This morning the Prime Minister gave me a letter from a J. Louis Lamontagne of Montreal who is apparently a public relations man connected in some way with the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Lamontagne suggested that the Prime Minister should invite Mr. Kennedy to Canada on a personal visit before his inauguration. The Prime Minister asked me to let him have a reaction to this letter.

I discussed it with Mr. Robertson and Mr. Ritchie and then saw the Prime Minister again at lunch time. I said that there were various reasons which seemed to argue for a delay in responding to this idea. In particular, it was possible that President Eisenhower might invite Mr. Kennedy to accompany him to the NATO meeting in Paris in December at which time, if the Prime Minister was there, a meeting would be easily arranged. There was the additional point that the Prime Minister would not wish to lay too much stress on meeting Mr. Kennedy at a time when President Eisenhower was still in office. The Prime Minister appeared to agree with these reasons for delay and signified that he had no intention of acting quickly.

I said however, on the basis of Mr. Robertson’s view, that if there was any possibility in the Prime Minister’s mind of inviting Kennedy to come to Canada, there would be much to be said for sending him now a message of personal greeting on the outcome of the election. I showed the Prime Minister a draft which had been prepared in the Department. At first the Prime Minister stuck to his previous decision against sending such a message but after some discussion he asked me to attempt a redraft and at the end of the conversation seemed inclined to send a personal message.

The Prime Minister made a few comments which are perhaps worth recording. He said that with Kennedy in control, he thought we were closer to war than we had been before. When I expressed surprise at this statement and suggested that the narrowness of Kennedy’s margin would cause him to move with greater caution and responsibility than might have been the case had there been a landslide, the Prime Minister disagreed. He pictured Kennedy as “courageously rash” and said that he had pushed himself to the top against all odds, had spoken of bringing world leadership back to Washington, and had given every indication of intending to pursue an active policy which the Prime Minister feared might prove dangerous. When I said that much would presumably depend on the people Kennedy had around him, the Prime Minister said that he doubted whether Kennedy would be deterred from adopting a policy of action. I raised the question of who would be Secretary of State and the Prime Minister agreed that this would be an important indicator of Kennedy’s intentions. He admitted that if it were Bowles, this would not point to a policy of concentration on military strength.

In domestic matters, the Prime Minister said, without elaborating at all, that although he like Mr. Macmillan was a left-wing conservative, further to the left than many right-wing liberals, there were many things in Kennedy’s platform that he could not have accepted. The Prime Minister made some references in this context to the tendency toward government intervention which he thought would be much more pronounced under Kennedy.

On the CL-44, ²⁷ the Prime Minister wondered whether Nixon, having been let down in the election by California, might now be less inclined to use his influence on behalf of the aircraft industry in California. This might result in the administration agreeing to the CL-44 deal; at least it was worth looking into he seemed to think.

H.B. R[OBINSON]

²⁷Voir partie 4 (c) de ce chapitre./See Part 4 (c) of this chapter.