The Atomic Conference 1945 and the Pearson Memoirs

Retired prime ministers write memoirs. This statement has the ring of truth, but it is one that cannot be justified in the Canadian experience. Of the fourteen former prime ministers of Canada only two had previously embarked on that task. Sir Charles Tupper wrote his Recollections of my 60 years in Canada (for two months and one week of which sixty years he was prime minister), and Sir Robert Borden left his unpublished manuscript to be edited and published by his nephew. Despite this paucity of domestic precedent, there can be no doubt that Lester B. Pearson was aware of the problems confronting the budding memoirist. It was an awareness which allowed him to tackle the problems involved in a constructive and productive fashion. An historian by training, he knew the value of historical research in urging forth memories which had long been submerged by the onrushing tide of events. Further, he was willing to acknowledge the faultiness of memory when confronted with evidence that one of his favourite stories had been so overlaid by time, subsequent events, and intermittent recounting that it had lost its factual grounding. It is a fact seldom recognized by private men that their counterparts in public life are often so caught up in the next event that they have little time to reflect on the importance and relevance of the preceding one. Thus the public man turned memoirist in more leisurely days is in desperate need

Memoir · Political science · Canadian Identity and History · Law