Haunted by Weird Willie

“A strange man, a strange age, a strange country. There is more to Mac­kenzie King, and to Canada, than meets the eye.”

In the mid 1970s, the writer of those words, political scientist Reg Whitaker, sat down in the reading room of the Public Archives in Ottawa to study the newly released volumes of the King diaries—a massive journal that Prime Minister Mackenzie King began keeping as a student in the 1890s, and in which he was still making entries until three days before his death in 1950. At first, Whitaker told readers of Canadian Forum in 1976, he was intrigued, because he found himself in “strange territory, not like other matter-of-fact diaries I have read before.” King appeared to be “an odd gentleman,” who believed that his dead loved ones literally hovered around him, and that the hands on a clock might be a communication from divine providence.

But as Whitaker read on, he abandoned his attitude of fond indulgence and hurtled toward the...