.

 

[HOLMES] We had, of course, spent a lot of our time combatting the great powers - in alliance with the Australians and the New Zealanders and, as they began to emerge on the scene, the Brazilians and some others in South America. The European countries, the small European countries, had barely begun to re-establish themselves and were not in a very strong position. But they were quite sympathetic. The Dutch, I remember, were very much interested in the functionalist concept. So a lot of our thinking about the brave new world was directed towards assuring a position for ourselves and for the smaller powers. During the war, somewhat reluctantly, we had accepted a degree of great power domination of war time policy that we were determined not to do in peace time. To win a war, and when a war’s at a last effort stage, you are not going to break things. We didn’t like the failure to get on to allied Boards. We thought the British and Americans neglected our interests and that kind of thing, but you put up with it, to get the war won. But it made you all the more determined that they weren't going to do it afterwards. We were very fortunate, of course, in the fact that the British in those days used to share practically all their telegrams and things with us. When I was in London, a regular Foreign Office box came around and I had a key and I read most of their telegrammes. I mention this particularly because they let us in on what was going on in the Three Power Discussions - Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin. Which meant that we were able to put our word in in advance while the whole thing was being congealed, and if one looks back at the very considerable difference in the nature of the UN as designed in San Francisco, from what Roosevelt and some of the rest were proposing, it's quite clear that the smaller powers had considerable influence. And I think the British were more amenable than the Americans or the Soviets. The Soviets of course were the biggest problem. They just did not want us. They wanted equal status with the United States in particular, with Britain too, and they didn't want any small powers. They particularly didn't want the Poles, who at that time weren't nice docile Poles. So they were the big enemy of any attempt to share power. The British had been so battered and brow beaten over the years by the Australians and Canadians they were somewhat more understanding, especially in the Foreign Office. I found the Foreign Office very helpful on this. We were somewhat preoccupied by the struggles against great powers and getting things changed. The big issue came over UNRRA, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, which was the first of the post-war agencies; and there we said: "This is nonsense, we are going to be the second biggest contributor to UNRRA (not because we were the second most generous but because we were in the position to be so) , and you've got to make a place for us on the directing board". We fought that one very hard, and it was in this context that Wrong worked out the functionalist idea. You see, originally Roosevelt had the idea of the UN run by a "World Council". That was the phrase he used. It was quite clear that it would be run by the United States. Some co-operation with the Soviet Union and some co-operation with the British perhaps, but he was already downgrading them somewhat; and we fought this very, very hard.

 

I often quote a remark that King reports Roosevelt made to him. I think it's very significant. Roosevelt was actually defending the UN. And he quoted Sealey's The Expansion of England, which is of course the great explanation of England's imperial expansion, and the great things it has done for the world. Quoting that, he said: "And now the United States has become the United Nations.” The great 1776 Messiah was now going to run the world. A little impatient with us, because of the sort of feeling, that you small countries have nothing to worry about now because we are involved, we will look after your interests. That didn't appeal to us very much, especially when the Americans would say: "You know we can't really find a place for you because we also have to find a place for Brazil." We would say: "Have a look at the Brazilian and the Canadian contributions to winning this war." We were hyped on that. I think this is where we got our perspectives somewhat wrong. We based all our claims on the past, particularly when we were trying to get almost a semi-permanent position on the Security Council. We were a great military power because of what we did in the war, but we hadn't have the faintest intention of continuing to be a great military power. We demobilized very quickly and you couldn't go on justifying a position of that kind on the basis of a war that was over and you hoped was damn well over. I sometimes ask the question, if somehow or other we had got a kind of semi-permanent position on the Security Council, what that would have meant to the Canadian defence budget. We would have had to maintain an enormous armed force. We were mistaken on some of those things. Functionalism, I still think, is a logical theory and a workable theory. We said we will strongly oppose a United Nations which is run by a cabinet of you guys. The "Council", of course, then started to have a different function, to be the Security Council and we had a lot to do with that. When I say we, I mean as much the Australians and those who worked with us. If it's a Security Council on functional grounds the great military powers have a right to a special position, which we never described as a veto. A veto is looking at it upside down. It was that, given our kind of concept of an alliance managing peace, you had to have the team in agreement. So you had to have agreement from the five in order to do things. We thought of this as a special responsibility, not a privilege. The great military powers could have a special place on a Security Council on security grounds, but not on an economic and social council. I think we did pretty well in San Francisco. At Dumbarton Oaks you had the great powers drawing up the Charter. Even there we had a chance; we knew what was going on in the discussions all the time and we kept telling the Brits and the Americans what we did or didn’t like. But once we got to San Francisco it was a different game. There were all the great and small powers there and it was rather difficult to ignore them.

 

[HILL] I think you made the point at one stage that the Latin Americans had considerable voting power at that time, and tended to vote as a bloc. So that shifted things really.

 

[HOLMES] That's right. We liked their support on middle powers issues, but we were getting nervous about this bloc voting, particularly when we didn’t make it on the vote for the first Security Council.

 

[COX] How did the Soviets respond to the middle power issue?

 

[HOLMES] Negatively. Of course they had no middle power allies at that time. They were putting forward in earlier stages this idea that the various Soviet republics would be members. What irritated us most about that was that they compared it with membership of the British Empire. The idea that Byelorussia was comparable to Canada was not very good. It might have gone down in Minsk but not in Ottawa.

 

[COX] You said earlier that you thought they had emerged from the war perhaps stumbling along just like anybody else. But in the discussions about the Security Council and the structure of the UN, did a clearer picture emerge of what they wanted?

 

[HOLMES] I think that they wanted to be part of the management team and they didn't want interference from others. I don't think they had any illusions that they could run the world without the Americans or even the Brits at that time. They were rather slower to downgrade the British than other people were. No, I think that is very much what they wanted, and they wanted a centrally controlled UN. They were so conscious of the fact that they weren't going to have any allies. In the early days of the UN, they had, aside from the Ukraine and Byelorussia, which didn't matter very much, only Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was ten years before Hungary, Romania and others, former enemy states, came into the UN. So this is why, given their paranoia, they were clinging to the veto. We accepted the veto in the Security Council as inevitable. We knew you couldn't have the UN taking on one of the great powers. And after Hiroshima, that became all the clearer. People tend to forget that practically nobody in San Francisco knew anything about the atom bomb. The few Canadians who did weren't there. I think Norman Robertson must have known something about it, but he never said anything. In any case he couldn't acknowledge it. Whether the Soviets knew about it, we're still speculating. There's kind of a grim logic to what they wanted (i. e., the veto). I think we could see their position. We wanted to limit the veto, particularly on other questions such as getting items on the agenda. I'm talking a lot about the UN but it was dominant at the time.

 

[HILL] I have another question which relates to the UN, but it also relates as well to NATO. It's the question of Canada's relations with the United States. When you were in London, there was still the phrase the Atlantic Triangle; it was still alive then. I think it was buried some time afterwards. As I see it, one of the main aims at the end of the war was to keep the United States involved in world affairs, firstly in the United Nations, and then of course subsequently in NATO and the North Atlantic Treaty. Could you tell us something about Canada's policy in that respect at that time and how you see it as having evolved since.

 

[HOLMES] You're quite right, and I find it so hard to get students to understand that in that period, it wasn't a question of worrying about the United States dominating the world like a colossus; it was trying to hang on to them. If NATO was a conspiracy it sure wasn't an American conspiracy. It was a conspiracy on our part to hook the US Senate; that's really what it looked like at the time, to get them committed against all their prejudices. This was dominant. For a hundred years, our policy was, well at least since 1870, to maintain the Anglo-American entente. This was the basis of our security. We were secure in a kind of Anglo-American world. One of the major reasons in our view that the Second World War had broken out, was that the Americans not only didn't stay in the League but went into isolation. During the period before the war and during the early stages of the war, the important thing, as far as we were concerned, was to draw the Americans into the war, in one way or another. Another, mistaken interpretation of history for Canadians, I think, is when they see Ogdensburg and Hyde Park as deliberate Canadian moves towards continentalism, away from the old imperialism. Ogdensburg and Hyde Park were efforts on our part (mind you, Ogdensburg was much more Roosevelt's idea, with which we agreed) to hook the Americans into our war. Because Roosevelt was really in agreement with our war, they were helpful, but it sure wasn't the Americans dragging us into their war. It was the other way around. Well, I just cite that in a sense to answer your question. There was an enormous preoccupation on our part to keep the Americans in.

 

We also used this argument (and I think this has something to do with NATO) to cope with ideas of a new Commonwealth defence policy that were floating around in Britain. I noticed, in going back over my dispatches from London during that period, that I spent an awful lot of time trying to calm their nerves in Ottawa. These ideas about a Commonwealth defence policy and Commonwealth foreign policy were more aberrations of the editor of the Sunday Times, and some guys in the War Office. The British were in a terribly difficult position. Whether the Empire was a good thing or not in 1945, they were stuck with it. You couldn't suddenly tell all these islands and what not to go on their own. Attlee was constantly putting it to us: "We are in a terrible state". The Americans certainly were not going to help retain colonialism. But they were not at all enamoured of the idea that the British should get rid of the outposts at this point, especially in the East, because they were already seeing them as strategically important to the United States. We kept saying to the Brits that no Commonwealth defence scheme really made much strategic sense, given the kind of resources available, unless the United States was involved. The United States was the key to any kind of world-wide system, and I do not think we had to work very hard to convince Attlee and Bevin of that. They saw that point.

 

When considering the weakness of Britain, it has to be realized that the British had to act in '44 and '45 without any real assurance that the Americans were going to stay involved in Europe. I have some quotations from 1944 and '45 that David Dilks has given me, letters from Churchill to Roosevelt saying: "Don't think we are going to help you with the French, they are your problem. We are not going to keep people in France. We are not going to keep any occupation forces, and don't count on us."

 

That is what the British felt, with the terrible problems facing them, not only in Europe but around the world. So they were rather desperate, but our view was again that the only hope was to keep the Americans involved. And that also in a sense leads to NATO, because I think that our arguments with the British, if they really were arguments, were that purely Commonwealth defence schemes do not make much sense. We know you have to do something about it, but NATO is the answer. That is why Attlee approached St. Laurent about NATO and how we got involved from the beginning.

 

[HILL] Concerning the immediate post war period, it seems to me that there is a popular picture a bit along these lines: there was a war-time alliance. The United Nations was built on top of this. The alliance split apart. The UN did not function very well any more, and then people got very disillusioned with the UN, and then they went and looked for other things, and eventually NATO appeared. It seems to me that that is very much an over simplification, and in fact, it really was not very like that at all. First of there had been difficulties with the Soviets all along. It got more difficult later on but relations did not break down entirely even at the height of the Cold War. There was not the utopianism generally about the UN which some people have seen in the period, and perhaps the disillusionment afterwards with the UN was not really that massive.

 

[HOLMES] Yes, I think this is so. I frequently blame our rhetoric to some extent. So much was the rhetoric of world government. You know, UN police force against aggression and all that sort of thing, got people thinking more simplistically than I think the people involved, the officials and others involved, really thought about it* You did have this slow realization that the Security Council was not going to work as easily, I will not say as we expected, but as we had hoped. There was a tendency in that period, of course, to feel that the Security Council was what really mattered at the UN. I think in some ways what is significant about that is the fact that when we went on the Security Council in 1948 and 1949, for our first term, General McNaughton had been down there, in New York, in our job on the Atomic Energy Commission, and established such a reputation, and prestige, that he was asked to stay on as Ambassador to the Security Council, where he did a superb job. We really almost single handedly settled the problems between the Dutch and the Indonesians, and things like that. He was awfully good. But when we went off the Security Council in ’49, in Ottawa, there were even questions as to whether we would need more than a secretary and a typewriter in New York in the mission, although we had been one of the first people to establish a mission to the League in Geneva.

 

So when they were trying to figure what would be required in the mission, when we were not on the Security Council, they sent me down as I was head of the UN division. They said, "Well, you go down and hold the fort until we figure it out. There is not much happening." Little did they know what was going to happen one June day when the North Koreans invaded the South Koreans.

 

Well, I jumped a little ahead there. You were asking about a period when I was not in Ottawa. I was abroad; and, especially in Moscow, one was pretty well isolated. You did not have visitors going through. So here I am depending more on my research. When the time came for us to try for the Security Council in *47 questions were raised in Ottawa as whether the Council was worth while. That was the session of the General Assembly when Mr. St. Laurent made his famous statement, which goes down even in the NATO histories as the beginning of the Alliance, when he said that the situation is such that maybe those countries which are prepared to do something for their own common defence will have to do something. That was the beginning, the first signal.

 

I can remember getting a call from General Bedell Smith, who was the American Ambassador to Moscow. I did not get a telephone call, he came around; one didn’t telephone about such things. He asked if I had a copy of this speech, which he had heard a lot about. They were very excited about it in Washington, very much interested.

 

I had not realized the extent of the disillusionment in Ottawa until I did my research much later. You see it's interesting that Escott, who was one of the strongest of the UN people, became one of the first to begin advocating something like NATO. Hume Wrong also. I found a rather surprising memorandum in which he raised the question whether it was worth our while going on the Security Council when it did not seem to be able to do the kinds of things we had hoped for. I suspected in his case it was the sort of thing he tended to do. He put up an argument like that and really hoped people would shoot it down. But there was a debate, and then I think it was won really by those people who said that if we did not take over from the Australians, this would be regarded as a vote against the UN and at a time when there were questions being asked about it. There was then a Commonwealth seat, not officially designated, but by gentleman's agreement.

 

So we went on the Council, and what happened was that we had a really spectacular time, thanks to McNaughton and the staff he had, like George Ignatieff, John Starnes and the others. That is really where Canada's mediatory role began to blossom.

 

So, at the same time that we were joining NATO, we were also having a renewed faith in the UN. By the time I got there, I think we had really accepted the fact that universal collective security was not going to work, but nevertheless the Security Council would be extremely valuable in doing what it did in Indonesia, doing what it was trying to do in Kashmir and Greece, various things. Then, just having shifted gears, along came Korea, posing the question of collective security. Well, I must not jump to that.

 

[HILL] You were in London, of course, in the immediate post-war period. It seems to me that that was a very strange period, in 1945-1946, and then up to about '48, where the world was in a very odd state. Hopes had been invested in the UN, but it clearly was not working out as originally intended. There were all kinds of problems, of course. Europe in particular was devastated, and there must have been a great sense of not knowing where the whole world was going.

 

[HOLMES] Very much so. Of course people in Britain were preoccupied by change in India. The imperial structures were breaking down. The Americans were beginning to realize, of course, that although it was nice to be anticolonial, the world was going to be rather different suddenly if the British Empire collapsed.

 

[HILL] I just want to finish up on that one. Would you say that, when NATO was set up, it provided almost a kind of psychological focus, a sense of coming home to something surer again, which people could attach themselves to.

 

[HOLMES] Oh, yes. It was in so many ways the answer to our problems. There had been long tensions in Canada between those who did not want Canada to be dragged in to European wars, and those who either for imperial or internationalist reasons thought we should be more involved in the war. Mind you that strong prejudice, not only among French Canadians but among other what are now called "ethnic Canadians", the strong fear that we would be drawn into British wars for sentimental reasons, had diminished. It was pretty hard to sustain that after the Americans for the second time had got drawn into the war, not exactly to save the mother country or help King George. So that at the end of the war, particularly in '45, it was awfully hard to see this as just a British war, as Gywnne Dyer still insists.

 

[HILL] Yes, but do you feel that there was the same sentiment in Europe towards the establishment of NATO? I mean that, by and large, here was something that they could cling onto?

 

[HOLMES] There is an assumption that NATO was set up for fear that the Soviets were going to march to the North Sea. It was not really that. It was the great fear for the morale of Western Europe. Countries which had been occupied, worried about being occupied again. Was Communism the wave of the future? Communist parties were very strong in Italy and France. We forget also that Germany was still in a state of almost total devastation, and one of the things that worried us the most was just the simple sort of belief that anarchy and poverty and starvation breed Communism. Therefore the Germans themselves might opt for it and not just because the Soviets were forcing them. It's a little hard now to reconstruct that idea of Germany, but it was one of those things that worried us.

 

Then, of course, it was Prague '48 that really did it. So what you had to do was to restore faith, so that the West Europeans would feel that the wave from the East was not necessarily the wave of the future. You got this feeling particularly in France. You would get people to say, "Oh well, what the hell. We might as well give into it. We don't want to have another occupation." I am not saying that was necessarily a shrewd judgment of France, but that was...

 

[HILL] A sentiment ...

 

[HOLMES] Yes. Widespread.

 

[HILL] David, I think you had a question.

 

[COX] I think in a way it was almost the other side of the question you asked. I was going to ask if - you described the sense of foreboding in 1938, perhaps even earlier - was there a sense of foreboding in 1947 or '48?

 

[HOLMES] Comparable with '38? Well, there sure was in Moscow. It was partly isolation but I can remember that the Berlin Blockade was a pretty chilling experience. It was the uncertainty. Well, I have been through my own dispatches from Moscow. They are all out now, and they do confirm my recollection. I do not remember at any time saying that I saw any evidence that the Soviets were about to mobilize and march to the sea. I just kept saying that there was no evidence, but as you could not move very far away, you could not tell. It was this uncertainty.

 

You know we were again alternating between the optimists and the pessimists in our interpretations of what they were doing. Well, Prague was a blow, and then the Berlin Blockade because I know I had been rather of the school of thought that the Soviets were canny and cautious, that, in spite of everything, they would not do anything very reckless. The Berlin Blockade was pretty reckless.

 

[HILL] The other thing you had in that period was the economic situation, I mean, in 1947, throughout Western Europe, there was an appalling winter. Having an appalling winter in those days was a different thing from having it now. There was lack of coal. There was lack of heating. There was lack of food in many instances, I think. It was a pretty ramshackle kind of place in those days, wasn't it?

 

[HOLMES] I was in England for the spring of '47, the late, late winter. There was not much heat. In Britain the glow of peace was fading. There was still rationing. What was the value of victory? Mind you, it was not a time when one could say the Germans and the Japanese were doing better than we were. That had to wait a long time.

 

At any rate, there was a lot of disillusionment, certainly in Western Europe. One of the things that worried us, and if we get onto Article II at some point I would like to talk about it, is that the Americans and to some extent Canadians were getting worried that Europe was going to be a permanent basket case. This was well before the German miracle. The Germany I was in, when I went with Mr. Howe in 1947 visiting DP camps, was awful. Frankfurt was just awful; bodies in the street, people fainting from hunger and things like that. With the German miracle a little later, we seem to have forgotten that. And therefore we had this feeling that we were going to have to provide aid to the Europeans indefinitely. They would never get on their feet again. That was one of the basic reasons for Article II, and it's one of the basic reasons why the Americans opposed Article II because they did not want any reference to economics.

 

I will not jump ahead to all that, but there was some worry in Ottawa as to how long we could go on. Wartime spirit was beginning to fade a little. When are these guys going to look after themselves? Are we going to have to keep sending food? Of course, the great forgotten event of that period was the enormous Canadian loan.

 

[Hill] Yes, you mentioned that. I had never really realized the extent of that. In fact, Canada virtually bankrupted itself in that period.

 

[HOLMES] Almost.

 

[HILL] Came close to it. Yes.

 

[HOLMES] The only man in Britain who knows about that and keeps talking about it is David Dilks. He keeps emphasizing to the British they should remember.

 

[HILL] Well, it is almost a forgotten event. I didn't realize its extent.

 

[HOLMES] It was very much appreciated in the State Department because they felt that our loan was keeping things going until Congress could pass Marshall aid.

 

[HILL] I think we will now go on to the last part for this morning.

 

[HOLMES] There is just one thing I should have mentioned earlier and I forgot about it, was that in the '45, '46, '47 period, when I was in London, our principal preoccupation was the peace treaties. This had a lot to do with the Canadian mood. We were very angry at the way we were treated over the German settlement. That was a case where we, better than on the Security Council, could say, "Dammit all, we played a major part in the defeat of Germany."; and we would say to the Americans, "We were in it from the beginning. We had to wait quite a while for you guys." Also, we kept arguing that France should be accepted as a great power, but once they had been accepted, they were not the least bit interested in our position.

 

I remember our preoccupations at that time. You know, I was the one officer in Canada House who was dealing with all these things. Doug Le Pan did Economics and I did these things. That is the stage we were at. Part of the time we did not have a High Commissioner. So I was in and out of the Foreign Office all the time, and the Foreign Office were quite sympathetic on this. They were quite helpful. Of course, they all had to put up with Dr. Evatt of Australia, who was not really as polite as we were, but we fought very hard with the Council of Foreign Ministers. We had to realize that it was primarily the Soviets who opposed us. But even the Americans did not support our cause very enthusiastically. The only people we really could make representations to were the British, and they did their best but there was not much to be done.

 

The Americans kept saying, "Well, we can't leave out the Brazilians." The Council humiliated us in the end. We smaller powers could not even make spoken representations to the Council of Foreign Ministers. We could only make written representations to the deputies of the Council on Foreign Ministers.

 

[HILL] The Council of Foreign Ministers being a control agency in Germany.

 

[HOLMES] They were the countries which were running Germany. Yes. This is important in another way too. We had a sort of chicken and eggish dilemma. When the proposals came before the war ended, I was still on the Post Hostilities Planning Committee. I mean the proposals for some kind of occupation structure in Germany at the end of the war. Of course, we were still in our mood of fighting for a place. We did not get much of a place. Then came the pressure on us to keep troops. The British particularly needed some help, and they would have liked us to share the occupation duties. We had, of course, to keep the troops until we could get them home; so a lot of them were around in Holland and elsewhere for most of the year. That was simply a matter of transport. But we rejected an occupation role, and we had a pretty good excuse. If you are not going to give us a spot on the occupation structure, we are not going to provide troops.

 

This remained a kind of running sore. It keeps cropping up. You can tell it again when we made the rather extraordinary refusal to take part in the Berlin airlift. That was still part of this, "The hell with it, you guys want to run this place, you go ahead and do it." Even the South Africans and the New Zealanders helped out in the airlift, and we stayed out of it.

 

That dominated a lot of thinking, but fortunately it died out because there was no German peace treaty. After a while, they gave up. If there had been a peace conference as at Versailles and Paris, this would have been a much more difficult issue. We did much better on Japan but cared less. There the Americans were in control. The Soviets never had much to say about it. I just wanted to pick that up because I think it explains a lot of the Canadian mood.

 

Mind you, at the same time, I have said how lucky we were not to get involved in the occupation. If we'd had no real role in occupation policy, we would have just spent all our time spluttering and complaining about our position. We would have kept Canadian troops in some little corner of Germany. So I think we were very well out of it.

 

Part IV - Moscow. 1947-48

 

[HILL] We will go on now to Part IV, which was your time in Moscow, '47-'48. That must have been a fascinating period, because there were not many Westerners who got to Moscow in that time. I wonder if you could just tell us a bit about the atmosphere of the Soviet Union as you saw it, especially when dealing with the Soviet government. What was all that like at that time?

 

[HOLMES] I was sent there after the Gouzenko affair. We finally withdrew Willgress. I think it's important to note that we never broke relations over the Gouzenko affair. We did not even withdraw our Ambassador. One reason was it would have been stupid to withdraw Willgress who was such a highly respected observer. But the Soviets kept their Ambassador at home. Finally Willgress was needed in Havana for a conference, because he was one of our leading men working on the International Trade Organization, setting up GATT.

 

So I had rather expected I would get frosty treatment but all diplomats got frosty treatment in those days, there was not any way really to distinguish. I did not have the distinction of being the most ill treated of all. They clammed up on diplomats. Our closest friends in Moscow were the Indians. Mrs. Pandit was ambassador. They did not get better treatment than we did. The Soviets were just being arbitrary and difficult, and you could not have any conversation with them. You could not talk to them, talk about policy. All you could do was guess what was going on. You did not dare invite Russians. I never was told I must not have dealings with Soviet people anything like that. It was just too difficult to invite people to dinner and know that the next morning there would probably be a knock on their door. I never had any feeling of harassment. They were polite and all that sort of thing. The Soviets you did deal with could be friendly and pleasant, but the freeze was very much on. I blame their secrecy for the outbreak of the Cold War. They did everything possible to inspire our suspicions.

 

[HILL] Presumably you were more or less kept in Moscow? Were you allowed to go and travel around?

 

[HOLMES] You could drive as far as your gas tank would take you. That meant you could have nice picnics in the woods, things like hat, and go skiing on the grounds of a castle that Catherine the Great had half finished. You rounded the corner and suddenly there were nice terraces, and a stone nymph right in front of you. It was hard to ski wherever it was. Especially as you had any old skis that had been left around and were barely tied on your feet. It was a wonder I didn’t get killed.

 

The whole diplomatic corps was an extraordinarily interesting one, so that life was intensely interesting but you took in each other's washing and were very much inhibited.

 

[COX] So were your views based mainly on, shall we say, very restricted conversations with Soviet diplomats?

 

[HOLMES] Very restricted; and trying to read signs. I found that the most interesting sources of information were some of the good press correspondents who had been around during the war and still had contacts. Alec Werth, of The Guardian was a very good friend; and there was a marvelous Scottish woman, Marjorie Shaw, who managed to be the correspondent of both the New Statesman and the Daily Express.

 

[HILL] Under the same name?

 

(HOLMES] Yes. Marjorie was great fun. She used to keep me informed about people. I met her on the boat going out but she had a lot of friends, like Prokofiev's wife and people like that. She would tell me a little about what was being said. This was the way you picked it up, on hunches. The idea that the press is controlled, it's of no value, is quite wrong. When you have disciplined and controlled press, you read it for deviation. What does that mean? One day I remember early in 1948, I think it was April (we had a Commonwealth Press Reading Series so we used to get digests of the Soviet press in English each morning); I was reading along, and I suddenly noticed "Belgrade: Yesterday was celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Soviet-Yugoslav Friendship Treaty". Full stop. That is funny. Usually they say on such occasion that the following speech was made, and roses were thrown and God knows what. Nothing. So we were going around saying, "Isn't that peculiar?" We watched and did not find any news of Yugoslavia for quite a while. We got quite suspicious that there was something funny, but we were not real Kremlinologists. I was not an expert on the Soviet Union. I was thrown into the breech, and I had to learn the language on the spot. We did not pretend, so we went to the real experts in the British and American Embassies, and they said, "Tut, tut, nothing". That's just typical of experts.

 

I remember it during the war. Anything that looks like good news, anything that looks like a weakness on the part of the enemy is to be disparaged - naive people indulging in wishful thinking. You are new people, you have only been here a short time. So they kept saying, "Tut, tut."

 

So, it took me a little while to report this to Ottawa. But finally I said, "Look, people do not agree, but I really think there is something funny going on in Yugoslavia." Then our people in Belgrade picked this up. They took it seriously. This was the break with Yugoslavia in June 1948.

 

[HILL] What were the Soviets up to? What sort of objectives did they have? Did they really have any very clear cut objectives in respect to Western Europe, Yugoslavia and so on?

 

[HOLMES] It seems to me looking back now, one of the points that the revisionist scholars particularly make is that the Soviet Union was so weak; it was absurd for us to fear them, they couldn't march to the sea and so on. The kind of evidence we have now is that they were pretty weak, but you had no way of knowing. You could not go into the countryside. You could not see. The streets were full of soldiers. It seems to me that the Soviets in their paranoia really believed we were waiting to pounce, so they had to pretend to be strong for defensive reasons. By pretending to be strong, they raised our suspicions. Secrecy is a terrible thing in a way. It arouses suspicions.

 

I can remember during the Berlin Blockade we were pretty nervous about what was happening. There were no signs around Moscow of mobilization. Another way you learned was from servant gossip: "My cousin in some place says that such and such kind of thing is happening". There again also you had to be careful of plants but I think our servants were too undisciplined. You did not get any idea of mobilization. But what did they do suddenly? I remember one Sunday night, the Americans always had a movie. People tended to gather for the movie at the American Embassy, and this day the military attaches came and said that they had all been barred from certain routes where they had previously gone. When you are in a nervous mood, this does not exactly help.

 

This I cannot exactly blame the Soviets for, but just to indicate our problem we only had a hand decypher, which meant that cyphering a telegram could take the entire staff a whole day. I used to keep sending messages to Escott Reid, "For God sake don't send those long telegrammes, and don't send a telegramme asking me to draft a speech for Mr. St. Laurent on the dangers of Soviet Communism because it would take us an entire week to send it."

 

One day at the height of the anxiety over the Blockade, in came this little message, and as we sat there undoing it, two secretaries and a couple of us, it said that the women and children in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa had just asked for visas to return home. Had we any idea what this was all about? We kept saying to ourselves, if they have got something up their sleeve, then we are not going to give it away that way. But still it was pretty nerve-racking when we found this had been happening elsewhere in Washington and other places. Then, of course, somebody discovered that the Soviet Foreign Office had just decided that all children over a certain age must be educated in the Soviet Union, and they were all coming back with their mothers.

 

[COX] I think they still do that.

 

[HOLMES] Yes. This was a change of some sort. That was of no consequence. I cannot blame the Soviets for frightening us that way, although here again if you had had an easy relationship with the Foreign Office, somebody would have told you, or it would have been explained why the people were asking for the visas.

 

[HILL] Were you able to detect what their attitude was towards the movement to establish NATO in this period? They must have been aware of it, of the fact that the Western countries were beginning to talk about it. The West must have been quite far along with its planning by then, I imagine.

 

[HOLMES] Well, I left in September, 1948. The meetings were already going on in Washington.

 

[HILL] Donald Maclean must have been reporting to Moscow?

 

[HOLMES] Yes, I have often thought that it was a very good thing he was, because if he was reporting accurately, as I presume he was, the Soviets would realize that this was very much done in a defensive mood, and it was not organizing an aggressive attack on Brest-Litovsk.

 

I am trying to figure out what their attitude was. I would never have got anything from officials, and all you had really was the Soviet press, which was always so extravagant. Mind you, we did not get very much information in Moscow, and we were not kept posted on the negotiations.  

 

[HILL] As to what was happening here?

 

[HOLMES] We did not have anything like the facilities for safe storage that one has now. It was pretty ramshackle in a way. I did not know an awful lot about the NATO negotiations.

 

One period that was pretty important was September-December in Paris that year, at the UN on the Security Council. There was an exercise there that might be worth mentioning. The Security Council was meetings when the Berlin Blockade was on, and we wanted to bring this up in the Security Council. The Soviets, of course, would veto the discussion of it. We were trying to get it discussed. We were trying to mobilize a lot of opinion on the subject. There was an interesting exercise of the Argentinian Foreign Minister - Argentina was on the Security Council, and the Argentinian Foreign Minister was there, I have forgotten his name - and he organized the non-permanent members in a group of six, as we were then, to see if we could find some kind of solution. It was quite an interesting exercise. We did not find the solution, but we tried. The Soviets were making a lot of the currency problem. We brought in an economist to see if we could get a solution to the currency problem. Looking back on it I have a feeling that the exercise was not entirely wasted, because it helped us to stall until the effects of the Berlin air lift were being seen, and then eventually the Soviets gave in; but it was an interesting exercise in lesser power mediation. The Americans and the British, particularly the Americans, were a little suspicious of the whole thing. They were afraid we would come up with some compromise on the Blockade, and they kept stiffening us because they figured that we were the only ones who would resist a compromise. Well, the Belgians were part of it too at that time. At the end of it, the Argentine Foreign Minister had a celebratory lunch, mind you we had not succeeded but we had a great celebratory lunch in the Georges V, a champagne lunch, at the end of which we were each presented with gold medals from Cartier - the Palais de Chaillot in a shower of stars. I have still got it. It was the first time I was ever kissed by a foreign minister. He kissed General McNaughton on both cheeks. Charles Ritchie was there too.

 

Part V - Ottawa and New York, 1949-51

 

[HILL] : Professor Holmes, from 1949 to 1951, you served as head of the United Nations Division of the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa. In the second of these two years you were also Canada’s acting permanent representative at the UN in New York. I would like to ask one or two questions relating to your duties at that time, but also to raise some points suggested by Volume Two of The Shaping Of Peace; especially in those chapters dealing with the establishment of the Atlantic Alliance, the creation of the NATO machinery, and other NATO related issues. So, perhaps first of all, we should look at the period relating to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed in April of 1949, and which Canada ratified shortly afterwards (on 29 April 1949). In fact I think that Canada was the first to ratify the treaty, which came into force on 24 August 1949. The first question is: what part did Canada play in the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty? It is often said that Mr. St. Laurent and Mr. Pearson and others played a strong role in allied councils during the establishment of the treaty. How do you see Canada's contribution in that period?

 

[HOLMES] One of the things that occurs to me in looking at this period is how totally divorced I was from the NATO activities in the Department. That itself may be of some significance. I was involved mostly in United Nations' affairs. I don't want to give the impression that that kind of hostility between the UN and NATO that some people perceive is responsible. I think the reason really was, it was such a busy period for the UN, I was totally preoccupied. I had spent the autumn of 194 8 in Paris at the General Assembly and I got back and I had to take over the UN and I had been away a long time. I knew that these negotiations were going on about the North Atlantic Treaty, but all I can recall is that I knew that this was going on. What I have to be careful of here is recalling things that I don't really recall but found out about when I was writing the book. For that period we were on the Security Council in '49 and General McNaughton was there and so was George Ignatieff and that meant almost total preoccupation with what was going on there. I'm trying to remember through 1949, the only time I was in Ottawa really during that period, I really have almost no recollection of NATO as I said, except that I knew it was going on. I know that we were concerned and very anxious to see that NATO was justified under Article 51 of the Charter. I recall the fact that we didn't want it under Article 52, the regional one. We didn't want that. It was particularly the NATO people who didn't want that. I think we had the normal dialogue in the Department; those of us who felt a kind of responsibility for the strength of the UN, and those who felt particularly responsible for NATO. I think that was a kind of healthy dialogue that goes on in the Department. People stressing different things, rather than controversy. I was responsible in those days to Escott Reid, the Associate Under-Secretary, he was also very much involved in NATO. So up through Escott, you had the two considerations, and of course, he was a strong UN man. I think that he had a great deal to do with it. Of course wherever he was he had a lot to do with policy, because he was so vigorous. It was a time when he and Hume Wrong had rather different approaches, particularly to NATO. Then in January 1950, we went off the Security Council, General McNaughton came home, and I went down to hold the fort at the UN, just briefly until they appointed an Ambassador, but I was there until August. There was so much emphasis on the significance of the Security Council that there was a kind of feeling that when we weren't on the Security Council there wouldn't be very much to do. So I could hold the fort. Well it was pretty difficult with a staff of just three of us coping with committees and things like that. But I was so preoccupied that NATO hardly impinged at all there, and then the Korean War started in June. There was nothing else to think about but that. In August Gerry Riddell came down to take over as Ambassador and I went back for a little while and then was back all autumn at the Assembly and then Gerry died suddenly and I was back again. Then I went from there to the National Defence College. If I was not much involved in NATO during that period, it was because of a total preoccupation with other things. I wouldn't want it to imply that between the UN side of the Department and the NATO side there was a great split.

 

[HILL] No, simply occupied with different files. If I might speak to you in your capacity as a writer and a historian, drawing on subsequent reading and analysis, how would you rate Canada's contribution to the establishment of NATO?

 

[HOLMES] I think we have a tendency to exaggerate somewhat, but I think it was critical, very important. I've frequently quoted, I'm quoting over and over again, the famous comment of Scotty Reston's: "It was the participation of Canada that turned into a community what would have otherwise been just another American scheme for aid to Europe". I think it very important, especially for Canadians, to realize that this was to a large extent our idea; not uniquely, by any means, but we had a great deal to do with formulating it. Escott says, and I think he's quite right, that the real author of NATO was Ernie Bevin. Certainly the basic authors were not Americans. I tend a little in retrospect to relate this also to the kind of debate that was going on about British defence policy, imperial defence. I was there in London up close; I saw it, and the British position was desperate. It's all very well to say that Empire is a bad thing and colonies should be liberated, but what do you do in 1945? The Americans were being extremely anti-colonial but would have been exceedingly unhappy if Britain had chosen that moment to move out. So you had these responsibilities, you had this worldwide thing, you had the terrible sterling crisis and Attlee didn't know what to do. There were people still clamouring for a new imperial defence policy. I think in Ottawa, they took that too seriously; Mackenzie King loved to frighten himself with plots, imperial plots. I noticed, in going through my dispatches from London, spending a lot of time telling Ottawa not to get so upset about ideas that were really just being spewed out by the editor of the Sunday Times. The Foreign Office in particular wasn't taking this very seriously. But still there was a kind of debate. Mackenzie King was very rigid; I remember him in one Commonwealth conference. He did not want defence on the agenda at all. Of course the Australians and the New Zealanders did. Not because they wanted to support old Churchillian ideas but because they were feeling rather isolated. We took the kind of, hear no evil, see no evil attitude, pretty silly I find; it was rather embarrassing on this. Therefore I think the sensible people in Ottawa, Pearson, etcetera, weren't attacking this idea of imperial defence as a plot, they were just saying that it doesn't really make much sense to have any kind of defence scheme that doesn't include the Americans. This shouldn't be regarded as a Canadian shift of any kind. There was no doubt that Attlee and Bevin agreed with that and I think this was of some significance in leading both British and Canadians towards NATO. The British in particular were very anxious to get the Americans involved, but naturally no-one would suggest to the Americans that they should be involved in a Commonwealth defence plan. This suited us; we didn’t want to be unconstructive, we didn’t want to be unhelpful; we knew that the British had a pretty tough position but we wanted to shift more toward something realistic. The Anglo-American entente had been deeply embedded in Canadian intuitive foreign and defence policy for a century. That’s why it came together. First of all, the basic reason was that we, like everybody else, were worried about what the Soviets were going to do. We didn't know. Then it was just so opportune, it satisfied all our needs. Britain, France, the USA in an alliance; the old tensions we had had between the imperialists and continentalists in Canada would be solved, and of course the very wide acceptance of NATO in parliament and elsewhere was pretty impressive, even the French Canadians. There is no doubt also that there was this agonizing reappraisal in a sense. We put a lot of our emotions into the UN, into collective security through the UN, and there was a feeling that moving to collective defence could be interpreted as desertion of the UN. This is an area where I think we had a good deal to do. In none of these things would we have been decisive on our own, but we had allies in most of these things. Where we were very important was in rejecting the views of some that the thing to do was to kick the Soviets out of the UN, or let them resign, and let the UN become a Free World agency. And we said: "No, we've got this universal body, we managed to get it through while the war was on, so, for God's sake, hang on to it because it can be useful!". There was this feeling that NATO was a regrettable necessity and we hoped it wouldn't be necessary indefinitely. i think this is very clear. Have you talked to Arnold Smith?

 

[HILL] No, we haven't.

 

[HOLMES] The reason I mention him is that Arnold was the one person in External Affairs - he was at the National Defence College at this time - who wrote a memorandum favouring the idea of getting the Soviets out of the UN. And I think his was the only voice. Arnold had been rather the hard liner out of Moscow. When Willgress went away Arnold started writing much more hard line assessments of Soviet intentions, but the interesting thing is that on the whole you would put Arnold left of centre, primarily because of his concern with the Third World and things like that; he certainly isn't a conventional right winger. That's why it was interesting, he was preoccupied with the importance of the United Nations economic job. He saw earlier than most people the role of the UN in the world economy and development. He wanted to get the Soviets out of the UN because they were obstructing that purpose; so in a sense what you have is somebody who wants to kick the Soviets out for left wing purposes. It is interesting in that way but he didn't get much of a hearing on that. So I don't think it was a major element, but it would be worthwhile hearing him.

 

[HILL] Yes, I think so, if we have a second round. This leads to another question. How conscious were people, during the negotiations, of Congress. Some of the Europeans had got involved in the Brussels Pact and the Western Union and they were anxious to get the Americans involved also, and to keep them involved, in Europe. Canada saw this also as a good opportunity to push its own interests. I'm just wondering what Canada did see as its own interests. There seems to be a difference between Escott Reid being interested in an Atlantic Community, and some of the others were not thinking quite in those terms. That was one question, and another one was how conscious were people of Congress in this period of the negotiation of the treaty.

 

[HOLMES] It is probably important to realize that that was the time when we were facing a pretty difficult economic situation. We had nearly bankrupted ourself with this enormous loan to Britain, and were really very worried about this, and that gave a certain impetus' to the desire to create what might turn into a North Atlantic economy, not specifically for free trade, but designed to encourage trade and commerce. The great worry that we had through that time was that the differing economic predicaments of the North American countries and the Europeans would lead to a great gulf. This is the primary reason for Article Two, to say: "You can't have a solid alliance and have a trade war." I think in looking at our perspectives at that time this economic dimension was important. Basically I think the difference was philosophical in a way. Escott was a compulsive constitution builder and a brilliant one. I remember arguments I've had with him, on which he would agree that world federation wasn't an immediate possibility. I said that it was an immediate possibility but I had great doubts whether it was the ultimate answer. Wrong was in Washington. Wrong was very much a pragmatist; what's more Wrong saw that any idea that the United States would take part in any kind of wider community as an ordinary member, that the US Senate would resign it's sovereignty over certain issues to some North Atlantic federation, was just out of the question. Escott was much too wise and sensible to think that we could create in 1949 a federation of the North Atlantic, but for most federalists it was something to aim at. So there was a difference in direction there. Escott also was very much concerned with the moral issue. On Article Two he stressed just as much those words that spoke of our all being democratic. He was very concerned that it not be just regarded as a military alliance of the old powers; this was a crusade for democracy. That's why he was very upset about Portugal. Portugal became a bit of an issue. Italy wasn't quite so much that, it was the feeling that once you strayed away from the Atlantic coast you were into trouble. From Italy, where would you go? They look less democratic as you move farther away. Greece and Turkey were knocking at the door. This we were quite reluctant about. Here it was not only the Reidians but the Wrongians too who wanted to keep it pretty much our crowd; the Americans, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, and countries in our democratic tradition, fairly limited. We had to give in over Portugal. I think many people in Washington would have agreed with us, but they just said: "The importance of the Azores is such that you just have to accept it". I'm not sure that that wasn't even more important for Escott than the economic aspect. If you look at his early memoranda, the moral issue is very important. Escott was not a right wing anti-Communist. I think what's very important on the whole is that the attitude in External Affairs towards the Soviet Union was based, not on anti-Communism, it was based on liberalism. I don't think anybody seriously thought that Communism as an economic philosophy was much of a threat. There were people who got excited about it in Canada, but not seriously. There was very much the feeling that if the Soviets want to run their country that way, that's up to them. It was the Soviet threat; what the Soviets were doing in Eastern Europe, not what they were doing in the Soviet Union. Mike was being very much a liberal in standing up to the Soviets and resisting them. I think that was true with everybody. We were very careful not to be anti-Communist.

 

Acheson's Present at the Creation, when it came out, sounded a little arrogant, but I must say, looking back, we all felt that this whole period was the creation of a new world and there were the UN and NATO fitting into it. My working title for my book until I found one was Also Present At The Creation. I almost used it, but it was too much an in-joke. We did have that same feeling and regarded Pearson, Wrong, Robertson, Escott Reid as part of the central construction team. We weren't just Canadians pursuing Canadian ends. We were architects jointly working together. I argue some times that this is what we've lost with NATO; we no longer really feel we are part of that. Partly because we've been pushed to the sidelines. This feeling of being present at the creation accounts for the fact that I, as a UN man, don't recall strong hostility to the creation of NATO, just these concerns within the group about accommodating both.

 

[HILL] I was wondering if this also reflected quite strongly Canadian public opinion because you mentioned that there was very little opposition, in fact there was no actual outright opposition in parliament at all. One or two people were a little dubious perhaps about it, but there was no outright opposition to it.

 

[HOLMES] One of the reasons, I think, was this illusion - the government, Mackenzie King and the Cabinet at any rate had - about universal collective security in the UN, that the formula was enough. They didn't realize that collective security meant what it said and that we had to contribute forces. So we talked a lot about collective security, and the Canadian Armed Forces became almost nothing; they really were whittled down. I remember this question coming up some years ago at a conference on NATO at Carleton entitled: "Did our joining NATO make us feel that we should increase our defence budget?". And Escott said "Quite the reverse:" It goes back, in a way, to 1914-1939-'45; if only the Americans had been pledged in advance there wouldn't have been a war. Just the pledge was enough to frighten aggressors. So there was no sort of disposition to increase our forces, and of course in 1949 we had no intention of having Canadian troops in Europe. It was the shock of Korea that did it. I remember my own feelings over Korea. I think I had been arguing, and by no means alone, and this was even after the Chinese Communists took over, that we ought not to regard Communism as a monolith stretching from Vladivostock to the Elbe. It was partly caused by the Yugoslav defection. We oughtn't to do anything to make them work more closely together. We were looking at all the signs of differences between the Chinese and the Soviets, and of course the Yugoslavs. Then this thing happened in June in Korean, and I can't pretend for a moment I expected it, and we just had to face this question: "Maybe they are all working together, maybe this is a monolithic". We knew so little about North Korea. It seemed incredible that the North Koreans would have acted without both Soviet and Chinese agreement and assistance. I think that's still one of the mysteries for historians - I don't know whether you have found very much on it - but they're still not certain. At any rate, we can be pretty sure that it wasn't the kind of monolithic agreement that we suspected at the time. So here you had this really frightening situation. Mike Pearson's first reaction over Korea was nervousness about a UN operation. For tactical reasons, he just thought it wouldn't work. What would be even worse than the UN failing, as the League had failed, would be to try a military operation and be defeated.

 

There was a strong feeling in Ottawa and in the European countries, and I think less so in Washington, that what we had was the communist bloc doing a feint in Asia, getting our forces to Asia and then doing a strike in Berlin. That basically accounts for the fact that it was the Korean war that caused us to send forces to Europe. We really got caught, in 1950. Here you have to remember that I have the recollections of somebody who was sitting in the UN. The UN had started a crusade, so you're caught up in it. You can see way back to the famous incident with Dr. Riddell in the mid *30s over Ethiopia. And I was under considerable pressure from the Secretariat, and the Secretary General. Canada was always proclaiming itself as the strongest supporter of the UN. Where are the Canadian Forces? When it was agreed to set up a UN force we were in a very embarrassing position, because we didn't have any to send, especially because Wrong was being told (I know because he used to phone me quite a bit in New York) to go down to the State Department daily to say: "No, we want this to be a real UN operation not just one run by the Americans; and we don't want it turned against the Chinese." To which Acheson would say, icily: "One of the best ways of course to make sure this is a UN operation would be for countries like Canada to have their forces on the ground". But we didn't have any! I think some of Acheson's displeasure with Canada dates from this period.

 

[HILL] I think it started off with three ships initially.

 

[HOLMES] Yes, somebody said it was a token and somebody in the American Embassy said, well, we'll call it three tokens. There we were stuck and the cabinet was clearly divided, the old timers against the younger - King, of course, was dying. Then Pearson had this brilliant idea. In a sense it was picking up some of the ideas we had had about collective security in the UN, whereby each country would agree to contribute so many forces. Well, that whole scheme never worked out, but that was a kind of pattern. So we would raise a special brigade for service. I think it does reflect attitudes in Ottawa that this would be for the UN and for NATO. It did not mean that we had very much to spare. Then, just after the Americans decided to send forces to Europe, apart from their occupation forces, we, acting in embarrassment, followed the Americans. What Canadians tend to forget when they talk about this history is that we were about the last of the major Western partners to get troops into Korea and they did not arrive until the fighting was nearly over. No disrespect to the men who went, but we were not a major factor in repelling the North Koreans.

 

[HILL] That is interesting also, what you mentioned about the move of Canadian troops to Europe, that that actually came after. The Americans had decided to transform their troops there from occupation to alliance forces and presumably to send some more.

 

[HOLMES] I think it was in any case being considered and being urged by some in Ottawa. My recollection should be checked with the documents, but I am pretty sure that it came a little later. We had been acutely embarrassed, we I mean me, sitting on the hot seat in New York having to rush out to Lake Success from time to time to say we were stepping up our contribution, we were going to take over so many Canadian Pacific flights to Tokyo. And there was one time when I had to say we were doing something, we were stepping up production of the ORENDA engine. Trygve Lie was not terribly impressed, he didn't know what an ORENDA engine was. Maybe it's of some interest too that the embarrassment in Ottawa during that summer was attributable to pressure of Canadian public opinion. The Americans were getting pretty exasperated. Their boys were being killed again. There were desperate battles, and there was a lot of anti-UN sentiment in the States. "What is the UN doing, nobody is helping us, we are all alone," and Canada was especially vulnerable; although I can remember one theme that I heard at that time in Ottawa from the older ones: "We waited two years in the last couple of wars for them, they can wait for us this time". On a kind of a popular emotional level there was a bit of that. Again you had that deeply held Canadian worry about conscription. The idea that you had to have conscription for the Korean Force seems pretty absurd, but the fear was there.

 

[HILL] Did that relate to the thinking about NATO also? Presumably it did.

 

[HOLMES] Yes, it did. Originally that was another reason why people had to be reassured that this was not going to mean Canadian forces conscripted to serve in Europe. The people in power then had been through not only 1944 but they had been through 1917. Mr. St. Laurent was much less traumatized by that than most French Canadians, but nevertheless knew it was a political factor, so that it had to be made pretty clear that there was no question of conscription. We did not have much trouble raising a special force, because of the particular circumstance that it was only 5 or 6 years after demobilization. There were quite a few people who by that time were thinking that life in Kapuskasing was pretty boring and nothing like those great years in the war. I think, if I am not mistaken, we had to weed out some of the quick recruits, not exactly the right types, but at any rate we did get them on the spot sooner than untrained recruits. Pearson was very good at devising this concept, which he finally sold, about raising the brigade. There was also some nervousness - (it came out over NATO also) - I mean the old worries that go back before the first war and afterwards about Canada being committed by somebody else. We certainly went into Korea because it was a UN war not because it was a U.S. war.

 

[HILL] This links us up to a couple of other interesting questions. If I understand correctly what you are saying, Canada's interest in setting up the North Atlantic Treaty, initially, was partly for its own sake, because of the liberalism of Pearson which you mentioned and so on, but also partly to make sure that the United States was involved, as a means of persuading the U.S. to continue being involved in Europe. Having done that, then Canada was quite content with that situation whereas the Americans, having got involved, sort of went further. Certainly they sent troops immediately to Korea and then other troops to Europe and so on.

 

[HOLMES] The decision on Korea, and I remember this acutely as I was in New York, was made because we thought it was clear that the UN was being challenged as the League had been challenged, and as the League had failed over Manchuria, over Ethiopia. Looking back now, I think that was a pretty simplistic argument, but at any rate that was very much the feeling: if the UN did nothing, it would go the way of the League. It was such a blatant, a classical aggression. It was like Belgium and Poland in the previous two wars. Here it was. You had to meet it. But in a crisis all the beautiful ideas of a UN Force in blue and white uniforms suddenly disappear. Here is a tough invading force with tanks heading fast to the South and you do not turn them back with a UN resolution. What do you do? The only people who could resist, aside from the South Koreans, were the Americans, because they had forces in Japan. So here we are, it is awfully difficult for Canadians, if we have any self-respect, to get up and to say that we, the UN, must resist them with tanks; because we do not have any. Only the Americans really could make that decision. The rest of us probably could have argued against intervention, but we could not argue for intervention, even if we believed that it was a good idea, because it would put us in a difficult moral position. Nevertheless it was because it was a UN affair, out of this feeling that the UN would stand or fall, that we eventually participated. The British and the French and the Turks got some forces in there pretty quickly. Contrary to a lot of Canadian opinion that the Americans put pressure on us, the Americans were rather discreet about it. It was when the Australians, New Zealanders and others, even the South Africans, were sending forces to Korea, that we felt pretty embarrassed, but we had to confront the military fact that we had no troops to spare. We only had this small group that was supposed to be defending the continent. We could not send everybody. The delay was partly a kind of resistance to getting involved again but to a considerable extent it was having to accept the fact that we could decide to send them but there was nobody to send. So you got all this tokenism throughout that summer, and it was not really until we had firmly said we were sending troops that we had a firm moral position in arguing what the UN campaign should be like. But fortunately we had troops there by the time we started taking a leading part in trying to get an armistice.

 

[HILL] I wanted to ask one other question that links into this. It seems to me that there was some discussion, at the time of the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty, and at the time of the consultations on the steering group that was set up in the year after, about geographic responsibilities. My impression is that France and one or two others were thinking of the North Atlantic Alliance having some sort of global responsibility. There would be some group there that would look at Western strategy on a worldwide basis. But Canada always firmly resisted that and thought in terms of a purely North Atlantic focus for NATO activities.

 

[HOLMES] This is an interesting question and I do not have an answer, because I recall being rather puzzled during that period by the different noises coming from Ottawa, really quite contradictory in a way. There is no doubt when things got under way we wanted to have this treaty commitment limited, but if you look at the earlier statements - when we were feeling our way - and I think if you look at St. Laurent's famous speech in the General Assembly in 1947, (which incidentally you will find even in those official little pamphlets of the history of NATO), this sense of global responsibility assumes considerable importance. But it is put in these terms: given the fact that the UN is paralyzed in collective security, those countries which are willing and prepared to do something should band together. You get a little note of its not necessarily being regional but the good guys everywhere. I suspect, for instance, we had our eye on Australia and New Zealand; so that note is struck. Some of those more apocalyptic notes came more easily to Escott and to Mike Pearson who tended to talk that way. Mike was very much influenced by Escott and found his approach emotionally appealing. Nevertheless, he appreciated Wrong's caution intellectually. I have a feeling he was somewhere in between, but I think that the broader idea in the beginning appealed to him. Here I am recollecting impressions I got in my research, not recollections of the time.

 

[HILL] I was very struck, when going through the history of these discussions about the Steering Group or Standing Group, that there was a lot of debate about what Canada's role should be. Initially there was some thought that Canada should be one of the four or five members of the directorate. Subsequently that idea was dropped, partly because the Italians made it clear that they would want to be in too, and then the Dutch and so on. Then Canada accepted the idea that Canada should be involved whenever there were things of keen interest to Canada. But that seemed to me a retrograde step. I mean the thrust of Canadian policy during the war had been to increase Canada's status in allied councils, and here, subsequently, was the relatively easy acceptance of what was a relatively weak position. But maybe it is more explained by this functionalism approach which you spoke of last time.

 

[HOLMES] I think so. It seems to me, certainly when looking at the record, that the illusions of grandeur persisted about ourselves as a military power, based on our performance during the war. We had been so insistently arguing that we were the third Western military power and we had a right to a place on this and that. We made a great deal out of it over the peace treaties with Germany. We almost took for granted that we would be a semi-permanent member of the Security Council. I think, as I may have said the last time, it was a curious illusion, because it was based on thinking of ourselves as a great military power - because of the past - while we were in fact disarming and demobilizing and clearly had no intention of remaining an important military power. I have often asked what the devil we would have done if we had got some kind of semi-permanent position on the Security Council, what it would have done to our defence budget. We would have had to keep it up. So you get this kind of illusion of our importance, and it carries over into- NATO. Of course it was reinforced in NATO by the fact that we really were in at the ground floor. Those secret tripartite discussions in Washington confirmed a view that we were pretty important, and you could see the illusion again. We knew we were not a great power, but we weren't Luxembourg. I suppose there were again those who wanted to press our position and those who were nervous of the commitments in which we would be involved. It was the old dichotomy in Canadian policy. If there had been a scheme for a kind of controlling group of five or something, we might well have argued on functionalist grounds that we belonged there, but it became clear that if we were going to have a directorate it would be tripartite.

 

[HILL] It never seemed to function anyway, this famous Standing Group or Steering Group. It seemed to be more or less a dead letter, as far as I can make out.

 

Professor Holmes, I think you would like to make one comment following on our previous discussions about the question of Canadian forces.

 

[HOLMES] Yes. It is this continuing theme, deeply embedded in our history - a misinterpretation, I think, of 1914, 1939 by many people - that we were committed by somebody else to send forces; it is not true. We were technically committed maybe in 1914, but the decision in fact to deploy forces in strength was entirely our own. However, this is a deep rooted worry. It was for Mackenzie King even though he really was disposed to commit forces in 1939. As a political factor everybody was worried about it; and it comes out in our debate on the role of the Security Council. There is a contradictory approach, all the way through to Article 5 of NATO. On the one hand, we feel strongly that the importance of either collective security or collective defence is in the assurance that aggression will be met by a united front against it, which really means that that assurance has to be almost an automatic commitment. But, on the other hand, when we got to the details of the Security Council, we insisted on getting something in there to the effect that Canadian forces would not be committed unless Canada had a right to be heard in the Security Council. This nervousness was there. For us the great thing about NATO was the commitment of the American Senate. But to do exactly what? When you get to the verbs you have trouble. It was a guarantee in a way, but a guarantee to do what? So you get all of this rather difficult philosophical arguing about what the commitment is. Then they hit upon the Rio Treaty formula, which was to regard an attack on one as an attack on all, a way of getting around the question of saying that the minute the Soviet Union sets one foot on West German or Norwegian soil we will all immediately declare war. Most of the worry in NATO was over a commitment of the U.S. Senate. But Canadians were not any more disposed to a clear commitment in the Article 5 debate. We would love to have the Americans come in because what would really deter the Soviets would be for the Americans to say instantly we are at war; but as we were not prepared to do that ourselves, it was a little hard to press the Americans. So I think (here I am talking from recollection of my research), I think one could only recognize this as a persistent ambiguity.

 

[HILL] Of course De Gaulle made a great deal of the question of not having French forces committed without France having a say in the matter. But in reality that was always anticipated, under Article 5. None of the Allies are automatically committed, really, are they?

 

[HOLMES] No, none of them is, and of course in recent years when you've had these doubts on the part of Europeans of the American commitment in extremis to get itself involved in the exchange of atomic weapons, it becomes quite real again. That is one of those things to which there are many answers.

 

[HILL] Although I suppose the fact of having forces on the ground does make them hostages, and that's another element in the equation, I think. If some of your people get shot by invading troops then that gives you all the more likelihood that you will be involved.

 

[HOLMES] There is that classical French statement about the First World War, about the British guarantee. It was essential to the British commitment, to have one British soldier in France, but he must be killed on the first day.

 

[HILL] Well, I think that was said by the French Ambassador in London at the outset of the First World War. The British asked him how many troops did he think would be enough, and he said one, and we will make sure he gets shot. Well, I wondered also if you could tell us something more about Article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty. You already mentioned the fact that Canada was strongly committed to it, and I found this very interesting. But I was not quite sure why Canada was so committed to Article 2, when others were not. So I wonder if you could discuss that?

 

[HOLMES] The French were quite supportive of Article 2. It was not so much Canada against everybody else. There has been a lot of simplified history to the effect that in order to sell a peace-time military alliance to the Canadian public, we had to pretend that it was something more than a military alliance, and for that reason we wanted to make it an economic alliance. There is certainly some truth in the feeling that we wanted to make it something more than a military alliance. I say "we” again. Who am I talking about? I guess the powerful figures in the Government and in External Affairs who were creating policy to a large extent. But it was not just for show; Pearson and Reid and company did not simply want to pretend that NATO was more than a military alliance in order to fool the public. They really believed it, they really wanted it to be something more. I think I quoted in my book somewhere that Mr. St. Laurent found that he could sell Article 2 to President Truman a little more easily by saying that it was necessary for Canadian politics. This is something Truman understood, being a politician. But St. Laurent was just being the diplomat. I think there was considerable ambiguity about what we wanted to make of the North Atlantic Community. However, there was no real doubt that everybody, Wrong as well as Reid, did want to build this idea of a Community. Article 2 was primarily intended to say: "We cannot have a strong military alliance unless we have diplomatic consultation, unless we are more or less agreed about going to war when we have to go to war". But we also said that it was equally important for a strong alliance that we not be conducting trade wars against each other. And this in a sense is a pledge not to do that. It is an old Canadian fear. I recall this particularly because I was working for Norman Robertson in London at this critical period. He always was very far sighted and for him the great nightmare was that the North American countries and the Europeans would drift apart economically because their interests were becoming different. North Americans were anxious for freer trade and removing barriers, but the Europeans had to put this off till they got on their feet. Recognizing the fact that there were two different streams of thought, it is hard to say what Canadian policy actually was; but on the other hand I do think (I did not realize this until I traced some of the later correspondence when I was doing my research), that within that little time those actually involved in the NATO set-up came to realize that Canadian insistence on Article 2 was only annoying and irritating others, who regarded it as a kind of obsession. Escott, who could be terribly insistent, kept pressing Wrong and others to do something about it. There were some who wanted to help us out on this issue and asked what we proposed to do; in Ottawa some of the people in Finance and Trade and Commerce and others got together and asked what we were proposing. However, it was very hard to come up with any specific ideas, as to what NATO should do in this period on economic issues, and it became less and less popular in Ottawa as an idea. Then there were some memoranda and dispatches from Washington, rather impatient ones from Wrong, on the subject of Article 2. I think in Ottawa they had got themselves into the position that they were over-selling Article 2 to the Canadian public; and if they did not keep hammering at it there would be criticism.

 

[HILL] Which period is this you are referring to?

 

[HOLMES] Particularly in 1950, 1951, after NATO was in fact set up and we were still making the Article 2 speeches. There is a splendid memorandum somewhere in which Ed Ritchie (I think Jake Warren had drafted it), suggested that the OEEC provided the way out. OEEC would be the economic body we needed and with a slightly different membership on functional grounds. Pearson accepted that, and we stopped flogging Article 2, contrary to the traditional view that we went on hammering at Article 2, and that it was a failure. I do not think it was a failure at all if it is viewed as I have been viewing it. If you look at the history, particularly in the earlier period, you did have, particularly on the part of the Americans and others, a feeling that the economic interests of their allies were of interest to them and you did get restraint. It is true that there were economic differences and trade differences, but if you look at the overall picture, particularly in the light of the kind of nightmare feeling we had of a real trade war, it was not bad. And this is true to the present moment; one has a feeling that Article 2 applies even now when they actually get together. There is a kind of feeling that we cannot afford to have a break over trade.

 

[HILL] That fear of a trade war, was that harking back to the Depression and so on, to what happened in the pre-war period? The other thing is that in the actual negotiations on the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, Canada at one stage put forward an even tougher Article 2. What actually came out as Article 2 was only a boiled-down version. I was wondering how tough was Canada in pushing for that? It is very hard to tell from the record. My impression is that there was a lot of telephoning behind the scenes, a lot of arm twisting and so on.

 

[HOLMES] I cannot remember the specifics of it. It is, incidentally, all in that Soward manuscript which I will be happy to show you. Take a look at his boiled-down version. I seem to recall a telegram to Wrong to go and impress the Americans again on Article 2, to which he replied that Acheson and company, and all the State Department, were strong allies in the whole business of selling it to the Senate. They were trying very hard. They were the pro- NATO people and didn't themselves have any real objections to Article 2. Theirs was a great concern about anything that might turn off the Senate. Wrong reported that he had, despite his doubts, impressed on them our views, but they would not even listen. The Senators seemed to get very frightened if there was any suggestion of continuing economic help to Europe. There were those in DEA who worked themselves into a certain fanaticism over Article 2, but increasingly in External, and with the advice coming from Wrong, we realized we were just making ourselves rather unpopular. So OEEC was a wonderful way out, it was our functionalist approach. NATO is a military alliance, the members of which are countries prepared to belong to a military alliance, but when we get to economics, we want to have Sweden and other neutral countries like Switzerland involved whether they want to belong to NATO or not. So here you get OEEC with a different membership that still has that essential NATO core in it. So it was a very good way out. I seem to recall a memorandum that said, let’s not drop Article 2, just lay off.

 

[HILL] It is interesting that France provided some backing for Canada on this question. Was there not a bit of conflict with the European movement on Article 2?

 

[HOLMES] First of all on the French thing I think some of that is attributable to General Vanier who, as the Ambassador, had been close to De Gaulle and had considerable influence in Paris at that time. It couldn't have been entirely that, but I seem to recall that he did quite a good job of selling them on this. A little earlier I was going to say that in our campaign for NATO, there were in a sense two problems. One was the U.S. Senate, it had to be drawn along. The other was the Europeanists. I think Spaak was in Ottawa at one point, and Pearson tried to sell him on NATO, but he was dubious because he was so keen on European unity. This was a problem because the Americans were keen on it also. Their's was, as we used to say, a 1776 syndrome, but they forget the 1861 syndrome.

 

[HILL] 1861, that was....

 

[HOLMES] The Civil War. The idea is that if you all federate together there won't be any wars. That was disproved in 1861. But at any rate there was considerable interest in this and Spaak and company were really, and quite rightly, worried that a North Atlantic association would cut across the effort to get Western European union going. Their economic prospects were pretty dim at that time. Western Europe was in a bad state, so that the kind of conventional arguments for all getting together in unity and strength sounded fairly good, especially with a man like Spaak who was a philosophically dedicated European. So, we had to be careful with them, because I think there was some feeling in Ottawa that what they wanted to do was perfectly respectable. It was a little hard to complain about it or to tell them not to, but still that was the one thing that would hold them back from NATO. We already had some ambivalence about European union.

 

[HILL] I think Lester Pearson and others made speeches supporting the idea of European unity, but there were doubts in the back of people's minds about where Canada would fit in.

 

[HOLMES] I do not want to make too much of this, but I remember that an element of the British opposition to European union, to British involvement, was the argument that it would be contrary to the Commonwealth association and that Commonwealth countries were urging them not to become involved in it. There was a little resentment of this in Ottawa. We had never told the British not to join Europe, they had Dominion status like the rest of us. I can remember 1951 or '52, I was on a National Defence trip to Brussels, and I remember this came up at a meeting in the Belgian Foreign Office. We did not want to appear publicly as opposed to European union, but of course what we were keenest on was NATO. There is one other thing there too that's of some interest. The Americans wanted to push the Swedes into NATO. We said no, we must respect the Swedish view. I think also there was a feeling that maybe it was not such a bad thing strategically to have neutral Sweden in between the Soviet Union, as we were very worried about Finland. If I am not mistaken Mike actually went to Stockholm; he went on a trip to Europe and talked to various people and was very anxious to maintain good relations with the Swedes and to show understanding. I remember being at a dinner party in New York, this would be in 1950, and there was an American, a State Department character there, who was getting angry with the Swedes, free ride and all that sort of thing, and denouncing neutrality as immoral. I found him extremely offensive. I am not sure that we did not have a Swedish host. At any rate, I finally could not take it any longer and I proceeded to point out that the Americans were quite recent converts against neutrality; and I recalled the lectures that we had had, in 1939 and 1941, when we were fighting "your war" and being told piously that neutrality was virtuous. It did not help the dinner party. But we very much wanted the Norwegians and the Danes although we understood that persistent fellow-feeling of Scandinavians.

 

[HILL] Right, I notice, in looking through the records, that there seemed to be quite a lot of concern in External about the attitudes of the Scandinavians in this whole period; perhaps more so than with the case of Turkey and Greece.

 

[HOLMES] This strong Canadian prejudice for the Northern Europeans over the Southern Europeans comes out here. Nobody said it. The same sort of thing you got in immigration policy.

 

[HILL] Yes, that is interesting. Strange, in a way.

 

[HOLMES] There was a very interesting remark Ian Smart made here a couple of years ago, that the division in Europe is as much North-South as East-West.

 

[HILL] On a couple of other questions, first of all, I think one branch of the revisionist view of the foundation of NATO is that the United States seized upon this opportunity to convert its forces in Europe from occupation forces to alliance forces, and that what you really have is a kind of Americanization of Europe. This is the kind of thing that De Gaulle feared. But how were things seen at the time, in 1949 and 1950? After the treaty was signed, there were some moves to increase military arrangements. I mean, for example, pipelines were eventually opened up, arrangements for transit routes from Bordeaux to Germany and things like that, which of course, all came to an end after '58 when De Gaulle came back. But in the early period, these things were set up. What was the attitude, as far as you could judge, of the Europeans at that time? Did they feel they were being pressured, or that the U.S. was coming as a saviour or something like that?

 

[HOLMES] A point I just made in a paper I am going to give at CMR next week is that one must distinguish the origins of NATO from what happened later. In other words, it is important to remember that we dragged the Americans into NATO, rather than the other way around if you want to use those terms. That is quite apart from arguments as to whether, once the Americans were in NATO, they excessively dominated policy. They did, to some extent inevitably, because of the size of their contribution. I seem to recall, up until then (maybe NATO was a turning point), we never got over the nervousness that the Americans were going to walk out, as they had before. By the time they were involved, and certainly by the time they got into the Korean War, one did not have to worry about that. And, gradually, we were beginning to realize that we had a permanent problem in American dominance, which we began to get a little more worried about. I think that in Ottawa there was always an understanding that you couldn't really have equality with the Americans, that they had to have a special position in NATO; but they started practising it without very great sensitivity. It happened in so many ways. I can remember in the '50s, proposals came from the Soviets, or the East Europeans, feelers towards some kind of detente arrangement in Europe, zones of disarmament and things like that, the Rapacki Plan and what not. The minute that these were proposed, they were instantly rejected, on behalf of NATO, by a spokesman in the White House. This would get us very angry. Already, of course, it was a nasty time in Washington. McCarthy hysteria started fairly soon afterwards. We were parting company in outlook. We did over China; we did over an armistice with Korea. We were already beginning to drift apart from them on Indo-China. Not for a moment did we doubt that we were on the same side ultimately. Our differences were over tactics, ways of dealing with the Soviets. I think that a classical case, which I cite frequently to explain the difference, was the debate we had with the Americans over the unification of Korea. This particularly came to a head at the Geneva Conference in 1954. But we had it earlier, when the Americans wanted to declare the Chinese aggressors, and we said okay, maybe they are, but at this moment, what we are trying to do is to get an armistice in Korea and that wouldn't be helpful. The fighting had gone back and forth and we were really stalled, and we said that there was no use in trying to pursue this any further. We weren't alone in that by any means. We've got to get an armistice. The Americans said yes, but we have to declare sin is sin and has to be castigated as such. We rather lost that argument in the UN, largely because our European friends were not prepared to stand up against the Americans, although they agreed with us. At the Geneva Conference on the unification of Korea, of course, all we had to talk about was a plebiscite or free elections, which were about as absurd to think of as they were in Vietnam, but at any rate, we had to have that. The Americans insisted that they must be free elections conducted by the United Nations. We said okay we agree, but the trouble is in this particular situation the United Nations has become a belligerent. The North Koreans would not accept, nor would the Soviets or Chinese, that role from the UN in a situation where it was a belligerent. The Americans had to stand on principle. And we said okay, we'll stand on principle but you won't get anywhere. It was very much a difference because of our functionalist approach. What we were trying to press was a formula by which the United Nations would be involved in the plebiscite but wouldn't necessarily be in charge of it. Now this is just a form of words, and in any case, we didn't get anywhere with either approach, but I cite this as an example of the difference between our kind of approach to so many of these things. For example, we didn't recognize the Peking Government but we maintained contacts with them. We had trade relations. Later we did the same with Cuba. The Americans were a little more for "sin is sin" and not having anything to do with the wicked, even though they kept their embassy in Bulgaria.

 

[HILL] What about military arrangements in this period? I mean, what were the Americans doing at that time?

 

[HOLMES] Throwing their weight around, I presume is really the answer. I am not disposed to look very sympathetically upon revisionists’ arguments, because they are pressed too far, but I just don't know enough about that period and the military arrangements. And again, during the mid '50s, I was up to my ears in UN activities. Even more particularly, Indo-China preoccupied us. I know that I would listen at staff meetings to what was going on. I did attend a couple of NATO Council meetings, not because I was really involved. But on our way to the Geneva Conference in 1954, there was a NATO Council meeting in Paris, and I was with Mr. Pearson. I remember going to that. The chief thing that I remember was the French Foreign Minister M. Bideault. This was shortly before Dien Bien Phu. He was chairman. Whether he was doped or drunk, I don't really know, but he sat in the chair, and he was obviously under terrible, heavy pressure. Every once in a while, he would sway far over on one side. A very distinguished Brit, a real FO type who was a sort of Under-Secretary, would give him a little tilt before he fell over onto his side. We all watched in horror at poor Bideault, and we felt sad for him. Then I can recall the session of the conference in Geneva, the day of the news of the fall of Dien Bien Phu. He was muttering out loud and behaving like a drunk, although I suspect it was drugs as much. It was a shattering experience. Everyone was watching this sad performance and he was flaying out against his staff, and throwing papers. This does not tell you much about NATO. I am trying to remember if it was at that or the other session that I went to. Dulles got up. We could see that he had a point to make. He was reconstructing history to strengthen his moral position; he had discovered that the Chinese Revolution had been much more blood thirsty than the Bolshevik Revolution and one knew that this was his way of justifying a tougher attitude towards Peking. It was the Red Chinese who were the principal enemy. They weren't exactly cozying up to the Red Russians, but still he had convinced himself of this version of history, and you knew perfectly well what it meant. He wanted allied unity against the Red Chinese. It was so characteristic of Dulles.

 

[HILL] Could I just ask one last question on this period? You mentioned the fact that Canada sent troops to Europe in 1951, really after the U.S. had taken the decision to upgrade its troops or keep its troops there. Could you tell us a bit more of that decision in Canada? Who was involved and how was the decision taken to send troops to Europe?

 

[HOLMES] I'm trying to remember, I think that I was in New York.

 

[HILL] It would have been 1950.

 

[HOLMES] I was at the UN, and then I went to Kingston. My dear mother was reported as having said to various people who asked where John was, "Oh, he is in Kingston now, but he is just going to be there for two years."

 

No, I really can't recall that at all. It must have been 1951, because the Korean invasion was June, 1950. I was in New York; still I should have known.

 

Part VI - The National Defence College, 1951-53

 

[HILL] We are going to move on to the next part, concerning your period at the National Defence College. First, did you travel widely in those days, I mean virtually around the world?

 

[HOLMES] No, we never went round the world, just to the Middle East, some of Africa and Europe, that was about it.

 

[HILL] But at least it gave you a chance to think about the role of NATO in world affairs and in the broader scheme of things, about where the whole world was going and so on. Of course, this was the period also of the Korean War. We have talked already about Communist China. What was the sense of where the world was going at that time and where did NATO fit in, where did Canada fit in?

 

[HOLMES] It was a pretty orthodox sort of NATO period, in the sense that the need to be strong, the need to beef up our defences, were obvious. Of course it was a time when we were increasing our defence expenditure quite rapidly and recruiting and that sort of thing. I think of the speakers who used to come and talk to us at NDC; I think of the discussions on our European tour in Brussels, and Paris and Rome and other places; it was very conventional. The Alliance was pretty strong. You still had the debates on Soviet intentions. Then, of course, I think it was towards the end of my stay at NDC, Stalin died. That raised all sorts of questions. We had a period; a couple of years, of freer thinking. I can remember at that time getting exasperated with the fact that every memorandum that came out of the Department of National Defence began with the same phrase, "Although we know that the Soviet long range intentions have not changed, and will not change, nevertheless..." It reminded me so much of the letters or articles I used to read in the Soviet press which would begin with acknowledgements of Stalin as "our leader, guide in medicine, philosophy and god knows what else", and then would go on and write something fairly sensible scientifically. This was pretty conventional thinking about the Soviet threat. Not many people argued that there was not a Soviet threat, but was it immutable, was there any change? Perhaps the biggest arguments were over the question of whether the Communist world was monolithic. I was rather anti-monolith and I think it had to do with my experience in Moscow, having predicted the break with Yugoslavia, when the specialists would not hear of it.

 

[HILL] The predominant feature of international relationships at this time was the East-West cleavage. Of course, it was also the period when India had become independent, the Bandung Conference, and so on. I think there must have been some feeling that the world was on its way to new kinds of relationships.

 

[HOLMES] Oh yes, and I think you had within External Affairs hard liners and soft liners, or middle liners. We had some who were tough in their analysis of the intentions of the Soviets, now and forever more, as they were elsewhere. But, the predominant mood, and this was certainly true of the Minister, Pearson, was to look for a change, to look for opportunities, to welcome change. Then, of course, when Stalin died and there was Khrushchev’s speech to the Party Congress, and things like that, it certainly strengthened the argument of those people who said: "Let's watch for change, hope for change, maybe they will change." That was very much the mood in which we went to Moscow. I went with Pearson in 1955. He was the sort of person who was duly sceptical of Soviet policy, but more anxious to be pleased than displeased. There is a certain mentality on this. You can see it right now. Any signs that the Soviets might be changing for the better are rejected instantly because they rather upset right thinking.

 

[HILL] We have the same thing now, of course. It wasn't until six months ago that some people started to accept that Gorbachev just might conceivably make some changes. In fact, a fair number of people have argued that things have got worse since he got into power, without any thought that maybe there is a requirement to follow a process there. It was all taken as being as black as ever and maybe a bit blacker still. That sort of thing.

 

[HOLMES] Well, that's been a kind of persistent one. I think in External Affairs, there was more disposition to welcome change. I think Pearson's attitude in Moscow was that he wanted to hear what they had to say. He was very disappointed in Moscow, where we had to talk to Molotov, out of whom we got nothing. Pearson really wanted a frank talk. Molotov would just put us off and make speeches about how we were neighbours over the Pole, and that kind of thing. One of the reasons was that he was really on his way out. I remember the day we went for an across-the-table session with the Soviets at the Kremlin, an article appeared criticizing him in the Soviet press and the specialists said: "That's it; so he was not in a strong position". But then the difference was great with Khrushchev. Khrushchev and Bulganin were in the Caucasus and they invited Mike to come and visit them there. Unfortunately, I had to stay in Moscow, because we were having some difficulties over the communique, and I had to stay on and negotiate with the Soviets on the communique. George Ignatieff will tell you more about this. They were hardly off the plane when Khrushchev said: "Why don't you get out of NATO?" Mike said: "Well, I'll tell you why we don't get out of NATO." They had a good discussion. George can tell you about Khrushchev's very interesting comments on Eisenhower. He talked about the suffering of the Soviets and about the war - he had lost his son - and said what they were worried about was that the Americans hadn't had war on their own soil for a long time and they didn't really understand what it was like. But there was one American who did, and that was Eisenhower.

 

[HILL] Why did he say that? Because of his breadth of understanding?

 

[HOLMES] I think he probably met Eisenhower and Eisenhower was not a hard liner. He did hate war, there was no doubt about that. He had seen too much of it. At any rate, I illustrate this as Pearson's difficulty. He did want to talk with them, and with some of the others. It was a reasonable discussion, but not much dialogue. Nevertheless, at that time, we didn't know how things were shifting in Moscow. With all this debate about who was going to take over, and it wasn't entirely clear that Khrushchev would, so there were all sorts of reasons for speculation. I think that we had hoped for some detente developing; we were hoping always for detente. I'm trying to remember what the Soviets did shortly afterwards which spoiled the whole thing. There was a summit meeting shortly after that too.

 

[HILL] Of course, there was the Hungarian business, too.

 

[HOLMES] Of course, the Hungarian business, shortly afterwards, the next year.

 

Part VII - Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, 1953-60

 

[HILL] To wrap up the interview, I would like to lead on from where you were talking about the Soviet Union, and to discuss briefly that whole period from 1953 to 1960 when you were Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. Then, perhaps we could also put in with that your period subsequently as Executive Director of the CIIA, because I think that I would like to just ask one basic question. Being involved in the making of foreign policy and its implementation at External, and since then thinking and writing about foreign policy and Canada's role in the world, how well do you think membership in NATO has served Canada in that time. How well do you think it is likely to serve Canada in the future? And do you see big changes coming ahead for NATO as well, as the world evolves? It is a very broad question.

 

[HOLMES] I have just written a long essay on this subject. I haven't had any doubt myself that we were better off in NATO than out, and that NATO, on the whole, was a good thing. The way I see it now is that we have to see NATO and the Warsaw Pact as somehow part of the structure of detente. This is what I argue with my friends who want to pull us out of NATO, in the interests of peace. What we've got is an enormous change from what we had twenty years ago. The concepts of detente and deterrence, even the concept of second strike, are revolutionary as compared to the old idea of one-up-manship, that you had to be superior, you had to be able to defeat the enemy. We may have overdone the extent to which a multilateral alliance is for us easier, because it reduces some of the tension in a bilateral alliance. But I think psychologically, it's valuable. It would seem to me that, on the whole, if we are trying to influence American grand strategy, we are more effective in NATO than just by saying, please, we are your continental allies, will you hear what we say. I don't think bilaterally you get very far unless it is specifically about the Arctic, about our own zone. Then clearly we have some clout. For the people who are worried about our being dragged along in the military alliance, I think we can argue that, we were one of the countries that pressed NATO to move towards detente. We have had, particularly with the Belgians, the Dutch, the Danes, the Norwegians, a chance for coalition diplomacy. It seems to me that our influence in NATO has more to do with our intellectual than our military contribution. Those who want us to increase our military contribution tend to argue that, unless we increase our military contribution, people won't pay any attention to what we say. I think that it would be better to argue we should increase our military contribution because we should increase our military contribution. I doubt it would make much difference in influence. I think if we decreased it, that would be another story.

 

[HILL] I would like to see a copy of that paper. One other point: I have been thinking about references to the Alliance supposedly "falling apart", which I think you mentioned at one point. Going through the files, I was struck to find that, already in 1950, people were talking about the Alliance falling apart.

 

[HOLMES] That's what it's for. If agreement among that group was automatic, taken for granted, then you probably wouldn't need much of an alliance.

 

[HILL] Well, I think that we have come to the end of our time. Thank you for participating in this study.

 

[HOLMES] It has been a pleasure.