Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Arnold Henney, joined by his colleague Saul Rae (father of current UN Ambassador Bob Rae) had harsh words for the U.S. Congress on this date in 1967. Henney and Rae traveled to the State Department to officially register Canada’s protests over the role the naming of Norman as a suspected communist by a Congressional committee had played in the suicide of Canada’s Ambassador to Egypt.
An American memorandum of the conversation attests to the gravity of the situation. Norman had jumped to his death from a Cairo rooftop only five days before.
“The (Canadian) Ambassador said he could not over-emphasize the seriousness of the situation,” the memo stated. “He said that if the Committee continues its “wild attacks” on Canadian officials it will doubtless produce an explosion and relations between the two countries would suffer greatly. The Ambassador said, as an example of the temper of Canadian Parliamentarians that a prominent member of Parliament (Alistair Stewart) is proposing to ask the Government to withdraw the Canadian Ambassador from Washington.”
No evidence has ever been found that Norman had spied for the USSR, or any other East Bloc nation, during his exemplary service to Canada during his years at the Department of External Affairs.
You can read the entire report from the U.S. side of the meeting about Norman at the State Department on April 9, 1957 at this link: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v27/d365
You can also listen to Canada’s foreign minister Lester Pearson, along with Tory leader John Diefenbaker, react to Norman’s suicide from a CBC radio news report at the time at this link: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1726181628caption id="attachment_3307681" align="alignnone" width="203"
Herbert Norman/captionArthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.