Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  Trudeau himself was never to recant. In his memoirs, however, he went to uncharacteristic lengths to defend his actions, which suggested he had taken the criticism over them to heart. Part of the reason, no doubt, was that the crisis had been such a personal one for him. In retrospect it got cast as the usual battle between Ottawa and Quebec, but for Trudeau, only two years in power then, it would have been a much more internal battle, fought entirely on his home turf. People like Ryan and Lévesque with whom he had once shared common purpose were now his enemies; he saw the lists of people arrested as a result of the act and knew the names. Back at Brébeuf he had sat in the desk next to Pierre Laporte’s; a generation earlier their fathers had also been schoolmates. Meanwhile, the FLQ, which for most Canadians was a faceless entity they knew only from the nightly news, for Trudeau meant young men like Pierre Vallières, who had passed through the very offices of Cité libre, and who must have seemed as impassioned and wrongheaded as he himself had once been. In one of the ironies of the crisis, Jacques Lanctôt, one of Cross’s abductors, and Paul Rose, leader of the cell that kidnapped Laporte, had first met in a police van after being arrested at the 1968 Saint-Jean-Baptiste protest that had brought Trudeau such renown. Rose later said it was that event that had radicalized him and turned him to the FLQ.

  The kidnappers all ended up doing their time. Even those who had been given free passage to Cuba eventually grew bored there and returned home of their own accord, to be tried and imprisoned. In 1981, however, the Laporte kidnapper Jacques Rose, Paul’s brother, by then already paroled, was given a standing ovation at a convention of the Parti Québécois. The one dissenter was René Lévesque, who had served with Laporte in the Lesage government and who looked visibly dumbfounded at Rose’s warm reception. Lévesque’s reaction underlined what had become by then the peculiar, complex legacy of the October Crisis. Though Lévesque had given nearly two decades to the separatist cause by then and had staked much of his political capital on the failed referendum of the previous year, he could, nevertheless, see how the lens of nationalist sentiment had already distorted his party’s collective memory of Rose’s actions. For many in Quebec, however, despite the overwhelming approval there of Trudeau’s handling of the crisis at the time, the event had somehow become a symbol of his betrayal of the Quebecois. In English Canada, too, it came to be seen as a moment of reversal, when Trudeau had abandoned the principles that people had admired in him and shown himself a despot.

  The revelations from the Trudeau archives of his fascistic prewar attitudes might suggest he had merely reverted, during the crisis, to an old, authoritarian self. It would be easier to argue, however, that if his old self ever crossed his mind during the crisis, it was surely in horror. The abductors were what he had been, this handful of militants determined to overthrow the established order—except that they had acted. He was seeing now, from the other side, what he might have become but what all the intervening years had turned him away from. His actions during the crisis, far from betraying his principles, had sprung from them: he had upheld the rule of law. Whatever knowledge he may have had in later years of the RCMP’s nefarious operations to discredit the separatists, the evidence suggests that at the time of the October Crisis, at least, he acted in good faith. Of the many players in the drama—Premier Bourassa and the police, the petition signers and flame-fanners, the kidnappers themselves—Trudeau, arguably, behaved the most clear-headedly, again the right man at the right moment.

  For all the criticism Trudeau took over the matter afterwards, his handling of the crisis became an indelible part of his image and likely helped account both for his political longevity and for his continuing place in the Canadian consciousness long after his retirement. He was the man who spoke his mind. Who was strong when he needed to be. The impeccable logic he brought to his uncompromising treatment of the kidnappers—give in and there would be no end—was the same logic he would bring to the constitutional talks and to his attacks, after his retirement, on the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. It was a logic born again of the legalistic mind that his detractors scoffed at and that in his public image often read as something quite different: arrogance, bravado, wilfulness, though also as strength, which people responded to. Whatever else Trudeau did during the October Crisis, he didn’t make a botch of it. He didn’t dither. He didn’t embarrass us before the eyes of the world, but gave a grave situation its proper gravity. For that, we were grateful.

  Trudeau’s exchange with Tim Ralfe on the steps of Parliament during the crisis contrasts sharply with the selfprotective sound bytes favoured by today’s politicians. In the midst of a crisis he was willing to be put to the test, to stand in front of the nation and risk the extravagant statement, the rhetorical flourish. It was a quality that drew the public’s eye to him. There was always the sense in an interview with Trudeau that there was no script, that anything might happen. Part of that feeling came from the fact that he was as much the questioner as the questioned, that he, too, was putting out a challenge.

  Over the years Trudeau came to be seen as increasingly hostile to the media, but the truth was likely more complex. An intensely private man, he nonetheless never got out of the habit of taking planeloads of journalists with him whenever he travelled, and many of his diatribes against them seemed to have come from a desire not so much to be free of them as to improve them, to make them understand the seriousness of the task they were involved in. At the Commonwealth conference in London, when he had threatened to pry into journalists’ private lives as they had pried into his, his point had been that they, too, were public figures with public responsibilities.

  The media never quite lived up to Trudeau’s standards, yet at some level he must have understood that much of what he was, much of what he was seen to be, he owed to them. “I’m kind of sorry I won’t have you to kick around anymore,” he said, parodying Nixon, when in 1979 he announced what he thought would be his retirement. But there seemed real affection in the jibe. Some ten years earlier, when Trudeau was still in his honeymoon phase, Barbara Frum had asked Patrick Watson, “When Trudeau talks to you, Patrick, who’s more in control, you or Trudeau?” The truth, perhaps, as in the interview with Norman DePoe, was neither. It was, rather, that quality in Trudeau, as Marshall McLuhan had seen, that said, “Just watch me.”

  In the short term, Trudeau’s ratings reached their highest levels after the October Crisis, though they did not stay there long enough to spare him near-humiliation in the election of 1972. In the interim, however, he would have a second honeymoon with the Canadian public, and his first private one, when his marriage to the woman on whose shoulder he had secretly wept at the death of Pierre Laporte, Margaret Sinclair, would briefly return him to the glory of the days of Trudeaumania.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the Bedrooms of the Nation

  Trudeau’s secret marriage to Margaret Sinclair on March 4, 1971, broke many hearts and started a chapter in Trudeau’s life that for some time to come would provide exactly the sort of copy in the international press that Trudeau had always abhorred, even as a part of him seemed to court it. The few short years that the marriage encompassed were in some ways a defining period both for Trudeau himself and for the country. Many people who couldn’t name a single Trudeau policy initiative from the 1970s can still remember what Maggie wore when she met the Queen, or which head of state’s wife she composed a poem for, or what infant child she had with her on the visit to Fidel Castro. By the time of her infamous weekend with the Rolling Stones a mere six years after her marriage, she had left the country with a sense of having forever shed its image as a bad mix of staid Presbyterianism and priest-ridden Catholicism. She had also left Pierre with three sons, two born Christmas Day, who would make him seem in his later years the perfect family man even as he reverted to his days of swinging bachelorhood.

  The daughter of a former Liberal cabinet minister, Margaret had met Trudeau briefly in Tahiti during Christmas 1967. They had discussed Plat
o then, she said afterwards, though Trudeau had not made much of an impression on her, her attention being taken up with a handsome young Frenchman named Yves. It was not until two years later, when, as prime minister, he showed up in Vancouver and took her out on a date, that she was stricken. “Call me up if you’re ever in Ottawa,” he said, a line he had apparently used more than once, and overnight Margaret decided to abandon her search for hippiehood, move to Ottawa, and apply for a government job. Trudeau may have been a bit shocked when this waif to whom he had issued a casual invitation suddenly showed up at his doorstep having thrown over her entire life. What started out as an on-again, off-again dalliance, however, slowly took on the rhythm of an actual relationship. In Margaret’s version of things Trudeau never actually proposed to her, merely put the idea of marriage before her as a matter of negotiation. He set some tasks: she had to prove she could remain faithful, and she had to give up dope. After she had gone several months without a joint or a sexual lapse, the date was set, and on March 5, 1971, the country learned, with some giddiness, that their perpetual-bachelor prime minister had tied the knot. From the outside, the whole matter had the air of a storybook marriage, though as it came to unravel in the following years the storybook image would give way to a tabloid one that proved all the more riveting.

  Trudeau was fifty-one when he married, and Margaret Sinclair, a mere twenty-two then, was hardly his first love. Margaret’s contention that he was reluctant to marry her because he thought she would leave him has the ring of truth: for all the image of Trudeau as someone afraid to commit, in the few great romances of his life it had always been the woman who had ended the relationship. This was the case, in a sense, even with the woman who was arguably the first true love of his life, his mother, Grace, who had remained a central presence in his life well into the 1960s. While Grace Trudeau kept almost no records of her own life or of her husband’s, she was as scrupulous an archivist of Pierre’s life, according to John English, as he himself would be in his early years, keeping detailed records of his progress from the day of his birth and continuing to build her archive on him into her dotage. Right from Pierre’s earliest years she had had high hopes for him, and after her husband’s death he became the focus of her attentions and her closest confidant and companion. Whenever he was away she kept up a steady correspondence with him. “Every time the postman comes I make a rush for the letters, hoping to hear from you,” she wrote him the year he was studying in Paris. That spring she joined him there and toured the south of France with him on the back of his Harley-Davidson.

  By the time Pierre met Maggie, however, Grace had also essentially abandoned Trudeau, already suffering from dementia. In Beyond Reason, Margaret spoke of Grace with great fondness, giving her the credit for Trudeau’s turning out “as generous, tolerant and understanding as he is.” Most of her impressions of Grace, however, would necessarily have had to come to her through Trudeau, and some of Trudeau’s earlier loves, whose experience of Grace had been more firsthand, had not been quite so well disposed to her. “‘Formidable’ is the word Trudeau sometimes uses to describe his father,” Richard Gwyn observed in The Northern Magus. “Everyone else applies it to his mother.” Trudeau himself always praised his mother for the tremendous freedom she allowed him, but while she may never have openly disapproved of any of his relationships, her shadow always loomed behind them. “It was something of a shock to me as well as to you,” she wrote to Pierre when she learned one of the great loves of his life had broken off with him. “When I realized how serious was the rift, especially as I had begun to take the girl to heart—which requires time for such an adjustment! Blood is thicker than water you know I often say.”

  John English gives a rich portrait of Trudeau’s early loves in Citizen of the World, one that reveals a man rather at odds with the Casanova figure he would often later be seen as. “I don’t want to go out with girls before I am twenty years old because they would distract me,” he wrote in his journal at Brébeuf, but then at eighteen he fell in love with a Franco-American girl, Camille Corriveau, whom he had met at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, where the family vacationed. Pierre shared his first kiss with Camille, but their relationship was decidedly puritan by contemporary standards, consisting mainly of letters and brief summer encounters. This was the first of several of Trudeau’s relationships that would be primarily epistolary and intellectual rather than carnal. Camille eventually fell in love with and married a fellow Franco-American and her relationship with Pierre shifted into mere friendship, another pattern that would repeat itself. Grace called on Camille in New England some years later while visiting Pierre’s brother Tip at Harvard and reported cattily back to Pierre that she was up to her ears in diapers with “no help from outside—does all her own work.”

  By then, however, Trudeau was already in hot correspondence with the woman he seemed destined for, Thérèse Gouin, the daughter of a Liberal senator and the descendant of a long line of progressive French-Canadian politicians that included two former Quebec premiers. Attractive, well educated, wealthy, ambitious, and fluently bilingual, she was a match for both Trudeau’s intelligence and his social class, and was considered suitable marriage material, Clarkson and McCall note in Trudeau and Our Times, even by Trudeau’s “notoriously sniffy” mother. For two years Trudeau wrote letters to her from Harvard of increasing ardour and intensity, confessing his love as well as his own loneliness and selfdoubt. Yet he had already made arrangements to study in Paris by the time he finished at Harvard, then spent half of the intervening summer, astoundingly, not in Montreal with his beloved but working at a gold mine in Abitibi. Thérèse, a psychology student, must have seen red flags in every direction. In Paris Trudeau began to see a psychoanalyst, but then grew jealous of the analysis Thérèse herself was undergoing as part of her training. According to Clarkson and McCall, Trudeau had made clear to Thérèse by then his resolutely traditional expectations of a wife: someone who would sacrifice her own ambitions in order to “manage his household affairs prudently, and raise his children wisely.” Thérèse, who clearly had no intention of sacrificing herself, grew more sparing in her correspondence, delivering the coup de grâce when Trudeau returned to Montreal the following summer. Trudeau took the blow hard. By now he was nearly twenty-eight, and, as his notes from his analysis show, he was still a virgin.

  BACK IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES, Trudeau had outlined a strategy for his future relations with women. “I must continually work for perfection and become likable, obliging, and gallant (what a word!).” It would be some years before he managed to get the strategy right. For all his casual playboy image in later life, his early relationships were all marked by an intensity and need that inevitably led to their demise.

  It was in Ottawa, during his time with the Privy Council, that the first signs of the later Trudeau style began to emerge. After the Ottawa Citizen, clearly at a loss for hard news, ran a front-page article on a twenty-year-old Swedish bombshell just hired on at the Swedish Embassy who spoke five languages and had studied French literature at Lausanne, Trudeau set out to woo her. His commitment to chastity had apparently ended by then, and within a matter of months he and Helen Segerstrale were an item and she was sending him billets-doux from the embassy signed “Puss.” “I feel like a young debutante, who has the love of a young man who must write sentimental things to the object of his great desire.” When they began to talk seriously of marriage, however, fault lines appeared in the relationship. Trudeau’s mother took it upon herself to help Helen in the matter of her conversion to Catholicism, which for Pierre was a nonnegotiable precondition to their marriage. Helen was not averse but found there was some difference between the personalist Catholicism that Pierre talked about and the priestly Catholicism that still reigned in Quebec. Meanwhile Pierre, characteristically, chose this moment to quit his job and set off for Europe. He had arranged to meet Helen in Gibraltar, but Helen never showed, sending a Dear John letter instead: she had met someone new. “My love, I
love you,” she had written earlier, “I always have and always will to the end of the world. My love, is this itself not enough? Evidently not, because you seem to say that I don’t express my love well enough or often enough.”

  This was to be Trudeau’s last serious brush with marriage until he met Margaret. From this point on the playboy image took over, and the women in his life became less girl-friends than “companions.” There would be a number of these women over the years, both before and after Margaret, in relationships that might stretch on for years but that often overlapped with other ones, frequently to the women’s surprise. “I don’t remember why I became a bachelor,” he would tell Norman DePoe. “It happened so long ago that I don’t think I could tell you.” Over the course of his life he would have far greater success with bachelorhood than he would ever have with marriage, though even women who knew him in his later years would say that his conquests were not quite so extensive as his public image suggested. As Margot Kidder put it:

  I know morality is not much in fashion these days, but Pierre was someone who just could not give up the habit. And anyway, you always sensed with him that his own heart had been broken way, way back down the line by someone—a woman, his father perhaps, a cruel school chum—and he had vowed to not pass on his infection.

  Two women he would grow very close to in the years before Margaret were Carroll Guérin and Madeleine Gobeil. Guérin was an artist and model who was frequently seen with Trudeau through the late 1950s and into the 1960s and to whom Trudeau was attracted for exactly the sort of independence and unconventionality he seemed unable to tolerate in a prospective spouse. By now, however, Trudeau had learned to curb the precipitous intensity that had spelled the end of his earlier relationships. Correspondence again played its part, as he and Guérin often found themselves on different continents, though they spent a happy summer together in Rome and on the Riviera in the early 1960s. Afterwards Guérin moved to England, but while Trudeau visited her there and continued to write to her during his first years in Ottawa, the relationship never seemed to move beyond its initial open-endedness.