We tried to make him more effective on television....I remember we went out to the CBC studios and we said to Mr. Pearson, "Here it is. Why don’t you just run through it, and we won’t film it. We’ll film it after you go through it once. We won’t take any pictures. Relax and just go through it for timing and so on." He did, and we did film it. And we said, "okay, now go ahead and do it. You’re on camera." We turned on the camera, and of course he was just dreadful. But he was pretty good on the one that he didn’t know was going to be [filmed], and so we used that one.
     Television was beginning to become extremely important. Mr. Pearson had a number of mannerisms which were very difficult. For example, we knew from the polls that people thought he was a smart-aleck. Now, Mr. Pearson was probably the least smart-aleck I’ve ever known in my life. He just wasn’t. That wasn’t his style to be a smart-aleck. And I think one of the reasons was he had a mannerism -- he would be on television and he would say, "The unemployment statistics are really bad this month," and then he would smile. Which was a mannerism, you see, but that was bad.
     We used to say in those days that if Mr. Pearson could meet every person in Canada informally, he’d score a landslide, which was true. But unhappily, that wasn’t possible.

Keith Davey, quoted in Peter Stursberg, Lester Pearson and the Dream of Unity (Doubleday Canada: 1978), p. 71.