by John English
* In February 1950 he bought two suits for $183, and, in June, a sports jacket for $35, at Tobia Felli, a Montreal Italian bespoke tailor. He had another suit made for $74 in November 1949. A suit at Eaton’s in 1950 cost about $20. TP, vol. 9, file 5. Before he resigned, his salary had increased to $3,696, a reflection more of the rise in the cost of living than of a generous government.
* Grace Trudeau had liked Helen, whom she too called “Hélène,” and she comforted Trudeau: “My dear boy it is needless to say how I feel about the turn of events—my heart aches for you-Why oh why, are you put to such suffering? I shall keep on praying that the future holds promise of happiness for you who are so kind and good—but these are God’s people whom He puts to severe tests.” In a letter a month later, Grace pointed to religious beliefs as the major difficulty: “It is always necessary to meet and iron out various opinions during the normal span of married life—let alone religious beliefs which are principles and foundations one should share.” Grace to Pierre Trudeau, Feb. 24 and March 9, 1952, TP, vol. 46, file 20. Trudeau did not write to his mother for several weeks at this time.
* Robertson was an atheist, which Trudeau probably knew. In pious Ottawa, Robertson insisted that the census record him as “atheist,” a category which the Canadian census did not then have. On Robertson, see J.L. Granatstein, A Man of Influence: Norman A. Robertson and Canadian Statecraft, 1939–1968 (Ottawa: Deneau, 1981).
* In 1992 Ron Graham asked Trudeau whether it was true that Claude Ryan had once told him to give up his wealth and that he had considered renouncing his inheritance at Harvard. He dismissed the rumour, though he added that, at Brébeuf, he had realized it was unfair that some students “were doing their homework … on the kitchen table with mother cooking the food and the rest of the family milling around and so on. And I felt it was a bit unfair that I should have a private room in my house to do work.” Citing a story by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Trudeau said that it was wrong that a Mozart could not have a piano because of poverty. “So,” he concluded, “I think there’s more sense of fairness than of guilt on my part.” Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, May 4, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 7.
* Another unsigned article in June 1951 would certainly have offended his superiors. In it he argued strongly against Canadian participation in the Korean War. He complained, as Canadian diplomats themselves did, about American policy towards Formosa (Taiwan) and the decision of the American general, Douglas MacArthur, to cross the 38th parallel and enter North Korea. However, he went beyond those complaints to attack the policies of the West towards Asia more generally and those of the United States more specifically. Everywhere, he claimed, the hallucinating fear of socialism guided American policy. Can they not understand, he asked, that their free-enterprise policies protect the most reactionary feudalism and that their evangelical promotion of democracy “refuses to the oppressed [Asians] the right to use their new liberty to create an economic system different from the biggest and the best?” “Positions sur la présente guerre,” Cité libre, May 1951, 3–11 [English and italics in the original]. In the case of Canada, he pointed out that it was always faithful to its tradition of defending the strong against the weak and “in matters of external policy, it has followed, it does follow, and it will follow.” It is not surprising that External Affairs was an early target of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968 or that Lester Pearson so strongly objected to Trudeau’s Foreign Policy Review.
CHAPTER 6
NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM
Trudeau returned to Canada to play the part in public life he had long planned and for which he had conscientiously trained at Harvard and in Paris and London. He discovered that his legal and social scientific training had value in public policy debates within the national government, but Ottawa was then too distant from Quebec—the province where he wanted to play a part. He told a later interviewer: “I had searched for a way to put [intellectual change] in motion in Quebec in order to renew ideas, old habits of thought, and old cultural customs. Cité libre was a path. Ottawa was not.”1
Those were grand hopes for a journal that had fewer than 250 subscribers, including some in Ottawa, girlfriends and relatives of the editorial team, and the former priest François Hertel, who peddled copies in Paris. Yet in Quebec in the 1950s the Catholic Index still survived, intellectual life among francophones remained centred within the church (which dominated both the colleges and the universities), and classical colleges like Brébeuf had created an elite whose members closely followed the activities of their peers. The debates occurred within this context—one Trudeau recognized in his article on functional politics in Cité libre’s first issue. Although he called there for demolition of the “totems,” he still bore witness to the Catholic and French fact in North America. The church, according to the historian Michael Behiels, “remained, even in 1950, one of the most powerful social institutions in Quebec, sharing power with the predominantly anglophone commercial and industrial institutions and the francophone political institutions. Through its diocesan and parish administrations, educational institutions at all levels, farmers’ and workers’ organizations, social service institutions, national associations of every variety, and its enormous fiscal power, the Quebec Catholic Church permeated all of the conscious and unconscious social, cultural, and political behaviour of the vast majority of French Canadians.”2
In this context the journal had attracted clerical attention almost immediately—something the editorial team had fully expected. Trudeau and Pelletier, the co-editors, shared a profound intellectual and emotional commitment to Roman Catholicism, but their criticism of the Catholic Church in Quebec was “that it preached an overly theocratic social and political philosophy which had spawned a corrupting form of clericalism.” This clericalism brought a religious dogmatism and an authoritarianism that stifled intellectual freedom in the province. Young Catholics like Trudeau and Pelletier, who had thrilled to the intellectual openness of the church in France in the postwar years, were determined to challenge it, though they had to work within the well-defined and narrow world of Quebec Catholicism.
And so, from the beginning, Cité libre tested the limits. On international matters, where Trudeau’s training and travels gained him immediate pre-eminence at the fortnightly editorial meetings, there was considerable freedom. His article opposing the Korean War, for example, reflected the opinion of many influential people in the church, the newspaper Le Devoir, and, according to the polls, the French-speaking population at large. Although it created a modest stir in Ottawa, it was largely ignored in Montreal. The real problems came for the journal when it touched on the power and the glory of the church within Quebec.3
Not surprisingly, Trudeau’s combination of playful mischief and personal independence got him into trouble first. He wrote an article attacking clericalism and, in particular, interference by the Catholic Church in secular affairs where the opinion of the priest, he argued, should count for no more than anyone else’s. He even referred mockingly to the “divine right of bishops.” Trudeau’s friends warned him that he had gone too far. Father Richard Arès, the eminent editor of the Jesuit journal Relations, indicated that Paul-Émile Léger, the archbishop of Montreal and brother of Trudeau’s friend Jules, was very concerned about the orthodoxy of Cité libre and of Trudeau personally. Monsignor Lussier, whose brother Charles was active in Cité libre, was even more troubled.4 In Relations, Trudeau’s comments provoked a harsh attack from Father Marie d’Anjou which startled Trudeau. D’Anjou had been one of his four favourite teachers at Brébeuf and, in the extreme nationalism of the war years, d’Anjou had collaborated with him in the creation of the secret revolutionary cell and promoted Trudeau as the natural leader among the group. When Trudeau questioned why he had published the article without first telling him, d’Anjou sent this reply:
But objectively, I think you deserved the criticism. Yet, I will always distinguish between your errors and you as a person. And
you were very much mistaken when you wrote that prime ministers have no more divine right than do bishops. True as far as prime ministers are concerned but heresy when you apply it to bishops. You knew that, Pierre, I’m certain. Why did you risk this pointless and inappropriate bravado in your otherwise sound and dispassionate article?
Perhaps you will think I am coming to the defence of a bad cause, that of the clergy you no longer trust. Pierre, this needs to be qualified! You know me too well—even some aspects of my personal religious experiences—to suspect me of blind loyalty. If I intervene here, it is because there are principles at stake which go infinitely beyond the cause of certain members of the clergy (however many there may be). My despair would be that you not recognize my point of view. But that is not my fear.
Then, suddenly, he changed topic:
Have you given your alms for Lent? If not I have a proposition to make, similar to the one you sent me from London three or four years ago. Once again I am coming to the assistance of an unwed mother. You know what that means. My cashbox is empty. If your finances allow it, I wonder if you could make a contribution … You need not apologize if my request arrives at an inopportune time. Thanks in any event.5
Despite his anger, Trudeau responded to d’Anjou’s request for the contribution. D’Anjou thanked him “in the name of the individual who has benefited from your wonderful charity” and promised that he would say a Mass for him during Easter week. However, he added that he had chatted with Archbishop Léger, who expressed his concerns about Cité libre.6
In the spring of 1951, Archbishop Léger summoned Gérard Pelletier and Trudeau to his office. Trudeau was still working in Ottawa and had to make a special trip to Montreal for the appointment, which finally took place in the late summer. Pelletier had already warned him that Léger had told Claude Ryan, a prominent official in the Catholic Church and then an admirer of Trudeau, that he was concerned—and that it had something to do with Cité libre.* The mood was tense for the early evening meeting.
The Archbishop made his entrance. There were the usual greetings and handshakes, then … nothing. An embarrassed silence on both sides. A bad start. Why was our host, normally at no loss for words, sitting there and smiling at us? Was he expecting explanations from us before they were even asked for? As Trudeau didn’t let out a peep, I screwed up my courage and said:
“You called us in, your Grace …”
He shifted in his chair.
“I invited you,” he corrected me. “This is not a summons, I invited you, first of all to make your acquaintance and then to draw your attention to certain points … of doctrine raised by your articles.”
After some discussion, it became clear that Trudeau had been the main offender by his comments about the “divine right of bishops,” but he did not back down. He even said that if he and Cité libre were condemned, “we would appeal to the universal Church, as is our right.” The archbishop, in response, “stared strangely” at Trudeau. Then, he passed to the next point. In “those few seconds,” Pelletier wrote later, “the fate of Cité libre was decided in the incredible atmosphere of a medieval dispute.”7
But Quebec in the fifties was no longer medieval, even if some knights of the church and state wished it to be.
When Trudeau returned to Canada in 1949 after his world trip, he found that the Quebec nationalism that had thrust him towards the barricades earlier in the decade was no longer intellectually compelling or emotionally consuming. The Quebec Catholic Church, which had absorbed him earlier, now seemed marginalized from the engrossing debates he had encountered on his travels, particularly in France. There was, for him, a striking dissonance in his home province. In many ways Quebec was part of the general North American prosperity, with its new highways, stores crammed with merchandise, telephones that worked, and electricity that no longer flickered or disappeared. Yet in other ways it lagged, and, for Trudeau and his colleagues at Cité libre, the church had become the barrier not only to progress but to a richer spiritual life. In the diverse countries he visited, Trudeau had seen the boundaries changing, and he was becoming convinced that the essence of freedom for groups and individuals alike was the right to choose their identity.
Yet in defining his own identity he was still, at this time, preeminently French and Catholic, and he sought change within that mould. In his two years in Ottawa, his relationship with Helen Segerstrale is revealing: he wrote to her in French, they escaped to Montreal whenever they could, and his commitment to the Catholic faith became an obstacle between them. He did not wear British woollens or read the New Yorker magazine as his fellow mandarins did. Although he learned a lot about the Canadian political system through his work, his emotional and intellectual commitment to Canada’s national political system remained weak.
As the 1950s progressed, however, Trudeau would develop an intellectual appreciation of Canada as a potentially successful state. Gradually this cerebral admiration would win over his emotional loyalty too. In these years he began to form the sense of Canadian identity that he later expressed eloquently in his political life, as both an author and an actor in the Quebec and the Canadian political process. The route he followed at this time, however, has perplexed scholars who objectively study his career, just as it did his closest personal friends.
In the fifties Trudeau often appeared to be aimless, if not dilettantish. The conservative nationalists with whom he had worked in the early forties, such as the Union nationale politician Daniel Johnson, dismissed him as a “dandy,” a rich, unreliable playboy who made no serious contribution to the political scene. Even Pelletier became so frustrated by Trudeau’s eclectic ways and frequent journeys to exotic destinations that he inquired: “Pierre, isn’t it a catastrophe to be born rich?” Another friend bluntly asked, “What are you going to do when you grow up, Trudeau?” Thérèse Casgrain, the leading Quebec feminist and socialist who worked closely with him in the 1950s, also expressed impatience with his habit of “launching ideas or movements, only to lose interest or turn to something else.” Reporters impressed by his quick intelligence and articulate arguments frequently qualified their praise by remarking on his lack of perseverance and sustained focus. An irritated Maurice Duplessis dismissed his old friend Charlie Trudeau’s son as “lazy, spoiled, and subversive.”8
True, Trudeau was single, and it did give him a freedom that Pelletier, for instance, who had a wife and children, did not possess. Some of his other colleagues, even if they were bachelors, had jobs at universities or colleges or with Catholic trade unions, and they feared losing positions and salaries because of clerical wrath. Trudeau also had the independence that wealth brings. His net worth in the early fifties remains unclear, but Belmont Park, one of his principal investments, flourished, and the stock market and real estate provided handsome returns. His mother’s money was available to him if he needed it, but, clearly, he did not. He derived enough from his trust, and, as the elder brother, he managed the estate with the assistance of an accountant and bankers. At that time, travellers needed banker’s drafts for extended periods abroad. They were not automatic and most had limits placed on amounts that could be withdrawn. Trudeau, however, quickly obtained letters that allowed him to draw on funds in Canada, and most of them specified no limit.
To many observers, it seemed that Trudeau lived like a hedonist. Gérard Filion of Le Devoir called him a bohemian, but it was a peculiar bohemianism. He lived in his mother’s gracious house, where she or the servants looked after all his daily needs. He wore expensive clothes, drove a Jaguar first and then a treasured Mercedes 300SL convertible, courted stunningly beautiful young women, and travelled to foreign locales whenever he felt like it. He frequented the bars on Crescent and the galleries on Sherbrooke, and, after his mother became president of the Montreal Symphony women’s association in 1951, he often joined her in the finest seats at the concerts. With his colleagues, however, he often appeared indifferent to money—and understandably so, given that nearly all his youth
ful friends, except for Roger Rolland, lacked it.*
Yet Trudeau did not hesitate to appear ostentatious when the mood struck. Jean Fournier, a witty and charming External Affairs officer Trudeau sometimes socialized with in his Ottawa days, recalled that, one icy winter day, he and his wife urged Trudeau not to risk the motorbike trip to Montreal. Instead, Trudeau appeared at their house the following Monday morning “behind the wheel of a brand-new American car.” Their young sons shrieked with pleasure when Trudeau scooped them up and drove them to school. The story reveals not only Trudeau’s wealth and independence but his remarkable ways with children—who always loved his own childlike playfulness.9
Youngsters also appreciated his generosity. His brother, Tip, who remained a close friend, shared his family with his bachelor brother. Tip’s wife, Andrée, who adored Trudeau, gently chastised him for the abundance of gifts he bestowed on his nieces and nephews at Christmas and when he returned from exotic locales. A cottage neighbour said his five young daughters often heard complaints about Pierre’s arrogance or distance but could not believe it of the older man, who charmed with his many tricks and listened to each of them as if there were no one else on earth. The stories about Trudeau’s interaction with children are absolutely consistent.10