From the IntroductionFactor in King's obsessive compulsive tendencies - the constant checking of the clock for no apparent reason and the saving of every scrap of paper he received, right down to his dental x-rays and the Pats' dog tags - and you have one difficult and oddball prime minister. King was "a literary magpie of unprecedented proportions," as Peter C. Newman described him in a 1976 newspaper essay. "After King died, his notes on Edward VIII's abdication were found in a piano bench at Laurier House." (The collection of King's papers kept in Ottawa at Library and Archives Canada includes more than two million documents and 25,000 photographs. It measures 315.89 metres or 1,036.38 feet, almost three football fields long.)King made a point of noting in his diary every compliment he received and each time his caucus or an audience cheered him on, in addition to every slight and sarcastic remark he regarded as offensive. And he always blew these usually insignificant matters out of all proportion. No wonder he was so "fatigued" so much of the time: He expended a huge amount of emotional energy on minor issues and sheer nonsense. It started early. In 1904, when Prime Minister Laurier did not properly compliment him on a speech he delivered at the Canadian Club, he was troubled about it for a week. At Christmas, he tallied up all those people who sent him cards and more significantly, those who did not. In December 1926, some months after his nasty public row with Lord Byng over a dissolution of Parliament that he demanded and the governor general did not wish to grant, a Christmas card from Lord and Lady Byng (who now detested King more than her husband) was not forthcoming. "The Byngs have not sent me a Xmas card," he noted on December 27, 1926, "pretty nice sort of treatment after the four years of close relationship we had." When Lord Byng died in Britain in June 1935, King was thrown into a crisis. He was uncertain if he should send a telegram of condolence, which he finally did, and was incapable of deciding what to say publicly about the former governor general's passing. He was in an anxious tizzy for days about it, reviewing the entire 1926 episode again with the necessary rationalizations and justifications for his actions. No one had it as hard or felt sorrier for himself than Mackenzie King did. A friendly phone call from Kathleen King, his nephew Arthur's wife (the son of his brother Max) was not just a friendly phone call. "I think this is one of the very few times that anyone related by marriage or any other way has made an enquiry concerning my health," he noted in October 1943 with typical self-absorption. "It shows how completely isolated one has become in giving one's years as well as days in public affairs and allowing all elements of home and its association to slip by unshared." Violet Markham, the British social reformer and socialite who was friends with King for more than four decades, remembered that she "begged him to take life more easily and not allow affairs of state to submerge him so completely. No human frame could stand with impunity the strain he put upon it, but he had little power either to relax or amuse himself." In his memoirs, historian Charles Stacey recalled that in August 1946 during a guided tour he gave King through the battlefields of Normandy in France, there was a terribly uncomfortable moment for the prime minister when the group stood at the spot where Canadian solders had been murdered by the Nazis and temporarily buried. King always feared not doing the right thing or following the correct protocol, so he did nothing. "What does one do at an empty grave?" Stacey remembered wondering. "We military people waited for the Prime Minister to set us some example. We then realized he was waiting for an example from us; in fact he was craning forward to see that those of us on each side of him were doing. We saluted; and King then removed his hat." King was so out of tune with his own persona that it borders on the absurd. During the second conscription crisis in 1944, he had recruited General Andy McNaughton to replace James Ralston, his problematic minister of defence. But then McNaughton failed to win a seat in the House of Commons. In his diary, King, who mentally catalogued every caustic remark ever directed at him, castigated the general for being "much too strong in his suspicions and dislikes and hatreds. McNaughton was not a good man in politics for that reason. Sir Wilfrid was right when he said that it does not do to cherish resentments in public life." Similarly, after King had died, Alex Hume, the veteran Ottawa Citizen reporter who had known the prime minister for years, recounted that King had once told him with a straight face, no less, that, "it is a great mistake to take anything in public life in a personal way to embitter one." If only he had paid attention to that advice he would have saved himself from so much aggravation, but it was not to be. The window into King's turbulent personality and his tortured soul is the diary he kept almost religiously from the time he was eighteen in 1893 to his death in 1950. It is the treasure trove of his triumphs, anxieties, sexual proclivities and chronic guilt, which this book is framed around. "This diary is to contain a very brief sketch of the events, actions, felling and thoughts of my daily life," the very first entry began on September 6, 1893. "It must above all be a true and faithful account. The chief object of my keeping this diary is that I may be ashamed to let even one day have nothing worthy of its showing, and it is hoped that through its pages the reader may be able to trace how the author has sought to improve his time." Running about 30,000 pages (7.5 million words) it is one of the greatest, historical documents in Canadian history. King's diary, journalist and critic Robert Fulford once opined, "might turn out to be the only Canadian work of our century that someone will look at in 500 years." Excerpted from King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny by Allan Levine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
