Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada's World Wars, by Tim Cook

Abstract

Tim Cook Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada's World Wars Toronto: Allen Lane, 2012. 472pp., $34.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0670065219For more than a decade, Canada and its Western allies have been at war with global terrorism, confronting enemies along an uncertain and shifting frontline that has extended through Afghanistan and Iraq, across Asia and into Africa. Though a new kind of conflict for Canadians, this shadowy war raises old questions about the nature of wartime leadership, about the balance between ends and means, political values and military need, and about the place of individual decision-makers in their country's history. Working off the larger canvas provided by the first and second world wars, historian Tim Cook tackles these questions in his timely study of Canada's wartime leaders, Sir Robert Borden and William Lyon Mackenzie King.Individuals matter in Warlords, and Canada's response to both world wars reflected the outsized personalities of its ruling prime ministers: Borden during the First World War and King during its tragic successor. Cook is a fluent narrator. He steadily marches his two prime ministerial subjects and his readers past the milestones of early 20th century Canadian history, enlivening the passage with colourful portraits of key characters encountered along the way. He opens with a Lincoln-esque sketch of the young Borden, who abandoned the family farm in Nova Scotia for teaching, lawyering, and politicking. Elected prime minister in 1911 of the first Conservative government since 1896, Cook's early Borden was an irresolute leader, trapped by recession and debt, and cautious in the face of national fissures over defence policy. There were few hopeful signs of change during the first years of the First World War. PM is undecided as usual, the veteran trade minister, Sir George Foster, complained to his diary in August 1915 (59).Over the next year or so, however, the Great War transformed Borden. The Conservative leader was shaken by the scale of the conflict and animated by a steely determination to seek a larger voice in its strategic direction. The payment demanded by Imperial Britain was Canadian manpower, a steep price that Borden proved willing to pay. As recruitment slowed in 1916 and 1917, the prime minister moved inexorably towards conscription over strong opposition from French Canadians, non-British immigrants, and farmers. For Cook, Borden's essential character was honed in the dramatic national conflict over con- scription, which the prime minister pursued with single-minded determination in 1917 and 1918. As the wartime state flexed its muscle, becoming intolerant, authoritarian (130), and even despotic (147), national security trumped national unity, and much else that Canadians field dear. For Borden, and possibly Cook, the ends clearly justified the means.Mackenzie King's legacy was different. A product of middle-class Ontario, King sat out the First World War, working for American millionaire J.D. Rockefeller, while absorbing the lessons to be learned from Borden's difficulties with French Canada. Above all, King came to understand the importance of national unity for political success. …