The Life of a Great Man

I should begin by saying that as a reporter and, later, a columnist in Ottawa while Lester Pearson was prime minister, I both liked and admired him. We developed a cordial relationship, but he was never a personal friend and even when he was in retirement and we lunched occasionally at the Rideau Club I never referred to him as Mike, as do many today, including some who never met him. He invited me into his home only once, and that was to his basement office to go through his files—with another journalist—to see and copy the evidence he said refuted the charge being made in several books at the time that he had sacrificed colleagues to save his own neck during one of the scandals that besmirched his record as PM. Both I and my colleague—the late W.A. (Bill) Wilson of the late Montreal Star—thought he had a good defence, and we separately wrote series of articles that were syndicated to almost every daily paper in Canada. Ah, those were the days...

Pearson...