Mr. Prime Minister, 1867-1964
""From Fundy to Huron the bonfires were burned out, the last rocket discharged, the bands and the orators silent...On the night of July 1, 1867, John Alexander Macdonald, an improbable midwife, felt satisfied that his Canadian Confederation was decently born, even if the grandeur of its birth had been somewhat marred by a nasty little quarrel in the Cabinet chamber....A hopeful constitution had established and awarded to him a new focus of power without deciding it...His successors, down to Lester Bowles Pearson, have not fully explored, even now, the possibilities of the Prime Minister's office....Having studied the lives of our fourteen Prime Ministers, and personally known six of them, I thought it would be useful to trace their work, to examine their characters and to analyze the successive management of a mysterious institution as a single narrative. So, indeed, it is--narrative of alternating success, failure and sometimes better sorrow, much less plausible than fiction." Thus Bruce Hutchison explains the strange fascination of the drama he unfolds in this masterly presentation of the principal actors on Canada's stage-- a presentation which took him three years to complete and which, in its economy, originality, vividness and humor, makes enthralling reading. Hutchison is not writing here an historical treatise or a constitutional study--as a skilled newspaperman whose "recollections over a period of forty-six years in political journalism are mingled with the public record, occasionally denying it," and he is writing the compelling story of what he calls "adventure at the apex of Canadian power" and he is writing this way because he believes that Canada "with its wealth, its stark splendour, and its limitless chance of human contentment," is "in peril from no one but ourselves" and so it is urgent that all of us examine ourselves in "the shifting mirror of leadership." Canada has had fourteen Prime Ministers and all are reflecting fairly, but unsparingly, in this revealing book."--Publisher
Print Book, English, ©1964
Longmans Canada, Don Mills, Ont., ©1964