Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  The trip under way, it soon became apparent that Trudeau’s natural leadership ability was not confined to the political arena, yet he never exerted an assumed authority or displayed any arrogance. Whenever he felt we should do something, he outlined his reasons carefully and put them to the group with no attempt to force his view. Once a course of action was agreed upon, however, Trudeau could be tough and unyielding. Though light conversation was not his forte, he enjoyed a good laugh at clever comments or casual mishaps along the way. He was careful never to mock anyone who did not find his own situation humorous, and he was also not one to laugh at himself.

  Trudeau did the dishes, went for firewood, and helped drag canoes around with everyone else. As a wilderness traveller, he was always disciplined and well prepared. Around the campfire at night, he was quiet and thoughtful, taking only one drink at our evening happy hour. He joined in our conversations, political or otherwise, but would never reveal anything of a personal nature. One of Trudeau’s most admirable qualities, as a politician and a man, was a complete lack of bitter or vindictive feelings toward anyone. On that journey, he scolded a member of our group for an unflattering personal assessment of one of his political opponents. “Confine your attack to the policy, not the personality,” Trudeau admonished.

  We had two uneasy moments on that trip. The first came on a day almost too hot to paddle, when we were drifting lazily with the current. For a while a herd of migrating caribou joined us, hundreds of animals swimming all around us as they forded the river at different crossing points. Occasionally they bumped our canoes, but paid us no more attention than they would floating logs.

  The canoes were strung out in line, Trudeau in the foremost with mine close behind. Soon we came upon a group of grizzlies sitting quietly on their haunches on the shoreline. They were obviously trailing the herd and happily digesting a meal of the last straggler they had picked off. To my astonishment, Trudeau pulled up onshore, leapt from his canoe, and trotted toward the big bears that, seeing the former prime minister descending on them, shook themselves and bolted away to a nearby ridge where they sat down again. Trudeau made to follow. I grabbed my heavy-calibre revolver from my day pack and bolted after him. By the time I reached the ridge, the bears had torn off across country, leaving their pursuer alone and apparently disappointed. I was angry and pointed out that his recklessness could have risked the lives of us all had the bears turned on him and others tried to come to his aid.

  “Well,” he asked, “how many bullets do you have in that gun?”

  “Six,” I replied.

  “No problem,” he said.

  There had only been five grizzlies.

  The other awkward exchange came a few days later. Before the invention of portable satellite positioning gear, navigating by map and compass through the Barren Lands was a chore. On lakes, in particular, where there are few major landmarks, everything looks pretty much the same at water level. We were canoeing through myriad lakes on our way toward the outlet of the Hanbury and had stopped for lunch at the intersection of two, each beckoning in a different direction. I had plotted out a course days before, and even though the compass reading can sometimes appear questionable I had learned never to override it. When lunch ended, Trudeau headed off without comment in the wrong direction. The others followed without question— that charismatic attraction still at work—as I stood sputtering on the shore, warning them of their error. Tim Kotcheff and I stayed on the shoreline while Trudeau led the group five miles down to the end of a sucker bay. Heavy winds and a sharpedged rain blew in and hit them in the face as they began the hard paddle back to us. As Trudeau rounded the corner to turn into the correct lake, he muttered a line from a then-popular television satire, “Sorry about that, Chief.” When Trudeau was out of earshot, someone remarked that as prime minister, he was always leading in the wrong direction but everyone followed him anyway.

  Doubtless Trudeau’s legacy as a nation builder will be long debated, but his reputation as a fireplace builder is unquestioned. On reaching any campsite, his routine was the same: After assisting his canoe partner with the setup of their tent, he devoted himself to the construction of our cook fire. These were no flimsy, thrown-together structures; Trudeau had the heart of an artist and could probably have become a successful architect. Rocks were carefully chosen, sometimes chipped, and shaped to fit. Sand was the mortar that held all the elements together. Some fireplaces were two-storey jobs with warming ovens complete with doors. Before pots and pans were allowed to rest, a glass of water was placed on the grate to be certain the cooktop was precisely level. Another curious habit of Trudeau’s was his need to wash the dishes twice over when he took his turn at dish duty. Once was not enough for this most meticulous of men.

  Trudeau was intolerant of the quick and shoddy work of others. I once made the mistake of doing him a favour, or what I thought to be a favour. Without his noticing, I built a perfectly serviceable fireplace while he was still setting out his personal effects under canvas. He walked down to the circle of canoes we always set up around the camp kitchen and gazed with evident contempt at my efforts. Wordlessly, Trudeau swept the whole thing aside with his boot, dropped to his knees, and began to fashion one of his own designs. At this site he discouraged all pretenders by including a chimney.

  Even when he was hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, Trudeau never let go of his sense of who he was or his position in the eyes of the country. Once, when the weather turned so ugly we considered calling in a plane and quitting the trip early, Trudeau would have none of it. Ignoring the rest of the group, his reasoning was simple: “They”—whoever “they” were—“will say I could not do it,” he told us. We stayed.

  As it happened, there was some criticism of the trip planning on the Hanbury adventure, criticism directed at me as the official organizer. Talk of a canoe group leadership convention arose, but Trudeau was supportive. “Pre-empt them,” he advised. “Quit and no one else will want the job and they will beg you to come back.”

  Two days later a float plane passed low over our group. Trudeau looked up at the circling aircraft and pronounced: “The Clark government has defeated itself and they are coming for me.” These were ironic and amusing comments at the time, of course. Except that six months later, the universe unfolded just as he had described.

  For all of us, there were occasions when our relationships as summer travellers intersected helpfully with our professional lives. Only once did I ever exploit that connection shamelessly.

  The year after canoeing the Hanbury I was assigned to Washington, and in the spring of 1980 I was sent to cover the simmering civil war in El Salvador at short notice. Only then did I discover that I had allowed my passport to lapse. An admirably fussy visa officer at the Canadian embassy informed me that I would need someone in a prominent position back home to vouch for my identity, since I did not even have my birth certificate.

  In what I concede was an inappropriate answer, I gave her the name of the recently elected prime minister, returned to office after defeating Joe Clark in February. She scolded me for making light of a serious matter. Her tone apparently changed, however, when she heard Trudeau’s familiar voice at the other end of the line in Ottawa. He was greatly amused that his fellow river runner needed a character reference.

  If the Trudeau connection had been responsible for greasing the skids under my Ottawa tenure, it also opened doors at the Canadian embassy in Washington. America, I concluded, was going to be a great gig.

  5

  WASHINGTON ASSIGNMENT

  I arrived in Washington on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, a moment when America was on its ass. The nation’s economy was in a deep slump, as was its mood. Interest rates were the highest since the Civil War and inflation ran at double digits. Perhaps worse, the country’s confidence had been shaken in November 1979 by the capture of sixty-six American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran, an ordeal that lasted well over a year for fifty-
two of them. Jimmy Carter, though later regarded as the nation’s best-ever past president, proved a weak and indecisive chief executive. Carter’s effort to rescue the Americans held prisoner in Teheran, dubbed Operation “Eagle Claw,” came apart in military incompetence and death in the desert. It seemed every tree in Washington displayed a commemorative yellow ribbon, constant reminders of a country held captive and a great power rendered impotent.

  The inauguration of a first-time president is a powerful tonic for Americans, however, and hope and optimism are soon restored. The ascendancy of Ronald Reagan promised a return to a much earlier era in U.S. history. There would be no more humiliations; it was back to Theodore Roosevelt’s policy of “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Although in the last days of Carter’s presidency his administration had been working mightily behind the scenes to secure the hostages’ release, everyone in Washington wanted to believe another story, never confirmed, that shortly before Reagan took office he had sent an ultimatum to the Iranian mullahs: Release the hostages immediately or face the bombing of Teheran. Twenty minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages were on their way home. The exhilaration was palpable among the throngs that lined Pennsylvania Avenue to see the new president pass by.

  My own giddiness at kicking off my tenure as CTV’s Washington correspondent with this historic event was tempered somewhat by a personal twinge of loss. I had left behind a serious relationship in Ottawa with a woman who did not want to uproot her son or her legal career to follow me south. The reporter I was replacing, Mike McCourt, had already left for his new job with ABC News, and I knew no one in the capital. I felt more than a little forlorn after Harvey Kirck and I finished our upbeat inauguration broadcast that night.

  I had found an apartment in a restored late-nineteenth-century brick building on 16th Street, an elegant and leafy avenue that runs straight down to Lafayette Square and the White House. In the plan laid out by French architect Pierre L’Enfant, the street was intended to be a grande allée, lined with foreign embassies paying homage to the president. Nowadays, the embassies are scattered across the city, but the street still boasts many grand old buildings, including the famous Hay-Adams Hotel.

  As my furniture was being moved in, my neighbour on the floor—a black U.S. marine officer—asked me wryly if I minded the fact that I was stationed right next to “Indian country.” The capital had been desegregated for years, but there was a clear demarcation between the black and white sections of the city, and we were the dividing line. The only other tenant on the floor was a retired U.S. Air Force bomber pilot who had experienced an epiphany during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It came while he was at the controls of his bomber on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Turkey, waiting for the coded message that would have sent him to destroy a Russian city with his nuclear payload. He passed tension-filled hours with the engine running, not knowing if he would be ordered to take off or stand down, and the experience changed him forever. He left the service after his tour was finished, and when Vietnam took American soldiers into another conflict, he was one of the leaders of the veterans group that opposed the war.

  A major concern in relocating to Washington was finding proper medical care for the glaucoma that I had been diagnosed with five years before. Fortunately, one of the world’s outstanding glaucoma specialists and researchers, Mansour F. Armaly, practised in Washington, and he agreed to take me on as a patient. I was in good company. His other patients included then vice-president George H.W. Bush and King Hussein of Jordan. My visits to Dr. Armaly’s office were always impressive. First I was seen by an assistant or two who took various tests and measurements. Then I was ushered into a spacious consulting room to wait for the great man himself, who arrived with a retinue of attentive interns in his wake. Dr. Armaly was invariably gracious, modest, and gentle, always putting me at ease with a kindly touch on the knee. He was a Palestinian and the many hours I spent in his company over the next few years left me with a lifelong affection for his people.

  In Washington’s journalistic pecking order, a Canadian reporter ranks just slightly higher than Radio Zambezi. Compared with the kind of access to power we of the CTV crew had dined on at home, Washington was a starvation diet. There might be the rare moment when a Canada-U.S. issue seized the attention of the political class, but most of the time we hovered below their radar. But I had one advantage and it took no forced effort on my part to exploit it: I was a single, straight male in a typical government town full of married men and single women. These smart and ambitious women had come from all over America to be successful in politics, government, or the media, and in the competition for companions the odds were stacked in my favour. Very often the outcome was as much friendship as it was romance, but either way the women I met were far better connected with the capital’s political grandees and their staffs than I could ever hope to be.

  I considered myself lucky to become a friend of Margaret Carlson, deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine, and then as now a regular on the network political talk shows. I confess that when I escorted someone as influential as Margaret, I had to park my ego at the door and accept my role as part of the scenery. On one occasion, seated across from one of the nation’s most celebrated television news anchors, I dared a conversational sally concerning Canadian premier Richard Hatfield and how he’d been caught carrying marijuana while on tour with the Queen. The acerbic David Brinkley replied, “Does that mean Canada has finally become interesting?”

  One of my closest pals was Patricia Ellis, the foreign editor for the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, the PBS program that was a standard-bearer for political reporters and a must-watch for all political junkies. I found Robert McNeil, a native Montrealer raised in the Maritimes, somewhat stiff and formal in his manner, but Jim Lehrer, an easygoing Texan, was his opposite. No doubt this formula accounted for their success as a news anchor team for twenty years.

  Pat’s own story was the classic American immigrant tale. Her grandfather had arrived in the United States as a penniless Jewish refugee. The immigration officer at Ellis Island gave up on his hard-to-spell Polish name and arbitrarily gave him a new one, Ellis, after the famous reception centre. Eventually he established himself as a successful businessman and formed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, then New York’s commissioner of police. Pat’s father was a lawyer who set up his first practice with the future agent to the stars, Swifty Lazar. Pat knew everyone and her unaffected warmth and thoughtfulness gave her easy entree to the Washington whirl. I might find myself at a birthday party for the chairman of the Democratic Party one evening and at a dinner with a senior Republican senator the next.

  There were other chance connections that I worked to advantage. My Washington producer had once dated Marlin Fitzwater, a press aide to Vice-President Bush and then to Reagan. Fitzwater was a farm boy from Kansas, and we found we shared a small-town-in-the-West kind of kinship. When the U.S.-Canada free trade negotiations became heated, Fitzwater was a valued source, and I suspect he also arranged more Reagan sit-downs for me than a strict rotation between networks would normally have allowed.

  Many years before, I had shared the hardship of a climb over the Chilkoot Pass with a California state senator and his wife. They knew Fitzwater’s predecessor, James Brady, an immensely popular press secretary to the president. Brady was not one of Nancy Reagan’s favourites, arousing her ire with small jokes at her husband’s expense. During a presidential campaign stop a few months previous, Reagan had made a bizarre statement about old forests and the threat to human health posed by forest fires. Later, gazing out his window as the candidate’s aircraft took off over a national forest, Brady pointed out the sight below to the surrounding reporters and declared in mock horror, “Killer trees!” I connected with Brady soon after my arrival, but we never had the more leisurely get-together we’d promised ourselves.

  On March 30, 1981, I was in Toronto for that day’s broadcast of Canada AM, sitting in for an ailing reg
ular host. After the day’s early start, I returned to my hotel room for an afternoon nap, only to be awakened by a telephone call from the newsroom telling me that Reagan had been shot.

  It hardly seemed credible. Reagan had been in office less than three months and it was inconceivable that the United States might once again suffer the agony of an assassinated president. The networks were already broadcasting the story that having delivered a speech at the Washington Hilton, a few blocks from the White House, Reagan was about to step into his limousine when a gunman who had inserted himself behind a line of reporters started shooting. I was supposed to be there, covering his address to the Construction Trade Unions. Soon I was on a Learjet booked by the network and headed for George Washington Hospital.

  The White House line was that Reagan was fine, that his condition was not life-threatening. But the chaos and sense of crisis at the hospital, where ashen-faced staff and relatives hurried past the media scrum, belied the official assurances. Only later did we learn he had nearly died from loss of blood due to a pierced lung. But the old thespian had a memorable line ready. “I forgot to duck, honey,” he reportedly told Nancy. He also told his surgeons that he hoped they were all Republicans.

  I sprinted the nine or so blocks to the White House, where the press briefing room was packed. Some correspondents were in tears after hearing that Jim Brady had been shot and killed. This was untrue, though he had been critically wounded and suffered lasting brain damage. Here, too, all discipline and order seemed to have collapsed. Normally the vice-president would have taken over in such a crisis, but George Bush Sr. was in the air, flying home from a foreign tour. So who was in charge? The lack of clarity was frightening, and Secretary of State Al Haig soon made it worse. Dashing up to the microphone at the head of the small room, Haig looked frantic and sweaty, not at all the calm-underfire commander one would expect of a former general. He spoke as if briefing the troops. “As you know,” he intoned, “the president took a round in the chest. I am in control here at the White House.” In fact he was far down the list of those constitutionally able to replace an incapacitated president. Haig, who later threw his helmet into the ring for the presidential nomination, seemed just a mite too eager.