Saul Rae

Saul Forbes Rae (December 31, 1914 – January 9, 1999) was a Canadian diplomat during the Pearsonian era of Canadian foreign policy.

Life and career

Rae's father was born Goodman Cohen ^[1] in Palanga, Lithuania. The Cohen family had moved to Scotland fleeing the pogroms of the 1890s, and there Goodman met Helen Rae,^[2] the daughter of a metal plater ^[3] in the Glasgow shipyards. The romance and subsequent marriage caused considerable turmoil in both families, and as a result they moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1912. Saul was born in Hamilton on December 31. He had two siblings, an older sister, Grace, who went to work as a dancer at the Radio City Music Hall, and a younger brother Jackie who had a long career in Canadian show business. The three worked in vaudeville in Canada in the 1920s under the name "the three little Raes of Sunshine". He converted to Anglicanism.^[4]

Saul Rae graduated from Jarvis Collegiate, University College at the University of Toronto, and went on to earn a doctorate from the London School of Economics as a Massey Fellow. He also studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and went on to lecture at Princeton University where he also worked at the American Institute of Public Opinion. He was a pioneering public opinion researcher co-authoring with George Gallup the 1940 book The Pulse of Democracy: Public Opinion and How It Works.

He married Lois Esther George in 1939.^[5] She was the daughter of Stanley George, a Hampstead general practitioner, and Mildred, whose family was from Watford, England. She had studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. The two met at a summer school organized by Sir Norman Angell in Geneva, Switzerland, and were married in Baltimore, Maryland at the outbreak of the second World War.

Saul Rae joined the Department of External Affairs in 1940, and would spend four decades with the civil service as a career diplomat. Rae was one of the first diplomats to serve in Paris after its liberation in 1944, having served as assistant to General Georges Vanier, Canada's representative to the Free French in Algiers.

In 1955, he worked on the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam as deputy to the Canadian Commissioner, Sherwood Lett. The role of the commission was to supervise the peace settlement at the end of the First Indochina War. He later served as Canadian Minister in the United States, and was Canada's Ambassador to the UN in both Geneva and New York, Mexico and the Netherlands. He retired in 1980 after suffering a series of small strokes.

Saul and Lois Rae had four children: Jennifer, born in 1943, John, born in 1945, Robert (Bob), born in 1948, and David, born in 1957. Jennifer worked at IMAX for many years, and was active in politics with her brothers John and Bob. Bob Rae, was leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, Premier of Ontario and later leader of the Liberal Party of Canada while another son John Rae was a senior advisor to Jean Chrétien and is an executive with Power Corporation. Another son, David Rae died in 1989 of lymphoma. He had served as Canadian president of GE Capital. Saul's brother, the late Jackie Rae was an entertainer and former host of the The Jackie Rae Show on CBC...

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