His mother told the journalist Patrick Nicholson that "when John was only six years old...he once looked up from reading about Laurier, and confided to her in all seriousness that he proposed to become prime minister of Canada too. Just as seriously she replied: 'If you work hard enough, there's no reason why you shouldn't.'" At the end of his life Diefenbaker believed that he had been one of those who "pursue their ambition with a single-minded devotion and attain it," and that he had guided his life "to make certain that our decisions and actions are not inconsistent with our highest ambitions." Yet in his view the career was not simply a product of his own acts, an expression of his own character; there was a larger destiny at work, the "circumstance" within which character could play our its role.
Denis Smith, Rogue Tory The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker (Macfarlane Walter & Ross:1995), p. 14.
