Whose Man in Havana?

s memoir is a joyous guide to a life in the Canadian foreign service, and reassuringly he also shows that there is a life after bureaucracy.Graham joined the foreign service when becoming a Canadian diplomat was thought to be a Good Thing.Canada's Department of External Affairs managed to look glamorous from the outside, and proved to be interesting and often strenuous from the inside.Though the foreign service had its share of clunks and incompetents, and ran a few posts that competed with Devil's Island for isolation and discomfort, it was usually much better than that, and there were real rewards -not the least of which was to join an international profession that required its members always to understand the other point of view and not simply to parrot instructions from head office in Ottawa.Diplomatic life could be pleasant.There were indeed parties and receptions and dinners.Other diplomats from other countries could be, and often were intelligent, good company, and sometimes lifelong friends.It could also be stressful, as Graham shows, hair-raising, and occasionally tragic -as he also shows.Life abroad with allowances was mitigated by home duty: ice and snow in Ottawa, and quite often a modest lifestyle.It was (and is) the equivalent of the slave riding in a chariot with a Roman conqueror, whispering in his ear, "Remember, you are but mortal."Canadian foreign policy when Graham was a diplomat was run from a smallish ministry that had been originally attached to the prime minister's office (with a lower case "o" at a time when it had not achieved the grandeur and size it has today).That meant it was located in a neo-Gothic pile, the East Block of Canada's Parliament buildings, where prime ministersxiv could keep an eye on it.Indeed for almost forty years the prime minister was also styled "Secretary of State for External Affairs" to distinguish him from the "Secretary of State," who handled patents and other forms.In the 1940s, "the Department" (all such entities were called departments before ascending in nomenclature to be "ministries") acquired its own minister, and two of them, Louis St. Laurent and Lester B. Pearson, went on to be prime minister: it seemed a natural step.Pearson even collected a Nobel Peace Prize as he passed Go.Under the minister came the under-secretary, the deputy minister.The under-secretary was a homebody, minding the store, running errands ("interfacing" today) between the political and the bureaucratic, rewarding, punishing, stretching budgets and generally keeping his fractious brood in line.He (for they were all male in Graham's period) occasionally had to suppress bad ideas from ambitious ambassadors."For the son-ofa-bitch," one under-secretary growled when an ambassador in Cuba produced a plan for harmony between the United States and communist Cuba.In that case his staff calmed the enraged deputy minister, but sometimes diplomats found themselves abruptly yanked and returned to Ottawa to contemplate life from within the department's Historical Division.It was understood that ministers, and more broadly the cabinet, made policy, and the diplomats executed it.It was also their function to give advice, as practically as possible, for ministers to adopt or disregard.As a general rule, however, the advice bore some resemblance to the policy adopted, and the policy, in turn, helped shape the advice.For that to be so, there had to be some common ground or at least mutual confidence.Most day-to-day work sailed comfortably under the ministerial radar.Readers will find very few ministerial irruptions in Graham's volume, and rightly so.Diplomats on post had considerable freedom to conduct their work as they saw best, disturbed only by very infrequent visits from superiors from headquarters or sorties by ministers in search of trade and publicity.An ambassador or high commissioner could address the local Drones Club or Meathead Society and nobody in Ottawa would be any the worse -in fact, better for not following up on such mundane details.Common ground and mutual confidence also applied to relations among foreign missions in a given capital.Sometimes this was necessary for survival or more usually comfort, pooling supplies, or shopping at the same commissary.This shared cordiality even applied to contacts *George Vest, stationed in the US embassy in Ottawa, 1951-54, desk officer for Canada in the State Department, 1954-57.Vest later became Inspector-General of the Foreign Service.

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