National Personality

There has been much praise for the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs) that oversaw Canadian foreign policy after the Second World War. Just as the British still take pride in the former reputation of their intelligence service, Canadians might point to the quality of their foreign service in the 1950s and ’60s. Some might even be familiar with such names as O. D. Skelton and Norman Robertson, who were at the helm during the department’s “golden age.” Brendan Kelly’s absorbing political biography, The Good Fight, makes a convincing case that Marcel Cadieux’s name should be added to that elite cadre.

Cadieux’s origins were far from elite. The son of a postal worker, he was born in 1915 and raised in a duplex on Boulevard Saint-­Laurent, in a working-­class district of north Montreal. In the mid-’30s, he began his studies at the Université de Montréal by taking night classes; he eventually earned a degree from its law school, although he...