Unsung Hero

I have always thought of the late John Wendell Homes, a distinguished Canadian diplomat turned scholar and teacher, as Canada’s equivalent to the late George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat and scholar who was the author of the doctrine of containment, which charted a course for the United States on how to deal with the former Soviet Union during the early days of the Cold War. Both men have become larger-than-life iconic figures in the annals of modern diplomacy. Much like Kennan, Holmes served as a diplomat and head of the mission in Moscow in the early, bleak days of the Cold War. Like Kennan, Holmes was intellectually brilliant and greatly admired, if not revered, by his contemporaries. Like Kennan, Holmes had a meteoric career in the foreign service, but left it to pursue a career of writing and teaching. Kennan went to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, Holmes to the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the University of Toronto. Kennan wrote a series...