SAUL FORBES RAE, Diplomat, Official. Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Canada, New York. Massey Fellowship, Moss Scholarship, University of London.
Background
Rae"s father was born Goodman Cohen in Palanga, Lithuania. The Cohen family had moved to Scotland fleeing the pogroms of the 1890s, and there Goodman met Helen Rae, the daughter of a metal plater in the Glasgow shipyards. Saul was born in Hamilton, Ontario on December 31.
Education
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.
Career
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". 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.
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 District of Columbia 1956-1961), and was Canada"s Ambassador to the United Nations in both Geneva and New York (1972-1976), Mexico (1967-1972) and the Netherlands (1976-1979).
He retired in 1980 after suffering a series of small strokes. Saul and Lois Rae had four children:
Bob Rae (b 1948), was leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party, Premier of Ontario and later leader of the Liberal Party of Canada
John A. Rae (born 1945) was a senior advisor to Jean Chrétien and is an executive with Power Corporation
David Rae (1957-1999) served as Canadian president of General Electric Capital and died in 1989 of lymphoma
Saul"s brother, the late Jackie Rae was an entertainer and former host of the The Jackie Rae Show on Canadian Broadcasting Company.
Personality
He was a pioneering public opinion researcher co-authoring with George Gallup the 1940 book The Pulse of Democracy: Public Opinion and How lieutenant Works.