Lyndon B. Johnson

Canadian history—from JFK and Diefenbaker, to the last ‘Trudeau Doctrine’—is littered with foreign-policy differences with the U.S.

I am 532 pages into Robert A. Caro’s The Passage Of Power, the fourth installment of what was originally meant to be a three-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Caro is now doing five volumes in all…or at least that’s what he is saying at the moment. A sixth book would not be out of bounds, on the precedent of Dumas Malone’s series on Thomas Jefferson, but five will probably do the trick. Johnson did not have the fascinating, full post-presidential life Jefferson did; he seems to have practically sprinted toward death after he was driven out of the White House.

There’s nothing less helpful in a political debate than a fatuous historical analogy. Whenever somebody levels a charge of “appeasement,” for instance, it’s a safe bet whatever negotiating stance they’re attacking bares not the slightest resemblance to what happened at Munich.

Presidential stopovers in Ottawa have included fishing trips, protests and back-breaking labour