John Diefenbaker, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Canadian press

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a pivotal event in the Cold War, which also caused tensions in Canada's relationship with the United States. While other allies offered immediate and unqualified support for the United States naval blockade of Cuba, the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker delayed support for days as it struggled to assess the situation and construct a policy. Canadian historians who have studied the Cuba crisis have almost uniformly branded Diefenbaker a waffling, indecisive and even untrustworthy ally for his actions. The uniform condemnation of the Conservative government in the historiography masks the range of contemporary opinion in Canada on the issue. This report compares the historiography on Canada and the Cuban Missile Crisis to contemporary newspaper editorials from around the nation with the aim of demonstrating that Canadians were more divided on the issue than the historical literature suggests.