In early February of 1963, John Diefenbaker’s minority Conservative government was brought down in the House of Commons, precipitating a winter election. The Cabinet was in open revolt, and the prime minister came very close to being run out of office by his own party. Only four newspapers in the entire country supported Diefenbaker. A Tory humiliation in the vote of 8 April seemed a certainty.

The election’s great debate swirled around the acquisition from the United States of nuclear arms for the Canadian military. Diefenbaker insisted that he would not allow the country to become a storage dump for a superpower’s missiles. His government would “make our policy in Canada – not generated by special pressure … across the border.” “Vote Canadian,” the election banners screamed, “Vote Conservative.”

The problem for Diefenbaker was that he had already secured weapons from Washington, and was now reneging on his promise to arm them with nuclear warheads. His defence minister had resigned and the government collapsed over precisely that issue. In the midst of the pre-election turmoil, Liberal leader L. B. Pearson reversed position and promised that he would embrace the nukes. Polls showed that a majority of the public agreed with Pearson’s new stance.

The Liberals had momentum and money. They began the campaign with 44 percent of voter support, a clear lead of eleven points over their closest rivals. Facing a government in disarray led by a chaotic prime minister, they confidently spoke of winning 175 of the 265 seats in Parliament.

Diefenbaker, however, was a magical old fox on the stump. It was the Liberals who soon appeared lost and disorganized. They had plenty of ideas, but Dief was so good at theatrics that the Liberals resorted to their own. Pearson sent one of his lieutenants, Judy LaMarsh, to shadow the Conservative chief and expose his falsehoods and contradictions. The prime minister’s response was to make her part of his platform routine. “In Moncton,” LaMarsh recalled in her memoirs, “he was merciless. I never made any record of his witticisms at my expense (I hope no one ever did) but I still bear the scars.” The LaMarsh Truth Squad symbolized Liberal incompetence. The experiment dissolved in a puddle of national derision.

With three weeks left before election day, the Liberals planned a big Sunday rally in Drummondville, Quebec. Hardly anyone came, and the few that did looked anything but happy about it. The television cameras were gone before the leader began to speak.

Perhaps that was best. As a Toronto newspaper reported, Pearson was the most affable of men, but when he “starts making campaign speeches … the frosty remoteness of an ordained egghead descends upon him.” He never learned to tone down his sophistication or hide his embarrassment at the games politicians had to play. Pearson was, as biographer John English makes clear, an anti-politician, suspicious of grand visions and the marketing of politics.

The Drummondville debacle panicked Keith Davey, the Liberals’ chief organizer. He had been expecting his party’s energy to build, on the theory that political campaigns were meant to develop naturally to a peak. But it just wasn’t happening this time. Polling numbers had been falling precipitously. The Liberals might lose an election they had been sure to win – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in the words of Britain’s Economist magazine.

Davey urged Pearson to change the mood with the promise that a new government would begin with a sharp burst of bold action. “Sixty days of decision” became the centrepiece of the final phase of the Liberal campaign, adding a pledge of full employment to a platform already studded with commitments, including the promise of a distinctively Canadian flag and a commission aimed at an equal partnership of French and English in national life.

Diefenbaker was short on substance and long on emotionalism, but he had the common touch that Pearson lacked. The prime minister ran a lonely campaign, driven by his extraordinary oratorical ability and visceral connection to the people of the prairie West, his home base.

Conjuring up Harry Truman’s 1948 fight for the American presidency against apparently impossible odds, Diefenbaker rolled ceaselessly across the country by train, pleading to crowds of voters that everyone was against him but the people. In Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, he proclaimed, “I’m not asking for the support of the powerful, the strong and the mighty, but of the average Canadian – the group to which I belong.”

No heroes were left standing after the distasteful election of 1963: not Pearson, not Diefenbaker, not the Americans.

Canada’s only recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, Pearson had repudiated his longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons for political profit. The electoral advantages of the move “certainly did not deter me,” Pearson later said with a disarming smile and considerable understatement.

Pearson’s last minute conversion to nuclear weapons deprived the Liberals of two star candidates in Quebec. Union leader Jean Marchand backed away from the Liberals, while academic Pierre Trudeau excoriated the hypocrisy of “the defrocked priest of peace.” Two years later, they changed their minds, running as Pearson Liberals and in the process changing Canadian politics forever.

Diefenbaker’s people’s crusade was a mask for a relentlessly negative and blatantly anti-American appeal. “It’s me against the Americans,” he exulted as he deftly brought together the two targets of his populist appeal. The United States was a bully, aided and enabled by its bosom friend in Ottawa, the Liberal establishment.

Anti-Americanism is a constant temptation for Canadian politicians. Diefenbaker’s Conservative forebears had successfully demonized the United States, but he went further than anyone before or since, pouring kerosene on the fire of the Canadian-American relationship with irresponsible allegations and sly leaks to the media. The tactic worked, but imperfectly, since many Canadians continued to believe that the country must accept its Cold War commitments to nuclear weapons.

Hostile to the prime minister from the beginning, the John F. Kennedy administration in Washington interfered shamefully in a close ally’s politics, greasing Diefenbaker’s skid from power with public statements about his untrustworthiness and offering their assistance to the Liberals during the campaign. Pearson refused the help, though Newsweek magazine, friendly to Kennedy, published a vicious personal attack on the prime minister. In a dispatch back home, the United States ambassador to Canada denounced Diefenbaker as an “undependable, unscrupulous political animal at bay.” The Americans, he boasted, had boxed Dief in.

Pearson’s promise of a stable and active government won him the election of 1963. Yet Diefenbaker’s mastery of rural Canada denied the Liberals enough seats for a majority in the House of Commons. The Liberal party had 129 seats and the Conservatives 95, with Social Credit and the NDP holding the balance of power. Pearson would face a wounded Conservative leader, and the possibility of defeat, day after grinding parliamentary day.

Elections, even the sordid ones, matter. Over the next five years the Liberals frequently resembled their awkward and incoherent predecessor, and never more than in the disastrous first “sixty days of decision.” Pearson’s government, however, grew into the most productive and progressive in Canadian history