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We’ve seen a huge boost in traffic to our website this past week. Our most visited page, by a landslide, is The Constant Diplomat: Robert Ford in Moscow, Charles A. Ruud’s biography of a renowned Canadian figure named… Robert Ford.
It seems the internet really wants its hands on a biography of Rob Ford (Robyn Doolittle has beat us to it). But we thought maybe we should clarify a couple of things.
Let us present to you the other Rob Ford of Canada:
Robert A.D. Ford had a distinguished diplomatic career that included an unprecedented sixteen years as Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union during some of the most turbulent and important years of the Cold War (1964-80).
Here is an excerpt is from The Constant Diplomat:
Ford had chosen diplomacy as a career by way of history and poetry. Both mattered most to him from secondary school into university and through graduate school. He turned toward world affairs when his father and a professor at Cornell urged him in that direction and when the Department of External Affairs opened its doors to him as a speaker of the Russian language. By next mastering Russian history on his own, Ford was able, in his dispatches from Moscow, to identify trends from the Russian past that influenced the ussr. He took into account Marxist ideas that had distorted politics under the Bolsheviks by warping Russian life. Marxism had shaped the psychology and outlook of the Soviet leaders, compounding their inability to view themselves and the world realistically. Ford’s writing on the Soviet Union was widely read, both within and outside the diplomatic world. His explorations of the political implications of the psychology of the Soviet leadership seem to be the most distinctive feature of his commentary.
The Soviet leaders, despite their deficiencies, commanded immense power. Dealing with such formidable but fear-ridden men demanded great diplomatic skill. Ford relished serving in Moscow as ambassador because, as he put it, he got “hooked” by the language and culture of Russia, and though he despised the Soviet system of government, he never gave up on the people. He wanted to be in Moscow, and he spent sixteen years there as ambassador. No other diplomatic post held the same attraction for him. For all the others he had held or been offered, none satisfied him like Moscow, in the Canadian Embassy on Old Stables Lane, near the Arbat. He stayed there as long as he wished and felt himself capable. He savoured his capacity to explain Russian actions and to interpret them to others. He drew on his poetic standards of precision to vivify his prose about the Russians.
(…)
Robert Ford received many accolades and honours over a long career as a Canadian diplomat and poet. He welcomed public recognition, without question, but he was more a public servant than a seeker of the spotlight. He lived on more than one level, and he cultivated an inner life, which above all was expressed in his poetry. He felt a great loss in the death of his wife Thereza. In his last years, ill and entirely dependent on the care of others, he returned to poetry with a zest, saying it was the one thing left to him.
To learn more about The Constant Diplomat, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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