Who Killed Herbert Norman?

Greg Donaghy
Head, Historical Section
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada*

The mysteries of suicide are almost always impenetrable to outside observers. This is perhaps especially so in Herbert Norman’s case. His five hastily-written suicide notes, in which he both asserts his innocence and refers to his “consciousness of sin” are cryptic and mysterious. Fifty years after his death, our sources remain incomplete and fragmented. Moreover, from the start, explanations for Norman's death have tended to transform it into a symbolic weapon to be deployed in heated Cold War debates over the appropriate balance to be struck between civil liberty and national security.

For the members of the U.S. Senate sub-committee on internal security, and their leading academic ally, political scientist James Barros, there was no mystery about Norman’s suicide. Weaving half-truths and unsubstantiated claims into a tissue of innuendo, they depict Norman as a long-time communist, whose supporters in Canada’s foreign ministry repeatedly helped him evade detection. When Norman’s name came up before the Senate sub-committee in March 1957, they argue, the Canadian diplomat killed himself to avoid exposure and to avoid incriminating other “communists.” Typical of their kind, Norman’s accusers ultimately rely on an unnamed “highly reliable source” for their uncorroborated claim that Norman feared he would implicate “60 to 70” colleagues in a new investigation and that consequently “he was going to destroy himself.”

For many Canadians (and even some Americans) – then and now – the explanation for Norman’s death was just as apparent: the suicide was a clear-cut case, in the words of CCF Member of Parliament Alistair Stewart, of “murder by slander.” Hounded by U.S. anti-Communist witch-hunters since 1946, Norman realised in April 1957 that he would never be able fully to clear his name, even with the support of his boss, Foreign Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson. Simply put, Norman was another “victim of the American behemoth run amok.” In this view, Norman’s death becomes a ready symbol of the Cold War excesses of Washington’s national security apparatus and the dangers to Canada of too close an association with the United States.

While making the Senate sub-committee the agent of Norman’s death is satisfying on one level, it enshrines Norman as victim and diminishes his value as an anti-American symbol. Thus, Norman’s leading defenders, just like his accusers, see his suicide as a fully rational response to the crisis brought on by the threat of a renewed Senate investigation. Norman is effectively the heroic agent of his own death. Journalist Charles Taylor, for instance, argues that by insisting on the validity of his childhood Christianity in one of his suicide notes, Norman was repudiating the Enlightenment values that inspired modernist America. Historian Roger Bowen, however, is doubtful. He insists that Norman kept his humanist faith. Fearing a new witch-hunt and worried that he might drag his friends down with him, Norman killed himself in “an act of self-sacrifice on the altar of duty.”

For a small number of contemporary observers, among them people who knew him well, Norman’s suicide was rooted in more personal and prosaic causes. In the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, Foreign Minister Pearson speculated that “overwork, overstrain, and the feeling of renewed persecution on a very sensitive mind and a not very robust body produced a nervous collapse.” With the passing of the Cold War and waning pressure to imbue Norman’s death with symbolic significance, perhaps it may be time to accord Pearson’s multi-faceted explanation, however much it may diminish Norman’s heroic stature, a little more attention.

Certainly, the balance of evidence suggests that Norman was indeed a fairly high-strung and sensitive individual, who was thrust into a pressure-filled diplomatic post for which he was not fully prepared. His unique personality, his mission, and the crisis created when his name reappeared before the Senate sub-committee in March 1957 proved a deadly combination. Let’s take the three elements of this interpretation one at a time.

As Norman’s life story has been increasingly uncovered since his death, it has become clear that we are dealing with an acutely sensitive man who experienced repeated bouts of social withdrawal and deep melancholy throughout his life. These periods of emotional upset accompanied his departure for boarding school at the young age of 11 years, his stay at a TB sanatorium while still a teenager, and his final days in Tokyo during the mid-1940s. Not surprisingly, his encounter with U.S. and Canadian security authorities in 1950-51 left him feeling more anxious than ever. In 1953, the Department of External Affairs sent him to New Zealand, a small and distant Canadian mission, for what one official later described as “a rest and cure.”

Norman’s posting to Egypt in the early summer of 1956 was a continuation of this “cure.” Certainly, his diplomatic career – in Japan and New Zealand, where Canada had virtually no direct interests – had not prepared him to play a role in a major international crisis. Nor was a role of that sort anticipated by Canada’s foreign ministry when it posted Norman to Cairo. Nevertheless, the Suez Crisis and Canada's participation in the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) thrust Canada and Norman into the very heart of Middle Eastern and world affairs. The new ambassador had hardly unpacked his bags before he was involved in endless rounds of negotiations over the role of the UNEF, the status of Gaza and Sinai, and the fate of the Suez Canal. Any of these issues were likely to create, as one telegram from Ottawa warned, “a major political storm.” And by the spring of 1957, the resulting strain was beginning to tell on Norman. He confided to his brother in March that he was finding his job “intense and exacting” and a “strain on one’s patience.” He echoed this complaint to a Canadian colleague, Ross Campbell: “Life remains hectic – I think Nasser enjoys a good crisis – I’m getting a bit weary of more than one a week.”

Though already under strain, Norman remained on his diplomatic game during the early spring of 1957. Indeed, on 12 March, he met with President Nasser and persuaded him to permit Canadian reinforcements for the UNEF to land in Egypt. When the Senate sub-committee leaked his name to the press on 14 March, Norman became “preoccupied” but “continued to carry out his duties normally.” The continued hearings in Washington, and the announcement that his Harvard friend, Japanese economist Shigeto Tsuru, had volunteered to testify pushed him close to the edge. Arthur Kilgour, his deputy in Cairo, later recorded that Norman now seemed clearly “disturbed” and that “he appeared unwilling to take any detailed interest in drafts or questions we wished to discuss.” At a diplomatic reception, Kilgour added, Norman “appeared to several people to be quite upset.”

According to Kilgour’s testimony, Norman continued to slide into a deep depression in late March. Withdrawing to his office and resting on the sofa, Norman “scarcely took part in the conversation and in fact did not appear to be mentally with us.” Haunted by the memory of his interrogation in 1951, which he called the “the most gruelling experience in my life,” Norman worried about the possibility of a renewed investigation and his capacity to cope with it. On 2 April, on the eve of his suicide, Norman told a UN information official, King Gordon, that “I have never been more depressed in all my life as I have been during these last few weeks.” Two days later, Canada’s ambassador to Egypt plunged to his death from a Cairo rooftop.

We will never know precisely what drove Norman to take his life. But treating his suicide as a rational response to the Senate sub-committee’s renewed charges of disloyalty – as either an agent seeking to avoid exposure or an innocent heroically defying the McCarthyite machine – reduces Norman to a Cold War symbol and strips him of his individuality. As both an individual and a diplomat, the historical record suggests that Norman was ill-prepared and perhaps unsuited for the pressures that confronted him in Egypt in the spring of 1957. The unjustified and terrifying accusations of the Senate sub-committee swept him over the abyss. “He was a very sensitive man,” Kilgour told the press at the time, “who took this sort of thing harder than perhaps most men would.”

*The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent the opinions of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade or the Government of Canada.

Source: Greg Donaghy, "Who Killed Herbert Norman?," October 12, 2007

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