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Newfoundland Premier Kathy Dunderdale resigned this week, providing a rare example of an easy, quiet exit from high office and power. It brought to mind a quite opposite moment: the ferocious extended farewell of Newfoundland’s first Premier, Joey Smallwood.

The ancient world had its battle on the “windy plains” of Troy as its originary tale. Modern Newfoundland has the 1969 battle for the Liberal party leadership, the bitter feud between the elderly Joseph R. Smallwood and challenger John Carnell Crosbie.

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From that contest for the Liberal party leadership (and for, to some degree, the very soul of Newfoundland politics), the current of modern Newfoundland politics emerged.

Smallwood, who’d brought the Dominion of Newfoundland into Confederation in 1949 and then run the province for the next two decades (in increasingly autocratic fashion), had set the race in motion when he announced his retirement in 1969. But he made a swift reversal when Crosbie, who previously had resigned from the Liberal caucus, announced he was going to try for the leadership. For Smallwood, this was an insult and a peril, a jeopardy not to be contemplated. He, Smallwood, must “save” the Liberal party from falling into the “wrong hands.” Those hands, the hands of error, the hands of snobbery, the hands of privilege and disloyalty, were those of the upstart “prince” John Crosbie.