Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau: 1968-2000 - Hardcover

English, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0676975232 ISBN 13: 9780676975239

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2009

Synopsis

This magnificent second volume, written with exclusive access to Trudeau’s private papers and letters, completes what the Globe and Mail called “the most illuminating Trudeau portrait yet written” — sweeping us from sixties’ Trudeaumania to his final days when he debated his faith.

His life is one of Canada’s most engrossing stories. John English reveals how for Trudeau style was as important as substance, and how the controversial public figure intertwined with the charismatic private man and committed father. He traces Trudeau’s deep friendships (with women especially, many of them talented artists, like Barbra Streisand) and bitter enmities; his marriage and family tragedy. He illuminates his strengths and weaknesses — from Trudeaumania to political disenchantment, from his electrifying response to the kidnappings during the October Crisis, to his all-important patriation of the Canadian Constitution, and his evolution to influential elder statesman.

About this title

About the Author:

John English is Professor of History, University of Waterloo. Citizen of the World was a multi-award winner and a Globe and Mail Best Book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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.
 
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 come 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."
 
—
 
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." She didn't, but the Victorian mansion on Sussex Drive did. It was the bachelor Pierre Trudeau's first house. With only two...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0676975232
• ISBN 13: 9780676975239
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 832