Saul Forbes Rae (December 31, 1914 – January 9, 1999[1]) was a Canadian diplomat during the Pearsonian era of Canadian foreign policy.
Life and career
Rae's father was born Goodman Cohen.[2] in Palanga, Lithuania. The Cohen family had moved to Scotland fleeing the pogroms of the 1890s, and there Goodman met Helen Rae,[3] the daughter of a metal plater[4] in the Glasgow shipyards. The romance and subsequent marriage caused considerable turmoil in both families. Cohen adopted his wife's surname, and the couple decided to move to Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1912. Saul was born in Hamilton, Ontario 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".[5] He converted to Anglicanism.[6]
He married Lois Esther George in 1939.[8] She was the daughter of Stanley George, a Hampstead general medical 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 (Washington DC 1956–1961), and was Canada's Ambassador to the UN in both Geneva and New York (1972-1976) - the latter a role to which his son Bob was appointed in July 2020. He served as Ambassador to Mexico (1967-1972), and to the Netherlands (1976-1979). He retired in 1980 after suffering a series of small strokes.
