Canadians Angered At Suicide Of Diplomat

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28259, 23 April 1957, Page 19

Canadians Angered At Suicide Of Diplomat

(.Spectally written for the N.Z.P.A. by FRANK OLIVER}

WASHINGTON, April 21. The fact might well be faced that the unpopularity of the United States with its friends and allies is increasing. Canada, which usually has excellent relations with its big neighbour, must now be numbered among those who ?re very bitter with Washington. It is seeping into Washington that many Canadians feel that the United State's Congress is responsible for the death of Mr Herbert Norman. Canada’s Ambassador at Cairo. The reason for thb “disclosures” about Mr Norman are I not far to seek. The economic law of diminishing returns is beginning to operate in the witch-hunting business. Victims are harder and harder to find, and the United States Congressional investigation committees are having to go further and further back into history to “uncover” anything.

Another factor was that word was’ getting round Washington that Canada was getting ready to recognise Communist China and that Mr Norman was to be transferred from Cairo to Peking. Then followed the publication of the first and erroneous report on Mr Norman —but not the second report, which cleared him. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Senate Internal Security Committee and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee are getting rather desperate for something to investigate. The McCarthy hysteria is prac-

tically dead, and the American Communist Party is on the ropes and gasping for breath. But these two Congressional committees have large staffs and plenty of money, in spite of the cry for economy, <and they are permanent parts of the legislative machinery. They want to keep in being, but they are running so short of material to investigate they are going back 10 and 20 years, and even rerunning old “iniquities.” In the last appropriations, the Senate gave its committee 289,000 dollars, and the House gave its committee 330.000 dollars, all in all a good deal of money, and little on which to spend it. It is being said and written at Washington that the latest idea of the Senate committee .is to charge that Canada’s Foreign Minister, Mr Lester Pearson, who is regarded by most people as one of the world’s most prominent statesmen, was an intimate friend of Mr Herbert Norman, and is thus “tainted with Communism,” too.

If this is done, the reaction of Canada can be imagined—and it is unlikely to be quiet. Constitutionalists assume that it is the right and responsibility of the President and the Secretary of State to conduct United States foreign relations, but Congress has arrogated to itself the business of investigating the political views of the ambassador of a foreign Power serving in a foreign country.