Heroes Read online

  — 2010

  Pierre Trudeau: Phantom of the Canadian Opera

  “To be a revolutionary is first of all to make sure of

  permanence and of a good reception. After which

  intellectual masturbation is permitted.”

  —Graffiti, Sorbonne University courtyard, May 1968

  HE MAGICKED US. Like the star of The Phantom of the Opera, Pierre Elliott Trudeau appeared elusive and unfathomable, yet master of the music of the night. He remained the eternal paradox: an egotist with radical ideals. Masked and huddled in his cloak, he controlled the melodrama of Canadian politics for a generation. He was eventually brought to heel by age, circumstance and the imposition on his good humour of having to deal with a wife who had exhausted his patience. Even then, he lingered in the wings long enough to confound his rivals with a booby-trapped legacy, and his ghostly, chain-rattling appearances allowed him to remain a decisive influence, way past his ordained shelf life.

  Canadians have always been of two minds about Pierre Trudeau. They admired him and felt good about being envied for having elected the first Canadian PM to become a world-class celebrity. At the same time, they felt betrayed at having been seduced by a supremely detached Jesuit who acted as if his grandeur grew in direct proportion to his aloofness. Compassion cast little light on his interior landscape. Despite his penchant for making outrageous statements and dressing in what then passed for outlandish costumes—leather coats, desert boots, loose-flowing capes and thonged sandals—Trudeau appeared a lot more daring than he really was.

  Though they would endure a week of blackflies before admitting it, most Canadians harboured a delicious inner feeling that they had dared to elect—and re-elect—such a fabulous smartass. (After all, he was our smartass—and London’s Daily Mail had picked him as “the world’s seventh sexiest man”—which was about right for a Canadian hero.)

  As hypnotic as Trudeau’s presence proved to be (someone described his style of government as “despotism tempered by epigrams”), his words were less compelling than his body language, which was worth a PhD thesis—or a rock opera. He was the dancing man, sliding down palace banisters, pole-vaulting onto speech platforms or standing his ground during riots directed at him, dodging Molotov cocktails, leaning back—thumbs hooked into his belt loops. The nerve of the man was breathtaking. No other country boasted a head of government who could dance the Arab moozmaad in Sheik Yamani’s desert tent; practise his pirouettes behind the queen’s back at Buckingham Palace; yell “Mangez la merde!” at striking mail-truck drivers; skin-dive, high-dive, ride a unicycle; earn a brown belt in judo; date some of the world’s most desirable women; and have two sons born on the same day as Jesus Christ. Even his marriage breakup commanded world attention as Margaret “liberated” herself by bar hopping with the Rolling Stones.

  Trudeau in office was a Zen adept who could detach himself from whatever political mayhem was happening around him. Yet he saved Confederation by facing down the Front de Libération du Québec in 1970 and winning the referendum on French Canada’s future a decade later. He made us aware that politics at its best consisted not of backroom deals but of sharing the passions of our age. He won four general elections and accomplished precisely what he set out to do: bring home Canada’s constitution and sponsor a charter of rights and freedoms, which, in effect, was a contract between individual citizens and the state. In theory, at least, every Canadian now constituted a nation of one.

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau put us on the map. His candour, his intellectual curiosity, his nose thumbing at the staid traditions of the country’s highest political office qualified him as our first existential political hero: the man with the red rose in his buttonhole, who rescued us—finally—from the dusty age of Mackenzie King. He levitated the staid government party into an activist political and social instrument without ever leaving the ground.

  IT WAS A GLORIOUS SPRING MORNING in that once-upon-a-time spring of 1968 when Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who had just been sworn in as Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, welcomed me as I stepped into his as-yet-unfurnished parliamentary office. He had promised to grant me his first interview as PM, and here he was, ready to shrug into my tape recorder.

  During his term as justice minister, he had secretly leaked future plans of his department to me, so that my scoops would test public reaction. That first historic day, as I set up my tape machine in his new quarters, I couldn’t control my enthusiasm. “Hey, man, I’m so glad you won. Now, I’ll get leaks from all the ministries …”

  “Listen,” Trudeau shot back, his face hardened into a Rodin sculpture. “The first cabinet leak you get, I’ll have the RCMP tap your phone.”

  Trudeau was legally correct to squash my feeble attempt to poke fun at the Privy Council oath of secrecy. But his reaction to what was obviously a tension-relieving joke was so extreme that our exchange has stayed with me. It was an early warning signal of how fast and how completely power would change the loose- limbed disco dipper, who only hours before had been on the convention floor, doing the boogaloo with a wild-haired blonde under the shimmering Klieg lights.

  THE ADVENT OF Pierre Trudeau was a going-away gift from Mike Pearson, the previous Liberal prime minister who left office after exhausting years of remarkable legislative achievements. As well as the frustrations of having to operate with minority governments, he daily faced the wrath and histrionic rhetoric of John Diefenbaker, the Tory Renegade, who saw himself as Samson, determined to bring down the whole damn temple. Pearson recognized in Trudeau a man very different from the florid French Canadians who had preceded him. Despite Trudeau’s eccentricities of dress, he possessed the qualities Pearson admired. He was the product of a rich and cultivated home, had been educated abroad, had travelled widely, was an avowed intellectual, a political activist and a convinced internationalist.

  On April 4, 1967, Pearson moved Trudeau into the prestigious Ministry of Justice and assigned him to reform a badly outdated legal system. During an interview I had with him at the time, Trudeau went directly to the core of his persuasion: “This should be regarded more and more as a department planning for the society of tomorrow, not merely acting as the government’s legal advisor. It should combine the function of drafting new legislation with the disciplines of sociology and economics, so that it can provide a framework for our evolving way of life. We have to move the framework of society slightly ahead of our times …”

  Eight months later, he presented a reform package to the Commons, and while defending his ideas on television, pronounced the magic phrase: “I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the minister of justice. There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”

  This verity—borrowed from a Globe and Mail editorial—was hardly a startling proposition, but it made a disproportionate impact on an electorate numbed by generations of politicians blowing through their moustaches about the gross domestic product and federal-provincial relations. It was the first intimation that Trudeau could excite public opinion.

  If Pierre Trudeau’s subsequent conquest of the Liberal party appeared in retrospect to have been predestined, with the other leadership contenders serving as spear carriers, in the bleak chill of December 1967, just after Pearson’s resignation, Trudeau’s victory seemed far from inevitable. In fact, it was scarcely credible. To most Liberals Trudeau was an untested outsider, an upsetting left-wing presence not easily encompassed by the collective middle-of-the-road party mentality, still stuck in times past when Canadian politics were brokered by a dozen Liberal bigwigs.

  The denizens of Ottawa’s Rideau Club, where these power adjudicators met, were fond of telling each other the story about the time Trudeau turned up on a Saturday morning at the Privy Council office dressed in desert boots and a boiler suit. The commissionaire on duty, convinced he was a plumber who had his worksheets jumbled, turned him away at the door. When his name was mentioned casually in
early speculative talk about possible candidates, it was dismissed as a joke. (“How could anybody who combs his hair forward like that be a Canadian prime minister?”)

  During his leadership campaign, riding a chartered jet and wearing his signature leather coat, Trudeau travelled twenty thousand miles, making thirty stops. Every appearance produced hysterical ovations. He seemed able, without strain, to establish personal contact with his audiences, operating on a private wavelength the other candidates couldn’t jam.

  By 1968 television had taken over political conventions. Because TV screens can accommodate only one image at a time and tend to give all events equal significance, Trudeau gained most from the coverage. From the moment he entered the race, the electronic media’s managers made an instinctive decision that he would be the winner and assigned full-time camera crews to his candidacy. Their message was not lost on the delegates. Throughout the convention eight cameras constantly clustered around the justice minister—recording Trudeau’s wisecracks and outrageous body language. That blanket coverage gave him the advantage of built-in excitement, bathing the dancing man in a constant halo of artificial light. There was about him an indefinable intensity, the suggestion of pent-up power and hidden dimensions that fascinated the nation’s TV viewers, impressed the delegates and frightened his rivals.

  His emotional impact was demonstrated most forcefully when he arrived at the Ottawa leadership convention by train: women of all ages celebrated his appearance. The girls threw wedding rice, waved Valentines and squeaked in delight, gasping at the sight of him. The ecstasy extended to the next generation, particulary the women. “Something happens to people’s faces when they see Trudeau,” Ron Haggart wrote in the Toronto Star. “You can manufacture noise and screaming kids, but you cannot manufacture that excitement in the eyes. It’s not madness, not in these excited matrons and lawyers. It is belief.”

  Recruiting delegates, Trudeau was completely at ease with himself and his audiences. He did again what he had done for so many years as a University of Montreal lecturer—combined theoretical musings with leaps of intuition, classical references and colloquial quips. To the familiar posture of a seasoned academic were added the touches of a cabaret entertainer. This involved run-on jokes and calculated mannerisms—putting a hand in his watchpocket, sipping water whenever he wanted a moment to think, raising his eyebrows to indicate that he and the questioner didn’t need to add to the complexities of human existence by creating new ones. And—always—the exaggerated shrugs. These and other tricks of stagecraft, adroitly exploited, were combined with repartee:

  Trudeau: “I hope to be a prime minister who doesn’t resemble in every way the Pierre Elliott Trudeau of up to now.”

  Question: “And how will you change?”

  Trudeau: “I’ll have more regular hours.”

  Trudeau not so much captured people’s hearts or minds as, in some mysterious way, connected subliminally with their nervous systems. No Canadian politician had ever come close to the collective madness that trailed this Phantom of this opera. The colourful Ontario MPP Elmer Sopha astutely noted his effect on the swarms of young women: “They’re transformed into a strange state. Their eyes are transfixed and they seem to be breathing through their toe nails. You’d think they all had asthma.” It was a perfectly accurate description. The day before the Liberals’ 1968 leadership convention, I found myself at a Château Laurier hotel reception, standing beside a middle-aged farming couple from Manitoba. As Trudeau made his way down the receiving line toward them, the wife visibly stiffened, turned to her huge block of a sideburned husband and moaned, “What if I faint when he comes in?” The husband smoothed down his Brylcreemed locks, rolled his eyes heavenward and gave her a look of calculated disgust. Just then Trudeau loped by and happened to shake the man’s hand. It was a moment out of time, but even though they didn’t speak, a visible connection had been made. Trudeau moved on, but the farmer stood there transfixed. His eyes glazed over, he hugged his wife and quietly began to cry. It was as though Trudeau was performing what Norman Mailer described as “the indispensable psychic act of a leader, who takes national anxieties so long buried and releases them to the surface where they belong.” This was the mystery that made him the source of such fascination, the trick that the professionals running competing campaigns could not duplicate.

  The climax came with his appearance on the convention floor. The candidates outdid one another by the size and noise of their marching bands, led by their most enthusiastic supporters waving placards and shouting their candidates’ names. The Trudeau entry was exactly the opposite. He sat there during the speeches, trying to eat a bunch of grapes. He would throw one up in the air and catch it in his mouth. The TV cameras kept prompting him to do it again. (“Could we hear the crunch, please?”)

  Then it was his turn. As if pulled by a single string, Trudeau banners were silently lifted in every part of the crowded arena. The delegates, instead of applauding, let out a collective “AAAHH,” a salute to a daring trapeze artist doing his star turn. The silent demonstration had been carefully planned, even if it looked spontaneous, as though the Liberal party had reached its pro-Trudeau consensus at that exact moment. Trudeau waited in the stands for precisely five minutes, then moved toward the platform. He talked about a Just Society, about strife in the world, about Canada’s internal divisions, about each man’s share of the eternal burden and confirmed his belief in the triumph of reason over passion. This was the sober, not the witty, Pierre, softly blowing his own horn. At the end of his speech, responding to the waves of applause, he bowed slightly, smiling, in his rounded Edwardian collar, a daffodil in his buttonhole. The candidate seemed assured of victory—in fact, the delegates underreacted to his charms: he barely won on the fourth ballot. It was a reminder that the Liberal party was still smug enough to believe that its mandate had little to do with magic.

  THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN that followed was a combination of coronation and Beatles tour. Teeny boppers with manes of streaming hair gripped their machine-autographed photos of Pierre-baby to their chests and shrieked whenever he deigned to kiss one of their swarming numbers. Bemused toddlers borne on their parents’ shoulders were admonished to “remember him” as excitement surged across the country. Press cameras clicked like hungry insects every time Trudeau stepped from his chartered jet, Caesar haircut intact, to make his triumphant way from one shopping plaza to the next.

  I particularly recall landing in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. We trudged down the plane’s slippery steps into a cold, drizzly night. That was wall-to-wall Tory country at the time, but along the route from the airport, as if by a prearranged signal, people spontaneously came out on their porches to wave. Many had backed their cars into driveways so they could flash their headlights in silent salute to the Phantom in the darkened, closed limousine. At the other end of the country, in Victoria, where the monarchy was still an important issue, local Liberals questioned Trudeau closely on a topic he had previously dismissed as irrelevant. He won the crowd over with a shrug and the comment: “I was in Saskatoon last night and crowned a lovely queen, so I feel warm toward the monarchy.” For a self-appointed philosopher-king, the campaign hardly qualified as a discourse out of Aristotle. In Winnipeg, to yet another horde of screeching supporters, Trudeau carefully explained, “I do not feel myself bound by any doctrine or rigid approaches. I am a pragmatist.” His response was summed up in the yell of a fellow lapsed philosopher-king, who had quaffed too many Molsons. “Yeah, you tell ‘em, Pierre-baby!”

  There was a certain shock value in his appearance. Voters came prepared to be fascinated and scandalized by a wild man in sandals spouting socialist slogans. Instead they found an immaculate, demure professor delivering proposals that he made sound exciting but would not have been out of place in any Canadian Manufacturers’ Association rally. Unable to classify him as a man of either the political right or the political left, most of Trudeau’s listeners seemed happy to regard him as a man of the futur
e. Awarded a conclusive majority (155 of 264 seats), Trudeau set out to govern a country which had, in effect, given him a blank cheque.

  Trudeau saw himself as being in the tradition of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist French philosopher who claimed that each individual is what he makes of himself—that “man invents himself through exercising his freedom of choice.” This was a welcome notion to “Lucky Pierre,” especially during his early years in power, when he became familiar with the mystical entity that is Canada for the first time and responded through authentic political acts; he imagined he could create a workable political creed by revealing the character of the nation to itself.

  THERE HAD TO BE A GAP between his promise and his performance. But that didn’t explain why he almost overnight became such a lightning rod for populist frustration. I remember watching with fascination a burly trucker at a motel near Red Deer who had lost two quarters in a vending machine. He stood back and kicked the thing. Nothing happened. He shook it nearly off the hinges. No luck. Then he stepped back, took a deep breath, glared at the offending contraption and cursed, “God damn Trudeau anyway!”

  Trudeau could never grasp the fundamental animating spirit of Canadian democracy: that political parties are not ideological armies but temporary coalitions of disparate men and women, in it not for glory or monetary gain—but mostly as a divertissement. To him, politics existed to provide intellectual stimulation. He could not grasp the idea that bored housewives from the Soo became Liberals because party functions transmogrified them into vaguely officious charmers or that unkempt carousers from St. Boniface belonged to the party because they saw themselves as heavy-duty prime-time guys at political picnics. The very notion that anyone would go into politics except as an act of duty to the state or an exercise in ideological expression baffled and escaped the leader’s ken. As a result, during the first part of his run, Trudeau almost invariably picked the wrong advisors— earnest clones who transmitted to him no sense of country, since their intuitions echoed his own.