J.L. Granatstein. The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935-1957. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Granatstein’s The Ottawa Men is at once a history of the emergence of the modern professional civil service in Canada under the long rule of the King government (and most especially in the area of foreign policy), and of the emergence of the ideal of that service as a non-partisan, politically neutral, and circumspect source of advice and information for the government in power. They were, Granatstein argues, “an extraordinary group of civil servants who collectively had great power in Ottawa from the Depression through to the late 1950s.”

They were “public servants in the best sense of that term, men who changed the way government operated and whose overall influence and impact were positive in the extreme” (xi). Granatstein’s book should be read as a significant contribution to the debates about the role of patronage in the Canadian state and about the role of Canadian foreign policy in the early Cold War. Although a masterful work for its time, its ahistorical preoccupations with the ideal civil servant and its failure to move beyond the twin spheres of foreign policy and Liberal politics limit the book’s significance beyond those debates.