(Editor’s note: author Peter C. Newman died in 2023 at 94. As a newspaperman he’d covered Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and in 1963 published Renegade In Power, a bestselling profile of the Prime Minister. Newman recalled those years in an October 7, 2009 interview with Blacklock’s publisher Holly Doan. Following is a transcript of his remarks)
I remember once in Vancouver, Diefenbaker had a speech and it started to rain. Someone held an umbrella over his head and he pushed it away. He started to speak in this downpour, waving his arms and shouting, and soon people in the audience who had umbrellas put them away. They wanted to share the rain with him. That was the kind of power he had.
He was one of those people who dreamt as a youth of becoming Prime Minister and always believed in himself. Like most self-made men, he worshipped his creator.
Diefenbaker was a person, but person is too small a word. He was a force of nature, a phenomenon. He’d walk into a room and the temperature would change.
He was like an Old Testament prophet. He had that kind of presence. Unfortunately he had crazy eyes that went in all directions, especially when he got angry.
I used to refer to him as well-balanced: He had a chip on each shoulder. He did have a lot of chips. It was unsurprising. All the power resided in Toronto, Montréal and Ottawa, and here was a man who was from outside that world. To break into that circle, you had to kowtow to their values. There was no point in bringing your own values because they despised or ridiculed them. But Diefenbaker wouldn’t do that. He had is own values. He represented the West.
Of course there was the name. There was a lot of prejudice against immigrants in Diefenbaker’s day. Those farmers were looked down on as a kind of working class, subterranean group of people you didn’t mix with. He came out of that. It was difficult for somebody with his name and background in that day.
I joined the Rideau Club in 1956. That was the place where Liberal cabinet members went for lunch. They thought Diefenbaker was a joke. But people followed him. He’d make a speech in Cobourg and 5,000 people would turn out.
I liked him for his instincts. His instincts were good. He was a populist. He truly believed in what we call “ordinary Canadians.”
