Just Watch Me

by John English

  ALSO BY JOHN ENGLISH

  The Decline of Politics

  Arthur Meighen

  Robert Borden: His Life and World

  Years of Growth

  Lester Pearson: Shadow of Heaven: 1897–1948

  Lester Pearson: The Worldly Years: 1949–1972

  Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau

  Volume One: 1919–1968

  To Bob English

  Who never voted for Trudeau but now wishes he had

  CONTENTS

  The New Regime: 1968–72

  1 Taking Power

  2 New Wine in New Bottles

  3 The October Crisis

  4 Reason and Passion

  5 Victoria’s Failure

  6 The Party Is Over

  7 The Land Is Not Strong

  Renaissance: 1972–74

  8 The Strange Rebirth of Pierre Trudeau

  9 Mid-term Promise

  10 Wrong Turns

  Things Fall Apart: 1974–79

  11 Beyond Reason

  12 Off the Track

  13 The Fall of Pierre Trudeau

  Legacy: 1980–84

  14 Trudeau Redux

  15 Closing the Deal

  16 Hard Times

  17 Peace at Last

  18 His Way

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  CHAPTER ONE

  TAKING POWER

  The champagne sparkled, the boyish smile lingered as Pierre Elliott Trudeau waved to the cheering crowd at the Liberal convention in 1968. On April 6, a Saturday afternoon, the forty-eight-year-old Montrealer and Canada’s reformist minister of justice was elected on the fourth ballot as the seventh Liberal leader since Confederation. His victory meant that he would become the sixth Liberal prime minister of Canada. Donning the mantle of Laurier and King, St. Laurent and Pearson, Trudeau prepared to address not only the delegates at Ottawa’s Civic Centre but also the curious nation beyond, which, gathered around mostly black-and-white television sets, was about to witness the birth of “Trudeaumania.” Whatever the meaning of the phenomenon, the evening seemed historic, for Trudeau would be the first Canadian prime minister born in the twentieth century, the youngest prime minister since the 1920s, and with fewer than three years in the House of Commons, the least experienced prime minister in Canada’s history.

  The Trudeau crowd was young but so were the times. Trudeau had begun his victorious campaign to capture the Prime Minister’s Office just as the Beatles launched their Magical Mystery Tour and the musical Hair declared its discovery of sex, drugs, and rock and roll and headed for Broadway. The year blended magic and political shock as the fringe and the alternative merged with the mainstream. At the end of January, the Viet Cong had stunned American forces in Vietnam with its Tet offensive, and the American presidency of Lyndon Johnson suddenly began to crumble. Richard Nixon, the old Cold Warrior, returned from the political wilderness to become a serious Republican contender for the presidency as Democrats jostled to succeed Johnson. And the American dream had become a nightmare. That vision of promise, embodied in the young and eloquent John F. Kennedy, had entranced Canadians at the beginning of the decade, but Kennedy was gone, and on Thursday, April 4, the day before the Liberal leadership convention began, James Earl Ray had gunned down the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as the civil rights leader stood on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The eruption of violence in America’s largest cities following King’s assassination shared front-page headlines in Canada’s newspapers with the convention triumph of Pierre Trudeau.

  The contrast was striking. Canada suddenly seemed different (cool in the argot of the day), a “peaceable kingdom” as some now called it. In this setting the candidacy of the parliamentarian of only three years became politically intriguing. His style and stance were unique in the history of Canada: an erstwhile socialist who cared what French intellectuals wrote, wore shoes without socks and jackets without ties and still looked elegant, drove the perfect Mercedes 300SL convertible, and flirted boldly with women a generation younger. That April weekend the American counterparts of the youth at the Ottawa Civic Centre were angrily demonstrating in the streets or on campuses. Bob Rae, then a hairy, rumpled student radical at the University of Toronto, later recalled how he went off to that convention, drawn to Trudeau’s incisiveness, wit, “belief that ideas mattered in politics,” and most of all, his “style.” His roommate and fellow student activist, Michael Ignatieff, joined the Trudeau team and claimed, forty years later, that politics were never again as exciting for him as during those heady days in the spring of 1968. John Turner supporter Bruce Allen Powe took his thirteen-year-old son to the convention, where Bruce Jr. defied his father’s allegiance, hid his Trudeau buttons beneath his jacket, and began a lifelong infatuation.

  The infatuation was infectious. After the convention formally ended, Trudeau’s supporters and thousands of others crammed into the new Skyline Hotel in downtown Ottawa, where the “curvaceous” Diamond Lil performed one of her livelier dances between two Trudeau campaign posters. Throngs of miniskirted teenagers screamed a welcome to the new leader, and older followers sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” “Let’s party tonight,” a beaming Trudeau told the crowd, “but remember that Monday the party is over.”

  Before long, Trudeau spotted Bob Rae’s striking young sister, Jennifer, across the room, and fastening his penetrating blue eyes on her, he came close and whispered, “Will you go out with me sometime?” She later did, but he also remembered the fetching teenager who had spurned him in Tahiti the previous December but had willingly accepted his eager kiss that afternoon as he left the convention floor. When reporters asked Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of a former Liberal Cabinet minister, “Have you eyes for Trudeau? Are you a girlfriend?” she replied, “No, I have eyes for him only as prime minister.” The office had already brought Trudeau unanticipated benefits, and for the first time since Laurier, a Canadian prime minister was sexy.1

  Trudeau knew that public expectations were too high, and he moved quickly to dampen them in his acceptance speech at the convention and at his next appearance. The acceptance speech reads poorly, but content mattered little, as Trudeau’s words were submerged in the froth of victory. On April 7, the day after he became leader, Trudeau held a nationally televised press conference. Sporting the fresh red rose that had already become his trademark, he praised his opponents—particularly Robert Winters, who had finished second—and said he was considering how they would fit into his Cabinet. To the surprise of some commentators, he indicated there was no need for an immediate election. Then, unexpectedly, he denied that he was a radical or a “man of the left.” “I am,” he declared, “essentially a pragmatist.” The comment confused many observers.

  Not long before, Trudeau had proudly declared himself a leftist. Evidence of his “radicalism” and left-wing views abounded in old newspaper clippings; in the memories of many who knew him; and in Cité libre, the journal he had edited in the 1950s. New Democratic Party leader Tommy Douglas recalled trying to recruit Trudeau as a socialist candidate only a few years earlier. Trudeau knew that his future success rested on reassurance, which paradoxically required ambiguity, rather than strong assertions of principle. At the convention he’d talked about the “Just Society” he intended to construct, but its contours were thinly sketched and its foundations, apart from a commitment to the rights of individuals to make their own decisions, were barely visible.

  Ambiguity or, perhaps more accurately, mystery was apparently alluring.* Even the Spectator, the British conservative magazine so often given to cynical observations about the oldest dominion, succumbed to the enthusiasm surrounding Trudeau: “It was as if Canada had co
me of age, as if he himself single handedly would catapult the country into the brilliant sunshine of the late 20th century from the stagnant swamp of traditionalism and mediocrity in which Canadian politics had been bogged down for years.” In the spring of 1968, an intrigued William Shawn, the celebrated editor of the New Yorker, commissioned Edith Iglauer to write a long article on Canada’s new prime minister. It took a year to complete, but it remains the best portrait of Trudeau as he took power and shaped his private self to the new demands of public life.

  Leading Canadian journalists could not resist his charm, and many cast objectivity to the winds and signed a petition endorsing Trudeau. Historian Ramsay Cook, a traditional supporter of the New Democratic Party but a Trudeau speechwriter in 1968, retains a scrap of paper from that year which reads: “Pierre Trudeau is a good shit (merde).” It was signed by eminent leftist journalist June Callwood and her sportswriter husband, Trent Frayne; Maclean’s editor Peter Gzowski and his wife, Jenny; and the brash young interviewer Barbara Frum. Peter C. Newman, the talented and bestselling political journalist at the Toronto Star, commented, “The whole house of clichés constructed by generations of politicians is demolished as soon as [Trudeau] begins to speak.”2

  Trudeau’s freshness seemed to free him from the dense political foliage and sombre shades that had darkened Ottawa in the mid-1960s, when Canada, in Newman’s famous term, suffered from political “distemper.” Two veterans of the First World War, John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, fought pitched battles that both bored and infuriated Canadians. The Conservatives rejected Diefenbaker in a bitter convention in 1967 and turned to the Nova Scotia premier, Robert Stanfield, whose laconic style and careful ways contrasted strongly with the fiery Saskatchewan populist. The seventy-year-old Pearson stepped aside more gracefully just before Christmas 1967, when the polls were showing that Stanfield would trounce the Liberals should the government fall. The Liberal minority tottered as the candidates for Pearson’s succession took their places in the winter of 1968. By that time Pearson had become convinced that his successor should be Pierre Trudeau, who had been his parliamentary secretary but had remained personally distant. Pearson told a close friend that “ice water” ran through Trudeau’s veins. Still, his successor had to be a francophone, he thought, and Trudeau’s intellect, his presence, and even his cold rationality made him the logical choice. Pearson’s wife, Maryon, was openly smitten with the charm Trudeau so deftly and consciously revealed to women, and her affection for her husband’s successor was obvious to all. A cartoonist wrote a caption on a photograph above Maryon as she gazed fondly at Trudeau: “Of course, Pierre, you realize that if you win, I go with the job.”3 She didn’t, but the Victorian mansion on Sussex Drive did. It was the bachelor Pierre Trudeau’s first house. With only two suitcases and his treasured Mercedes, he took possession when the Pearsons moved to the prime minister’s official country retreat at Harrington Lake after the convention.

  The two suitcases contained striking and elegant clothing, his wrist bore a gold Rolex, and his thinning hair was artfully shaped to conceal bare skin. “Canadians,” the Winnipeg Free Press declared, “are looking to Mr. Trudeau for great things, much in the manner that those Americans who elected John F. Kennedy as their leader expected great things from him.”* The English-language press abounded with glowing references to Trudeau in the spring of 1968, but the French press, though almost always respectful, was more reserved and even critical. Le Devoir’s Claude Ryan had known Trudeau since the 1940s, when he wrote an admiring article for a Catholic journal on the young Quebec intellectual, but he had endorsed Paul Hellyer for the leadership after his first choice, Mitchell Sharp, withdrew in favour of Trudeau. Although he never failed to acknowledge Trudeau’s ability and political appeal, he was increasingly critical of his longtime acquaintance’s constitutional arguments and especially his arch refusal of special status for Quebec. After dismissing suggestions that Trudeau lacked experience, Ryan said: “But Mr. Trudeau has developed to a very high level some significant qualities. He holds well-articulated personal thoughts. He speaks in the direct terms favoured by today’s generation. He appears to fear no person or orthodoxy, whether official or not.”4 While disagreeing with his policies, Ryan acknowledged that there was a clarity to Trudeau’s rejection of “special status” for Quebec. Trudeau’s position differentiated him not only from Ryan himself but also from Quebec premier Daniel Johnson and Robert Stanfield, who in his first months as Conservative leader began to talk of “two nations”—a concept that was anathema to Trudeau.

  Trudeau’s rise to national political power was fundamentally a response, first by the Liberal Party and then by many Canadians, to Quebec’s new challenge to Canadian confederation. The so-called Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s had shattered the foundations of Quebec’s political structures, eroding the Roman Catholic faith that had provided the buttress for tradition. As a vibrant and activist secular state emerged in Quebec, the two political forces of nationalism and separatism exploded and pushed Quebec politicians and intellectuals toward different sides. Once a nationalist and for a brief time a separatist, Trudeau took his stand with those who believed that the future of French-speaking Canadians would be realized most fully within a renewed Canadian federalism. In 1965, as the Pearson-appointed Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was declaring that Canada was passing through “the greatest crisis” in its history, Trudeau joined with two old friends and collaborators, the journalist Gérard Pelletier and the labour leader Jean Marchand, to become one of “the three wise men” who would sort out the confusion the new Quebec had caused in Ottawa. By 1968 Trudeau had eclipsed his more celebrated colleagues and had become a charismatic leader fit for an extraordinary challenge.

  Trudeau had first gained national attention in 1967 with his reforms to the Criminal Code, which he cleverly and memorably described as taking the state out of the bedrooms of the nation. He quickly framed his public character: candid, fresh, and alive with the spirit of the sixties. In a Montreal speech with a strong federalist message that troubled Ryan, Trudeau declared that he would speak “truth” in politics and that “les Canadiens français” must hear the truth. Some of them wanted to hesitate, others to obfuscate, but the choices had finally become clear. On the one hand, there was the view that a modern Quebec was incompatible with a united Canada. According to Trudeau this attitude would lead ineluctably to separatism. On the other hand, there was federalism, accompanied “by a new resolve and new methods, [and] the new resources of modern Quebec.” For Trudeau, the choice was obvious. Canadian federalism “represents a more pressing, exciting, and enriching challenge than the rupture of separation because it offers to the Québécois, to the French Canadian, the opportunity, the historic chance to participate in the creation of a great political adventure of the future.”5 And so a great political adventure began.

  As the tides of Trudeaumania, or la Trudeaumanie, as Quebec’s milder version was termed, swept over the popular media, dissenters began to appear, particularly in his native province. Their ranks included many who had shared earlier adventures with Trudeau. From the left came complaints that the new “pragmatist” had abandoned his own core beliefs in favour of a naked thrust for power. Le Devoir carried a bitter attack from McGill historian, tele vision host, and NDP activist Laurier LaPierre, who denounced Trudeau’s constitutional rigidity, his opposition to Quebec nationalism, and his silence over the Vietnam War. LaPierre, later a Liberal senator, said that far from catalyzing change, the election of Trudeau would mean a return to the “do little” politics of Mackenzie King and the end of Canada. Trudeau became a regular target in the many radical journals that promoted the combined separatist and socialist cause. Some of his oldest friends were now among his most virulent critics: the sociologist Marcel Rioux, who had dined regularly with him when, as two lonely young Quebec intellectuals, they worked in Ottawa in the early 1950s; the brilliant Laval academic Fernand Dumont, who had written often f
or Cité libre when Trudeau was its editor in the 1950s; and the writer Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who had been Trudeau’s close friend during childhood and adolescence.

  From the right in Quebec and English Canada came rumours of Trudeau’s homosexuality and his flirtations with Communism: the proof lay, it was said, in his trips to the Soviet Union and China. Although right-wing columnist Lubor Zink touched on these subjects in the mainstream Toronto Telegram, most Canadian journalists ignored or dismissed the tales as scatological.6 To his credit, Claude Ryan sternly and admirably rebuked those, including some within the Church, who spread “calomnies insidieuses” about Trudeau. While declaring that he was increasingly opposed to Trudeau’s policies, Ryan recalled that the two had shared “une vieille amitié” since the 1940s and that he could personally attest that such attacks had absolutely “no basis in fact.”7

  Some friends had left Trudeau, but he found new allies who, together with Marchand and Pelletier, reassured him that his course was correct. Friends and colleagues mattered a lot to Trudeau, but his first journey after gaining the Liberal leadership was to Montreal to visit his closest confidant—his mother, Grace Elliott Trudeau. Widowed in 1935, she had since devoted herself to her three children and doted especially on Pierre, her elder son, who shared her gracious home in the prosperous Montreal suburb of Outremont until he became prime minister. An easy banter had developed between them in the 1940s as Trudeau formed his adult personality, and in his mother’s presence, he retained a wondrous blend of playfulness and serious purpose. They went to the symphony together, cruised the corniches of the Riviera on his Harley-Davidson, and shared the pain when Pierre’s romantic life faltered, as it often did in the forties and fifties. Grace could be critical when women did not meet her standards, and most of Pierre’s dates recall their trepidation as they mounted the steps at 84 McCulloch Avenue. In the mid-sixties, however, Grace’s mind became cloudy. She probably did not know that her son became Canada’s prime minister in 1968, although three decades before, she had dreamed that he might. She was, as always, dressed elegantly when he saw her on April 9, and she listened mutely as he held her hand, spoke softly, and told of their most recent and greatest triumph. In silence her strong presence abided.8