LESTER B. PEARSON

Lester Pearson was born April 23, 1897 to Anne Bowles Pearson and Edwin A. Pearson, a Methodist minister. He was the second of three boys.

His father’s avid athleticism, as much as his sermons, inspired the young Lester. Minister Pearson was known to organize hockey and baseball games with the boys in his parish. In his memoirs, Mike, Pearson said he suspected this was why his father’s services were so well attended.

Pearson was a brilliant athlete and ferocious competitor. He excelled in virtually every sport he played, and there were lots -- football, rugger, baseball, cricket, and lacrosse and hockey.

Stories of his prowess on the hockey rink as a young man followed him throughout his life. While playing with Oxford University’s hockey team he earned the name “Herr Zigzag” after a 27-0 win over Cambridge.

In his early 20s Pearson played semi-professional baseball with the Guelph Maple Leafs as a means of making extra money during the summers.

He remained an avid sports fan throughout his life. When he was Prime Minister, he had a TV installed in his office so that he could follow the World Series. The inter-league trophy awarded to Canada’s two Major League baseball teams was called the Pearson Cup. The National Hockey League’s Lester B. Pearson Award honours the league’s most valuable player as voted by the players.

Pearson earned his nickname “Mike” during the First World War. A senior officer in the British Royal Flying Corps thought Lester was too genteel a name for a fighter pilot and dubbed him Mike. Pearson would keep it for life.

After a crash landing in his plane and a bus accident during a black out in London, he was diagnosed with neurasthenia, a common anxiety disorder of the time. After serving nearly three years, Pearson was sent home from service in 1918. The experience of the First World War left him with an unshakable commitment to peace.

When he got back from the war, he spent a summer stuffing sausages in a meat-packing plant. He moved up the corporate ladder to a clerical job in the firm, called Armour and Company. He later quipped that the Russians claimed he had once worked for an armament manufacturer.

Pearson met Maryon Moody, his future wife, in 1923 when she was a student in his class. They married two years later and went on to have two children; Geoffrey who would follow in his father’s diplomatic footsteps and Patricia. She would have five children, including journalist and author Patricia Pearson.

In 1926,while in Ottawa researching a book on the United Empire Loyalists. Pearson got his first taste of politics. In the afternoons, Pearson would play hooky from the archives and go to Parliament’s visitor gallery, along with his wife’s friend Paul Martin Sr., who would later serve in Pearson’s cabinet.

Around this time, Pearson was recruited to take the Foreign Service exam. He aced it, getting top marks and one of the handful of jobs at Canada’s newly created External Affairs Department.

For his work, Pearson was awarded an Order of the British Empire. Pearson had a life-long dislike of pomp and ceremony, and actually got the OBE when the Governor-General’s assistant tossed it to him while he was on a tennis court.

When the Second World War broke out, he remained at the Canadian High Commission in London, England during the worst bombing known as the Blitz. He recorded his experiences and observations in a series of humourous BBC radio talks for broadcast in Canada. Aware that such behaviour was not considered appropriate for diplomats he adopted the name "Michael Macdonald" for the wartime broadcasts.

In 1943 Pearson was posted to Washington and before the war was over he became Canada’s Ambassador to the United States. But his great passion was building a new world after the Second World War and creating a unique role for Canada in it.

The brave new hope for the post war world was the United Nations. Mike helped create several important agencies such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the Food and Agriculture Organization, whose goal is to eliminate world hunger. He was nominated to be the first Secretary General of the United Nations, but was vetoed by the Soviet Union. It was an enormous honour for a country whose external affairs department just a few years earlier could have fit into a broom closet.

Pearson had an easygoing personality, great charm and an extraordinary ability to build consensus. Underneath the warmth was grit and determination to make the world a better place. When the world is in trouble Pearson was the one they turned to. He played prominent role in resolving conflicts in the Middle East, Indochina and Korea.

Although Pearson was an idealist, he was no idle dreamer. He said in 1955,

A true realist is the man who sees things both as they are and as they can be. In every situation there is the possibility of improvement; in every life the hidden capacity for something better.

His greatest triumph was his solution of the Suez crisis that threatened the world with war. The Nobel Foundation announced Cricket as the winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize on the same day that Conservative John Diefenbaker was being sworn in as Prime Minister. Pearson, now an opposition member and sitting in a small basement office, didn’t believe it when a reporter called him to let him know. What did Mike say when he heard about his triumph. He said “gosh”.

In his acceptance speech, Pearson emphasized the need to close the gap that had developed between man’s material progress and his social and moral advancement: “In facing the choice of peace or extinction, man must renounce predatory nationalism and look to the primacy of world concerns to bring about peace and security for all”.

In his decade as Liberal leader, Pearson fought four federal election campaigns, winning two minority government in 1963 and 1965. He served as Prime Minister from April 22, 1963 to April 20, 1968.

Ironically, the things that made him a good person – his humility and honesty – interfered with his political success. Pearson was not a natural political campaigner. Television made matters worse. He was a wooden and uninspiring speaker.

Former External Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, himself a Nobel peace prize nominee for his work on clearing landmines, recently said that it was a speech of Pearson’s he had heard as teenager in Winnipeg that had changed his life. Pearson revitalized the Liberal party in the early 60s by attracting many idealistic young Canadians with his ideas and energy.

One of the young men that Pearson attracted to the party was Albertan Jim Coutts. He became Pearson’s appointments secretary, and later became principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau. Coutts recently wrote that no one came close to Pearson as an innovator of social policy partly because none of the others ever had as fully developed a plan or the determination to carry it out.

When Pearson was elected prime minister with a minority government he said, “we will breach no trust, barter no principles. The task ahead is immense, but it is not frightening. It is complex beyond simple description, but it is not impossible. It will not be an easy time, but it will, I pledge you, be a time to excite the daring, to test the strong and to give new promise to the timid”

A close friend once remarked that Mike was “always happiest when clinging to a precipice and about to fall off”. Faced with the on-going crises of minority government, Mike would jokingly tell his nerve-wracked advisors, “we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it”.

Many Canadians consider Pearson’s greatest achievement to be Canada’s distinctive maple leaf flag. What was the source of his determination to give Canada a flag of its own? Partly it came as a result of Pearson’s other great achievement – the United Nations Peacekeeping force. When the first peacekeeping force was sent to enforce the ceasefire, the Egyptian president at first refused to allow Canadian soldiers to participate. Canadian troops carrying the Red Ensign looked too much like the British invaders. It was a terrible humiliation for Pearson and for Canada and Pearson wanted to make sure that it never happened again.

In 1964, Pearson resisted U.S. pressure to enter the Vietnam War. In a speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s Temple University in 1965, he called for a halt in the American bombing of North Vietnam. A furious U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson summoned him to Camp David, the presidential retreat. LBJ accused Cricket of inciting dissent, warning him not to “come into my home and piss on my carpet.”

It wasn’t the first time Pearson had stood up to the Americans. He refused to cooperate with the American anti-communist witch-hunts during the 1950s. In retaliation, the FBI opened an investigation into Pearson. They developed a file labeled Espionage: Russian. It was a 243 page assemblage of rumour and innuendo. When they threatened to release it, Pearson told them to go ahead. They backed down.

In 1968, at the age 71, Pearson decided leave politics and returned to his first loves. He lectured on Canadian foreign relations at Carlton University in Ottawa. He headed up a study on international development that presented the case for greater economic aid from the rich nations to poorer ones.

The secretary to the commission was struck by what he called Pearson’s humanity. His mere presence he said “induced a breathtaking reduction in the pettiness, the self-serving, the back-biting, the callousness and the small-mindedness to which all of us are subject. He led us by drawing out the best in us. He showed us that it was possible to be serious without taking oneself seriously.” This remark could apply to Pearson’s entire career – he always appealed to what was best in us.

Both Pearson and his wife, Maryon were extremely bright and witty. When Pearson retired he said that his mischievous remarks had often gotten him into more trouble than any controversial policy he had championed. One of Maryon’s most famous comments was that behind every successful man was a surprised woman, although it’s unlikely she was talking about her husband.

Pearson showed his wonderful sense of humour to the end. When he developed cancer and had an eye removed, he joked that the people were right who said they never knew what was going on in his head.

Pearson raced against time in writing his memoirs. In the fall of 1972 the first volume of “Mike” was published to critical and popular acclaim. Like the man himself, it was wise and witty, a great read, and rose to the top of the bestseller list. However, his son Geoffrey would have to finish the next two volumes.

Pearson died on Dec. 28, 1972 in Ottawa from cancer. He was 75 years old. After a state funeral he was buried in a modest cemetery in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec.

At his funeral service, the minister concluded his eulogy with these words, which include a reference to a Chinese poem that was one of Pearson’s favourites:

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