In Unbuttoned, Christopher Dummitt examines how personal secrets (slowly) came out after the 1950 death of long-serving Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King, and how the media and society struggled to deal with them. In this excerpt, King’s official biographer, Robert MacGregor Dawson, treads on delicate ground.

Dawson also needed to make sense of King’s relationship with his mother. This would always have played some role in the biography, since King had made no secret of his devotion. The revelations about King conversing with her dead spirit, and the pseudo-shrine he established to her in his upper-floor library at Laurier House, made the issue pressing. But it mattered even more because psychiatrists and their popularizers were radically changing what to make of some men’s relations with their mothers. This had to do, of course, with the Oedipus Complex.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Canadians were learning (or at least beginning to believe) that the mother-son relationship could be sinister. Freud and his popularizers warned of the dangers of excessive mother-devotion. What did it mean when young men did not learn to transfer their affections to other women? What happened when men were dominated by their mothers? At a time when psychiatry was dominated by psychoanalysis, which argued that the roots of mental illness were to be found in childhood, it wasn’t surprising that motherhood became such a fascinating topic. Philip Wylie had warned of “momism” back in his popular 1942 book, A Generation of Vipers. These ideas, and the therapeutic techniques that flowed from them, spread throughout the culture.

To appreciate how pervasive they were, one need only look at some of the most important films of the era, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Each film played on the idea of sons who become psychologically warped after being dominated by their mothers — and always with an uncomfortable sexual connotation.

It must have seemed to Dawson that King’s life was made for the age: there can rarely have been a man who was so devoted to his mother. His closest friend, Violet Markham, considered his mother-fixation a tragedy. In her memoirs she wrote of how she hesitated to “hold Mrs. King responsible for the cult into which her son’s love developed … But in the jargon of the psychiatrists, it is undeniable that the mother-complex was a misfortune for Mackenzie King.”

Like others, Markham blamed King’s mother-love for the fact that he did not marry and have children. Markham herself was sympathetic but others could take the analysis further, wondering how his mother-devotion was a kind of neurosis and fitted into the Freudian idea of the Oedipus Complex.

Dawson took notes on Karl Menninger’s book Love and Hate. So popular were Freud’s ideas about the Oedipus Complex that Menninger claimed, “Nearly every individual of this type who comes to a psychiatrist announces that he has ‘a mother fixation’ or ‘a mother complex.’”

But Menninger insisted that most people misunderstood this complex to mean it involved some kind of sexual attraction. Instead, he said, it really is a combination of “dependence” on the mother, and, at the same time, “hostility” toward her for this dependence.

Then Menninger went on to describe a kind of person who looked a great deal like Mackenzie King. “Such men have no sexual attraction, in the adult sense of the word, to their mothers or to any other woman; if they consort with women at all, it is with women who are much older or much younger than themselves, and these are treated either as protecting mothers or as inconsequential childish amusements.”

This image echoed strongly with MacGregor Dawson, as it would to anyone who knew of King’s intimate relations. Not only did King never marry, but his closest relationships in his adult life were with two older married women. In his various attempts to find a wife, King rarely revealed any kind of sexual attraction to them. In fact, in his relations with Mathilde Grossert that Dawson wrote about in Volume One, King clearly became disturbed when she showed physical affection toward him.

In other words, King’s life matched up all too well with the mother-fixated neurotic. In an earlier age, even his critics could regard his devotion to his mother as something that was at least honourable. But by the time of Dawson’s biography in the late 1950s, the spread of psychoanalytic ideas was transforming how people understood intimate relations, especially between sons and mothers.

Yet Dawson held back. Even though the psychiatrists clearly informed his own thinking on King, his would not be a psychobiography.

Certainly, when one now reads Menninger’s ideas about the mother-fixated man, the way they so closely match King’s own life is eerily familiar. But in the late 1950s, for a serious scholar like Robert MacGregor Dawson who was writing an official biography, it was still safer not to probe too deeply. He himself, and the reviewers of his book, found the private Mackenzie King fascinating. But they weren’t yet ready to dive fully into all of his oddities.

Volume One gave readers an intimate portrait of King’s youth, yet it was still very much in the tradition of other biographies of statesmen. Readers might have been fascinated by the private King, but the book would soon move on to the real business: King’s political career. A misprint on the dust jacket, though, raised anew the whole question of what kinds of secrets King might have and which ones the literary executors were going to allow the public to see.

The University of Toronto Press screwed up. Someone at the press no doubt thought it would make the book seem all the more exciting if the public learned that the only way they would ever see Mackenzie King’s diary was in the form of excerpts in this biography. The dust jacket alerted readers that King’s “diary has never been opened to the public, and, indeed, Mr. King directed that it be destroyed on completion of the biography.” In other words, if you wanted the real inside story of Mackenzie King, this book was the only place to get it.

The dust jacket wasn’t entirely wrong — King’s will did dictate that the diary was to be destroyed, and although there was some wiggle room in this declaration, the literary executors hadn’t decided yet exactly what to do. But they also didn’t want untoward publicity.

The note about the diary’s destruction blew up a flutter of articles in publications across the country about the rights of public men to guard their private secrets. There was no settled opinion, but the issue clearly spoke to growing concerns of the age. The values of openness and authenticity, of the need for transparency, and the question of whether one could trust those in authority not to hide their dirty secrets: these had become issues in themselves.

Maclean’s took the old common-sense approach. If King had ordered that his diary be destroyed, then, “the answer is painful, maddening, contrary to the public interest — and, alas! beyond dispute. Mr. King’s wishes must be obeyed.” Even Maclean’s, though, questioned the right of politicians to destroy their public documents — those documents they created in the midst of conducting their public affairs.

“What right has a politician, a statesman or a military leader,” the magazine asked, “to keep his official and semi-official documents under lock and key while he’s in office, pack them up when he leaves office, burn such of them as he’d like to have forgotten, and then turn the rest over to a chosen biographer or use them as the material for a book or books of his own?” Maclean’s had a very simple answer: none.

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Some took this logic and applied it to the diary itself. Diaries could be private, true. But the Ottawa Journal made the point that King’s privacy could be respected only so long as he didn’t make the diary public himself. By allowing his private diary to be used for the official biography, King (or his literary executors) had made it a public document. Once certain parts of the diary were used in the official biography, the public could only ask the reasonable question: What else had been left out?

The literary executors were no doubt professional men but, “no matter what their intellectual integrity or their impartiality or objectivity was,” wouldn’t it be reasonable to place them “under suspicion of selecting or interpreting what Mr. King wrote to create a favourable public image of him?” King’s diary now simply had to be preserved and eventually made open to serious researchers. If not, it would only create cynicism. This kind of history would prove Napoleon right — that history was “a lie agreed to.” …

It certainly gave the literary executors something to consider. Francess Halpenny of the University of Toronto Press wrote to apologize for her part in generating the controversy. Still, the literary executor W. Kaye Lamb reassured her that at least it “has perhaps served a useful purpose, as it has prompted quite a lively discussion on the question as to whether or not prime ministers have any right to have their diaries considered private, and to have them destroyed!”

By the end of the 1950s, with the publication of the official biography and with the need to decide the ultimate fate of King’s papers, those with the control over King’s secrets found themselves facing the arguments of those who wanted to tear down older boundaries between public and private. The literary executors had their own opinions, differing from each other on matters of principle and pragmatic interest. But the rising tide of curiosity about what had been private could not be denied. What wasn’t yet clear was whether the literary executors could hold out against it — or whether they would even want to.