David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
Not that anyone in the United States would notice, not that anyone in Joe Biden’s White House would care, not that Canadian history is even a tangential part of the Washington conversation – but for Americans there is a telling lesson in a Canadian election two-thirds of a century ago.
The name Louis St-Laurent has not been uttered in the American capital since the days of Dwight Eisenhower, and even then it was not an element of the cocktail chatter of establishment Washington nor part of the election calculus of the newly developing culture of professional political-campaign strategists.
But St-Laurent, whose remarkably accomplished nine years as Canada’s prime minister began in 1948, offers a bracing cautionary tale for Mr. Biden, who at 81 now is preparing for his re-election campaign. St-Laurent was repelled from 24 Sussex Dr. in 1957 in large part because he was … too old.
Right now Mr. Biden is resisting pleas from every sector of his party to stand down and to allow a new generation of leadership – a phrase redolent with echoes from John F. Kennedy, who at the age of 43 used it in his campaign to succeed the 70-year-old Eisenhower in 1960 – to emerge in the party and in the country. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 77 per cent of Americans said they believed that Mr. Biden was too old to be effective for four more years in the White House. That view is held by 89 per cent of Republicans – but also by 69 per cent of Democrats.
Like Mr. Biden, who has won important legislative victories in climate and economic issues, St-Laurent had been a strong, successful prime minister, pounding out legislation and innovation throughout his time in office. His Liberals had won a landslide victory in 1949 and an easy re-election in 1953, but facing the voters four years later, St-Laurent, 75 in 1957, was old – in fairness, in some ways even older than Mr. Biden is at 81. Life expectancy for a Canadian man in 1882, the year of St-Laurent’s birth, was 44, and had risen to around 69 in 1957. The life expectancy for American men in 1942, the year of Mr. Biden’s birth, was around 63, while it’s 73 today.
The spring in Mr. Biden’s step is the product of great luck, exquisite medical care and the determined efforts of his handlers to make him look spry. He has advantages that St-Laurent lacked, for the 12th prime minister, as Patrice Dutil, the Toronto Metropolitan University historian, put it in The Unexpected Louis St-Laurent, had by 1957 “lost some of the fire in his belly that was essential for the good fight.”
But like Mr. Biden, who argues he is the leader most likely to defeat Donald Trump, St-Laurent convinced himself – and let others convince him – that he was the single member of his party positioned to lead to an election victory. “I don’t know where you will find anyone who can do any better,” he said. Those words perfectly capture Mr. Biden’s viewpoint.
There were signs of vulnerability as early as 1956, with St-Laurent suffering stomach pains leading to sleepless nights and eventually to a diagnosis that he had an ulcer. For some time, he remained what his former assistant and biographer, the University of Montreal professor Dale C. Thomson, called “a prisoner of his own hesitant, even negative, attitude towards public issues.” He lost patience, for example, over the need to debate the Trans-Canada Pipeline, a topic of serious controversy at the time.
To buttress his strength, he took a Florida vacation. His staff allowed a 75th birthday party to proceed in Quebec City that February. And he was determined, when election campaigning came around, to display his fitness – physical, as much as political – for office. (But a trip to the Arctic was cancelled to save his energy.) He entered the race fully convinced that the Liberal record of accomplishment would defeat the opposition, as it had since 1935. The polls gave the government the lead. Victory seemed assured.
Besides, Canada’s history with aged prime ministers went back to John A. Macdonald, who was 76 when he died in office in 1891. Charles Tupper turned 75 while he served as prime minister for two months in 1896, Wilfrid Laurier was PM until he was defeated at the age of 69 in 1911, and Mackenzie King was 73 when he stepped down in 1948.
But things had changed since 1953. Television, now widely available, accentuated St-Laurent’s wrinkles and slower pace. He told a speechwriter that he wanted to give the public a chance to decide for themselves whether he was, as Dr. Thomson put it, “still sufficiently alert and competent for this job.” Voters saw that his speeches now appeared wooden, full of facts and figures, lacking the fun and finesse of his adversary John Diefenbaker. Mr. Diefenbaker was already 61 years old, but looked a full generation younger.
The campaign was exhausting, and St-Laurent’s performance declined. Liberal polling numbers began to drop in the last few weeks. At a monster rally in Maple Leaf Gardens on the last Friday of the campaign, a 15-year-old boy boldly tore up a campaign poster in front of the prime minister. St-Laurent looked shocked, his face open-mouthed; he had lost his reflexes.
The Liberals won the popular vote – two percentage points more than the Progressive Conservatives – but lost an astonishing 64 seats. Mr. Diefenbaker’s team won the right to create a minority government.
“St-Laurent was weak, he was tired, he was frail, he was mildly melancholy,” Prof. Dutil said in an interview. “He had had enough. The race was too much.”
Mr. Biden has not had enough. The more important question is whether the American people have had enough.