Word: pearsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Assured by External Affairs Chief Lester Pearson that Canadian security checks gave a "clean bill of health" to Herbert Norman, Canadian Ambassador to Egypt, Canadians last week turned hotly angry with a U.S. Senate subcommittee that released evidence of Norman's Communist leanings in the 1930s. Politicians, editors and many others blamed the subcommittee for Norman's suicide leap from a Cairo building a fortnight ago. Then at week's end, harassed "Mike" Pearson admitted under intensive questioning in the House of Commons that "Mr. Norman, as a university student many years ago, was known to have...
With that admission, the pure flame of public anger yellowed and flickered, except for a backfire of resentment against Pearson for having misled public opinion. What had threatened to create a real diplomatic strain between Canada and the U.S. turned instead into an occasion for second thoughts and cooler analysis...
...with a stiffer note demanding assurance that security information supplied by Canadian agencies would not be released by U.S. agencies without Canada's permission. The plain presumption was that some part of the evidence against Norman had come from the Canadian government. But on this point, too, Pearson had to back down. In Parliament he admitted that the Senate subcommittee had not used Canadian sources...
Undermined Spirit. From Cairo Herbert Norman cabled Pearson thanking him for his support. He began to spend long hours in his study writing: then he would summon his Nubian servant, Mohammed Daoud. and ask him to burn the writings in the ambassador's presence. In the pocket of his suit when he died, he left two scrawled notes. One said: "I have no option. I must kill myself because I live without hope." Another, to his wife, said: "I kiss your feet and beg you to forgive me for what I am doing...
When news of Norman's death reached Ottawa, Mike Pearson rose in the House of Commons to pronounce an epitaph: "All his actions served only to confirm and strengthen my faith in and my admiration for him. The combined effect of overwork, overstrain, and the feeling of renewed persecution on a sensitive mind and a not very robust body produced a nervous collapse." But Pearson refused to send a new official protest to Washington: "There is no point in making an international issue of this...