by John English
On a trip by canoe, he wrote, there is a new morality, one where God can be gently chided, where one’s best friend is not a rifle but the person who shares a night’s sleep after ten hours of paddling. How does it affect the personality? The mind works in the way that nature intended, and the body, “by demonstrating the true meaning of sensual pleasure,” serves the mind. “You feel the beauty of animal pleasure when you draw a deep breath of rich morning air right through your body, which has been carried by the cold night, curled up like an unborn child.” Sometimes exhaustion triumphs over reason, and the mumbled verses of the first hours “become brutal grunts of ‘uh! uh! uh!’” The humility one gains becomes a future treasure when one confronts the great moral and philosophical questions. He concluded, significantly: “I know a man who had never learned ‘nationalism’ in school, but who contracted this virtue when he felt the immensity of his country (’patrie’) and saw how great the country’s creators had been.”
That man was Pierre Trudeau, and in 1944 that country, or “patrie,” was Quebec, or “Laurentie.”* His loyalty to its “founders” remained strong when he left Quebec in 1944 at the age of twenty-four. That October, before he embarked by train for Harvard and Boston, Thérèse visited him at home. She discovered that his strong sense of the past resonated deeply. He asked her to come to his bedroom, where he guided her towards a portrait of his father. Then, before his image, they prayed.30
Harvard University was an entirely different environment for Trudeau when he arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that fall. A citadel of the English Puritan tradition, it had become a refuge for some of the finest Central European minds as they escaped fascist persecution. The university was filled with the wounded, the weak, and the foreign—but there were few women, except at the distant Radcliffe College. Yet it remained profoundly American, the self-confident expression of the swelling American sense of superiority in the late war years. Liberal democracy, after its failures in the 1930s, was winning a second chance on the battlefields of Western Europe and the islands of the South Pacific.
Trudeau, whose teachers in the late thirties had been frequent critics of bourgeois democracy, was now exposed to new arguments that profoundly challenged him. Although he had a law degree and a year of legal practice, he felt adrift. “The majors in political science at Harvard had read more about Roman law and Montesquieu than I had as a lawyer,” he explained later. “I realized then that we were being taught law as a trade in Quebec and not as a discipline.”31 If his legal training was deficient, his knowledge of economics was pathetic. He knew nothing of John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories were transforming not only the discipline of economics but also the role of the state in postwar economic life. Quebec academics and leading journalists knew that the province desperately needed a better knowledge of the revolution in economics that was occurring. In his memoirs, Trudeau says that his decision to study economics at Harvard followed a conversation with André Laurendeau, who told him that there were only two economists in Quebec and that the province lacked economic expertise. Trudeau had already met both of them, the academics Édouard Montpetit and Esdras Minville, and they, too, had strongly encouraged him in this direction, particularly when he told them that he wanted to enter public life.32
The great intellectual migration of the 1930s and 1940s from a disintegrating Europe recreated Harvard from a Protestant American cradle of the economic and political elite into a major intellectual centre through which flowed the stormy yet stimulating currents of twentieth-century thought. Very soon, and for the first time, Trudeau encountered Jewish intellectuals. Other professors, including Heinrich Brüning, the last German chancellor before Hitler, possessed thick European accents and deep wounds. Far more than the outer limits of the Canadian Shield, this new environment tested Trudeau. Domesticity and Montreal tempted him often. Suzette was marrying; his young brother, Tip, was soon to follow.33 Fortunately, Thérèse, as she gradually captured his heart, helped him to endure Harvard.
Trudeau’s Harvard experience was, in retrospect, intellectually rich; in his own words, Harvard was “an extraordinary window on the world” in which “he felt like being in symbiosis with the five continents.”34 He began his study of economics with the future Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, who recalled bullets whizzing by his head in St. Petersburg in 1917 as the Russian Revolution began, who had studied in Weimar Germany, and who, in his twenties, had worked as an adviser to China’s national railways before taking refuge in the United States in 1932. Within a decade he developed the first input-output tables for the American economy and made early use of a computer for economic research. He was a generation ahead of what passed for the discipline of economics in Canada in the early forties. In his class, Trudeau read Keynes, Kenneth Boulding, John Hicks, and Joan Robinson, although he remained respectful of Catholic practice when he asked the Boston archbishop if he could read books proscribed on the Index for his academic courses.35 He learned quickly what was old (J.M. Clark and his long-winded descriptions) and what was new, notably Keynes’s theory of general equilibrium.
But if some were charmed by Keynes, Trudeau’s course in economic theory taught by the Austrian Gottfried Haberler clearly set out the case for the other side. Haberler, later a leading scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, introduced him to more traditional views of what the state could and should do. The professor who left the most indelible impression was the Austrian Joseph Schumpeter, who fitted no categories but dominated a brilliant group of scholars at Harvard at the time. The gifted writer’s 1942 classic, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, argued that democracy’s success, particularly its creation of an intellectual class, assured its doom, as the entrepreneurial spirit so essential for capitalistic renewal drowned in the doubting footnotes of intellectual debate in an advanced capitalist society.
Trudeau did well in his economics courses. His notebooks reveal that he was a serious student of economics: he soon mastered both the new approaches that were transforming the profession and the increasingly high mathematical requirements of the field. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who met frequently with Trudeau later, described him as a “first-rate economics mind of postwar vintage,” a judgment his Harvard marks confirmed.36 And here lies an enigma: Trudeau rarely reflected his economics training in his writings and, once he became prime minister, not only his enemies on Bay Street but also many of his colleagues and friends complained that he paid no attention to economics. Yet his training and even the lectures he gave to trade unionists in the fifties show clearly that he had a solid graduate education in economics. What he said was not original, but he was thoroughly aware of what the best students must know. Indeed, among Canadian politicians of his time, he ranked at the peak in terms of formal academic training in economics. Why, then, did he seem to put it to the side?
There are probably several reasons. First, Trudeau’s Harvard training reflected a diversity of approach to economics that made the discipline much less confident than it had been earlier and than it was to become later. Keynes had created a tempest at Harvard, but traditionalists and the Austrian School, notably Schumpeter and Haberler, had battened down and resisted. From these two men he learned, in his own words, that Keynes had “expressed himself too vaguely, and can’t be fitted to everyone’s particular needs.” Haberler, a strong personality (“Thus spake Haberler, May 3, 1946,” Trudeau wrote on his notes), introduced Trudeau to Friedrich Hayek’s conservative opposition to political Keynesianism.
Trudeau’s comments on the texts he read reveal his intellectual excitement but also a growing understanding that economics was a debate, not a science, one that is grounded in political positions, economic circumstances, and the psychology of the crowd. “From Sept ’29 to Aug ’33 great losses were incurred,” he wrote in his notes about Schumpeter’s course. “Capitalists themselves lost faith in the system to a contemptible extent, and the Roosevelt administration had to cope with this psy
chological attitude.” No fan of Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith later reflected on the views he shared with Trudeau, notably “a consistent view of the inadequacy of those qualified simply by their possession of money or motivated only by the hope of pecuniary reward.” Economics was, for Trudeau, not a mystical wand that the wealthy could wave before the politician. Economic judgments were not the product of a science but more often the result of special interests. It was a Harvard lesson he did not forget. It moved Trudeau, who was himself a wealthy man, to the political left.37
The second reason Trudeau moved away from economics may seem paradoxical: by studying political economy, he finally came to understand the significance of law. After his initial encounter with the finest minds in economics, he moved on to political science, which, initially for him, lacked the intellectual excitement of economics. His course on comparative government offered by the distinguished British academic Samuel Finer was, in Trudeau’s view, too opinionated. More interesting was Merle Fainsod’s course on the Soviet Union, where he quickly concluded that the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb were hopelessly naïve. Trudeau reached an important conclusion about political science and, perhaps, academic life: “The more you read of [the Webbs’] seemingly thorough and detailed analysis, the more you realize that respectable political scientists can also indulge in pseudo-science.”38
Trudeau also read several important contemporary works on European fascism, and was profoundly troubled. He read Franz Neumann’s Behemoth sometime in 1945 and realized what horrors Hitler had wrought. “Powerful work,” Trudeau wrote in his diary, “by an honest scientist, exceedingly well documented; though written by a violent anti-Nazi, there is remarkably little prejudice. The book in consequence is all the more convincing. Shows all the power of Nazism, its awe-inspiring accomplishments; and yet analyses so thoroughly its cynicism, its militarism, its fundamental, irrefutable irrationality.” From Neumann’s work, Trudeau took an important lesson: liberal democracies must prove that “efficiency” is compatible with liberty and that “democracy is not synonymous with capitalistic exploitation.”39 This important conclusion was the germ of his later beliefs that politics in a democracy must be “functional” and that romantic and unrealistic notions such as nationalism could be deeply damaging. Law is important not in the landlord-tenant disputes he had worked on in Montreal but in establishing the covenant between a ruler and a people. Positivist social science itself was insufficient because statistics cannot establish values. After reading Auguste Comte, he concluded: “The spiritual should have a decisive voice in education, but it should be only consultative in action.”40 This assessment marked a profound break with some of his earlier assumptions, and it remained a belief that was to animate his future public life.
Harvard and its professors made Trudeau rethink what he had learned and done. His past suddenly seemed parochial; all the excitement of Jean Drapeau’s by-election, the plebiscite, and the debates in Quartier Latin seemed very different viewed through the prism of the violent history of the twentieth century. He realized, just as the Third Reich fell in the spring 1945, that he had been wrong.
Will this be my great regret? In all my life, never to have raised my eyes from work of questionable value, tied to a hypothetical future, when the greatest cataclysm of all time was occurring ten hours from my desk. Or, does listening to one’s conscience bring its own compensations for the losses it inflicts? And incidentally, what is true conscience, that which comes from reason or that which one feels intuitively?
Pierre had written these words to Thérèse Gouin in Montreal, and she asked for clarification: What cataclysm do you mean? He curtly answered on May 25, 1945, just as the Third Reich fell: “PS–The cataclysm? It was the war, the war, the WAR!”41
This exchange had a long life. George Radwanski was troubled when Trudeau spoke to him in the seventies about the war. He said, simply, that he had been “taught to keep away from imperialistic wars”—an explanation Radwanski found not “entirely convincing.”42 More tellingly, in his own memoirs, Trudeau seems to have an almost exact memory of the exchange with Thérèse. “It was only at Harvard, in the autumn of 1944,” he wrote, “that I came to appreciate fully the historic importance of the war that was ending.” Of course, it was not in 1944 that he wrote his letter to Thérèse but in May 1945, which was the actual date for the end of the war in Europe. He continued: “In that super-informed environment, it was impossible for me not to grasp the true dimensions of the war, despite my continued indifference towards the news media.” Again, in almost exact parallel to his comment in May 1945, he wrote: “I realized then that I had, as it were, missed one of the major events of the century in which I was living.”
Thérèse Gouin later recalled accurately that Trudeau had expressed doubts to her about the way the war had passed him by, but he never raised the issue again in his more than two hundred letters to her. Moreover, in his memoirs he refused to express any regrets for “missing” the “historic importance” of the war. “I have always regarded regret as a useless emotion,” he said. At Harvard, he had “no time to indulge such moods.”43 The exchange reveals much about Trudeau: his exceptional memory, which retained exact details of his earlier thoughts and actions; his quick reactions to great events and his tendency to cast them in terms of his own personal narrative; and his willingness to change his views without pausing to admit he had been wrong. He had little patience with those who remained mired in the past, and, despite his great memory for detail, he could also close his mind to events and experiences that he deemed “chaff,” a waste of time.44
In one powerful way, Trudeau’s memory is correct: he did change at Harvard. From the debris he found around him in 1945, Trudeau, like the West itself, began a process of reconstruction. He realized that the law was not what he had learned in the “horrible” civil procedure class at the Université de Montréal or in the landlord-tenant tiffs he had handled in his practice. Rather, it was a conceptual framework through which he could understand change and help to shape it. His notes, particularly in his classes on political thought with constitutional scholar Carl Friedrich* and legal historian Charles McIlwain, reveal a curious and exceptional intelligence actively engaged in organizing his experience and his previous learning into categories of modern legal and political thought.45
The courses in general celebrated liberal democracy and were very different from what Trudeau had heard at Brébeuf. He recognized the contrast in intellectual climate and was sometimes uncomfortable. He “did not see the traces of fanaticism and ultra-democratic sentiment” in Samuel Finer’s textbook, he said, that were sometimes present in his course.46 Similarly, he had reservations about Friedrich’s support of the Nuremberg trials, saying that “the present trials only give more legal appearance to things that could be done without them.” Friedrich argued that the trials were important, even if “they deny positive law,” because when a new “community” is created “it often overrules legal concepts.” Trudeau was not convinced: “But if the emerging community imposed duties on the Germans, it did too on the Allies. Shouldn’t they be punished for having created a state of affairs conducive to war? Etc.”* He himself was sceptical of the positivist and secular tone he found in many of his professors.
Trudeau did not become an American liberal democrat, but neither was he any longer the corporatist Catholic of Brébeuf days. Harvard, along with the success of the democracies in wartime, greatly altered his political thinking. Moreover, it focused his mind on the importance of the rule of law and its embodiment in constitutions—documents that could be used to protect minority rights. He remained deeply sceptical of the celebrations of British tradition at Harvard. He also retained a Quebec nationalist’s resentment of the British impact on his people.
One professor, William Yandell Elliott, an anglophile, deeply offended him, and he responded by challenging him, at one time murmuring “son of a bitch” in class. When Elliott said that Robert Borden seeme
d an imperialist to French Canadians but a liberal to foreigners, and that R.B. Bennett put Canada first, Trudeau wrote: “But both would rush to defend Britain! … maybe their Canada First was Canadian pockets first.” He put an exclamation mark in Elliott’s statement that “G.B. prestige [came] as center of spiritual values[!] of freedom and toleration.” The course profoundly annoyed him, as did the required readings. On one work he wrote: “There are any number of tedious repetitions and re-repetitions. But this seems to be the English way … Rather poor style; and many boring precautions, introductions, forewarnings etc. that the author thinks marks of a conscientious thinker.”47 Alas, Trudeau had the ill fortune to have two courses with Elliott and to write his major paper for him. One of these courses had considerable Canadian content, including F.R. Scott, J.B Brebner, and Stephen Leacock. Scott had impressed Trudeau very much when he spoke at the Université de Montréal in 1943 in opposition to conscription and the infringement of civil liberties in Quebec, but he was only a brief respite from Trudeau’s general irritation with the course. Elliott assigned his own book on the British Empire as a text, even though it had been published in 1932. Trudeau was rightly contemptuous: “The Chapters were originally delivered as lectures, it seems. Which would account for the loose structure and loose style throughout. For all the rest would be forgiven, even a certain supercilious humor, if facts were not 14 years old.”48
Trudeau submitted his major essay, “A Theory of Political Violence,” to Elliott on January 20, 1946. He had consulted with him about sources several times, as well as with a new friend, Louis Hartz, who was to become a major theorist of American liberalism. Hartz, who was Jewish, had suggested that Trudeau study Mussolini, and Elliott had recommended, sensibly, that Trudeau look at Harold Laski, Tolstoy, and Gandhi. The essay, it seems, was written deliberately to offend Elliott. Trudeau, for example, said that the 1837 Rebellions should not be called by that term because “the ‘Canadiens’ were too realistic to believe their shooting would have much more effect than scaring the rulers into being a little less iniquitous.” He wrote also of “our North-west Rebellion” as an uprising that aimed only “at getting a little more justice out of the Federal Government.” One sees traces here of the debates in 1942 and Trudeau’s flirtation with violent protest and demonstrations. He returned to Brébeuf form when he denounced the “liberal bourgeoisie” as “lovers of vicarious experience.” Then came a remarkable paragraph:
