Oliver's Twist by Craig Oliver Page A

massive campaign against Tommy by an alliance of business figures and medical professionals. They could not defeat medicare, but they could defeat the man who fathered it. The nation was stunned when the capital city of Saskatchewan rejected its popular former premier, but I was ready with the backstory and delivered it to a national television audience.
    In 1965, the network brass singled me out again to appear on the network’s national election night broadcast covering John Diefenbaker. Dief had set himself up in his private railway car, parked in the station siding in Prince Albert. By then I knew the Chief pretty well and accepted that he had little use for the national press, much preferring the local media, which in his mind included me. I had interviewed him many times. On the first occasion I recall asking him nervously for his opinion on how the Liberals were running the country. “Young man,” hescolded me with mock impatience, “you must learn to spell. The Liberals are ruining the country, not running it.”
    The election was on my birthday, November 8, which one of Dief’s aides drew to his attention. I was outside on the station platform with the television crew when Dief invited me in for a drink. He was famous for such small courtesies toward his staff and others he liked. As any reporter would, I inquired how he thought the night would go. To my astonishment he replied, “I think we may lose the night.” This was news, but I was sure he believed the conversation was off the record. To assuage my conscience on the matter, I went on television and announced that senior aides to the Opposition leader believed they were about to lose the election to the Liberals. That sent reporters on the train scurrying down to his car, demanding the names of the loose-lipped aides. Dief killed the story, stating that no staff member of his had ever said such a thing, which was literally true. Nonetheless, Dief was correct and his party was defeated that night.
    Diefenbaker was a wonderful storyteller, with a laugh that dissolved into a maniacal cackle, but he was also a puzzle to his contemporaries. I discovered one clue to his nature when I interviewed the man who was his first law partner in the village of Wakaw, Saskatchewan. The fellow described Dief as “an old bullshitter,” a successful defence lawyer who owed his triumphs to an ability to act. I came to believe that was both his strength and his weakness as a politician. In Opposition, where he could thunder in the Commons and on the stump against the sins of the Liberals, he was unsurpassed. But as a prime minister, confronted with the challenge of holding a caucus and a country together while implementing policies and solving problems, he found that acting was not enough.
    Though some are better than others at hiding the fact, all politicians are vain and possessed of oversized egos. Dief’s was larger than most, and he became paranoid and vindictive to those he considered his enemies, a group that grew as he aged. Dief was such an instinctive partisan politician that after a while he became a one-man party, estranged from many fellow Tories.
    Surprisingly, Pierre Trudeau always enjoyed and respected John Diefenbaker. When Dief became seriously ill on a vacation to Ireland in his later years, then Prime Minister Trudeau sent a government jet to bring him home. On his first day back in the Commons after his recovery, Dief rose to attack the Liberal government for its excessive use of government aircraft. Trudeau doubled over with laughter at his desk across the aisle.
    Dief stayed on in Parliament after the Conservative Party ousted him as leader in 1967 and spent much of his time undermining his successors, Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark. He was particularly spiteful to Clark, often referring to him in conversations with me as the “so-called leader.” Since he could bring himself to trust only the most supine