Citizen of the World

by John English

  Trudeau had other reasons, too, for his reservations about the Liberal government. The Radio-Canada strike had made Lévesque into a nationalist angry with the government of Canada, though he remained a secularist modernizer and became part of a group identified as neonationalists—a group that included André Laurendeau, the journalist Pierre Laporte, and the academic Léon Dion. Trudeau dissented ever more strongly from the neo-nationalist position, and the presence of many neo-nationalists in the new Lesage government bothered him. These differences divided Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, who tended to follow Trudeau’s lead, from those who became the Quebec intellectual mainstream after June 1960.

  There had been signs of the future division earlier in Cité libre. In 1957 Léon Dion had issued a mild dissent from the general tone of Trudeau’s analysis of Quebec society. He criticized the “pessimistic nationalism” of Michel Brunet and the so-called Montreal school of historians in a Cité libre article that did not mention Trudeau. Correspondence makes clear, however, that Trudeau, who at the time shared some of Brunet’s analysis, was also a target. Trudeau published the article after considerable editorial debate. The following year, in another journal, Dion criticized Trudeau in more detail, arguing that he ignored the existence of some democratic institutions within Quebec while being too vague about what democracy itself represented. He wrote that Trudeau’s bleak assessment of the dominance of the clerical and conservative elite and of the obstacles to democracy in Quebec ignored moments in Quebec’s history, such as the Rebellion in the 1830s and responsible government in the 1840s, when democratic tendencies were strengthened. Trudeau’s focus on unions and democracy was too narrow, his despair too sterile, he charged.

  Earlier, Pierre Laporte, Le Devoir’s senior political reporter, had also reproached Trudeau, “my good friend,” for his pessimism after hearing a presentation he made to the Institut canadien des affaires publiques. Laporte claimed that Trudeau went too far when he said that “French Canada had produced nothing, not a thinker, a researcher, a man of letters or a professional worthy of the name.” Trudeau, moreover, was dead wrong when he claimed that English Canadians had given democracy as a gift to French Canadians. Like Dion, Laporte asked what they should make of the blood spilt and the battles won by the patriots in the 1830s and 1840s once representative and responsible government came to Quebec.9 “A gift from the English?” Hardly.

  These emerging divisions were reflected within the Cité libre team itself. Although some of the younger writers and their supporters were at loggerheads with the founding fathers, the fall of the Union nationale suddenly drew enormous attention to the journal. Despite sporadic publication and limited circulation, they all knew it had played a major part in expressing and disseminating intellectual dissent throughout the 1950s. Dion might have had differences with Trudeau, the editor, but he recognized the journal’s significance in a February 1958 letter to him: “It is here that I see the immense usefulness of ‘Cité libre’—it allows us to express our thoughts with ease before and for our contemporaries.”10

  In the summer of 1960 Cité libre was reorganized under the business leadership of Jacques Hébert, who had experience running Vrai as well as a successful new publishing house, Éditions de l’homme. By broadening the journal’s group of supporters, he turned it into a financial success: its subscriptions increased dramatically from under one thousand to over seven thousand at one point. English-Canadian subscriptions soared as the intelligentsia in the rest of Canada struggled to understand what was happening in Quebec. Yet, as so often occurs, this success bred even more dissension as Trudeau’s hesitations about the Lesage government, on the one hand, and his criticisms of the Parti social démocratique, on the other, created friction with earlier sympathizers such as Paul Gérin-Lajoie and René Lévesque, who were themselves ministers in the new government, and Pierre Vadeboncoeur and Marcel Rioux, who were becoming ever more strongly socialist and nationalist.

  Then, suddenly, the spectre of separatism began to disrupt their deliberations. The first but still minor explosion came on September 10, 1960, when about thirty mostly young Quebec francophones in a Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN) issued a manifesto that called for the “total” independence of Quebec.

  As the newspapers reported the RIN manifesto, sometimes dismissively but often with curiosity, and the Lesage government began its fundamental reforms of Quebec’s educational and social system, Pierre Trudeau and Jacques Hébert were flying over the Atlantic with the hope of visiting China. Hébert and Trudeau obviously enjoyed each other’s company, even though they were very different: Hébert, an extrovert who laced his life with wry but regular humour; Trudeau, essentially an introvert whose pranks were invariably ingenious. They shared a love of the unexpected and the mysterious and a distrust of the mighty and the meretricious. By the sixties, they had forged a partnership based on their love of exotic travel and their sometimes playful but often deadly serious attack on the establishment—whatever it might be.

  Both men, but especially Hébert, were outraged when Wilbert Coffin was hanged on February 10, 1956, on questionable evidence, for the murder of three Pennsylvania hunters. The American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, personally contacted Quebec authorities on the case, Duplessis responded as requested, and the conviction came quickly after the judge charged the jury with the words “I have faith that you will set an example for your district, for your province, and for the whole of your country before the eyes of America, which counts on you, and which has followed all the details of the trial.” This disgraceful charge, the fawning government response to American intervention, and the flimsiness of the evidence outraged the lawyer Trudeau and the crusading civil libertarian Hébert. For a decade, their demand for posthumous justice for Coffin bonded them in their mission.11

  This commitment also made them defiant in the face of American and conservative Canadian challenges. China intrigued them, both in itself and as a challenge to orthodoxy. Except for a photograph, Trudeau omitted mention of this six-week trip from his memoirs, even though he and Hébert had written a book, Two Innocents in Red China, describing it. Three others accompanied them: Denis Lazure, a psychiatrist and future separatist politician; Micheline Legendre, one of Canada’s great puppeteers; and Madeleine Parent, a leftist union activist. They were a peculiar quintet encountering an enigma. Although Canada had begun trading with Communist China in mild defiance of the Americans, there were no formal diplomatic ties between the two countries. The group formed a “delegation” whereby they all officially visited sites appropriate to their particular background. In Trudeau’s case that meant courts and related institutions.

  The Chinese had invited one hundred French Canadians to visit their country, but only twenty, according to Trudeau and Hébert, “dared to answer.” Most of those invited feared for their reputations should they accept. The authors, however, felt they were “pretty well immune to reprisals.” Both “had been generously reproved, knocked off, and abolished in the integralist and reactionary press in consequence of earlier journeys behind the iron curtain.” Thus, “the prospect of being assassinated yet again on their return from China was hardly likely to impress” either of them.

  In the Shanghai chapter, Trudeau ruefully complained that his mischievous companions had told his solicitous hosts that he loved sea slugs. As a result, every day they served him the “quite repulsive beast which lives in slime and looks like a fat, brownish worm covered with bumps.” Trudeau had fled Shanghai in 1949 as Mao’s armies neared. He found it “strange to come back after eleven years to a city that used to embody all the fascination, all the intrigue, all the violence and mystery that could arise from the collision of East and West.” Now the beggars and wounded soldiers were gone; the streets were clean, and no one wore rags. The bars and brothels of earlier days had disappeared; the city went to bed at 11:30; and “Shanghai has become an industrious city.” One night Trudeau escaped from his insistent and sometimes
imperious guide, Mr. Hou, and wandered through the streets at midnight. He found nary a bar or a café but, in the city’s parks, saw “several young couples [with] their arms round each other’s waists [who were] kissing.” The sight appealed to his warm, romantic side and broke the monotony of the too “industrious” city.

  On October 1, the anniversary of the Communist victory, the Canadians and the other guests stood atop the gate at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and witnessed tens of thousands dancing and celebrating below them while fireworks turned the heavens into daylight. As Mr. Hou began to escort the guests back to their hotel, Trudeau hid behind a pillar, then suddenly darted away into the crowd and disappeared. “What happened,” Hébert wrote, “we shall never know exactly, nor are we convinced that Trudeau remembers it clearly himself. He took part in weird and frenzied dances, in impromptu skits, in delightful flirtations.” Later, he described “exotic orchestras, costumes of the moon people, strange friendships and new scents … dark tresses, inquisitive children, laughing adolescents, brotherly and joyful men.” The memory lingered of lights dimming and faint footsteps in dark alleys, and a long walk back to the hotel in the early dawn.12

  In his epilogue, Trudeau said that his purpose in writing the book was to dispel the notion of “the Yellow Peril.” The real threat, he concluded, is “not the Yellow Peril of our nightmares; it is the eventual threat of economic rivalry in the markets of the world, and the nearer threat of an ideological success that is already enabling China to help … the even poorer countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”13 He said that the “two China” policy of recognizing China and Taiwan as sovereign entities was unacceptable and dangerous. It was American “prestige” that prevented the acceptance of China in the international arena, but, in a thermonuclear age, “innocents” must ask whether Taiwan is “worth the trouble of setting off the final thermonuclear holocaust.” Trudeau himself did not worry about the “China threat” during his own lifetime. China had too much to do internally; its history was not that of an aggressor, unlike the nations of the West. Hébert and Trudeau did get to meet Mao, “one of the great men of the century,” who possessed “a powerful head, an unlined face, and a look of wisdom tinged with melancholy. The eyes of that tranquil face are heavy with having seen too much of the misery of men.”14

  A largely handwritten draft of the book is preserved in Trudeau’s papers, and it indicates that Hébert was the principal author and Trudeau mainly the editor. Trudeau’s most substantial contribution is the chapter on Shanghai and the epilogue, although Hébert claimed that Trudeau made constant changes to drafts of other sections. Perhaps because of this shared authorship, the two friends wrote in the third person in their book.

  Hébert published the volume and launched it at the Cercle Universitaire on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal on March 28, 1961. Fortunately for them, the anticipated attacks on their “innocent” presentation of “Red China” were few. Indeed, several priests came to the elegant book launch and eagerly sought the authors’ autographs. In his speech that evening, Trudeau called for Canadian recognition of China and again predicted, accurately, that China would someday challenge the West not only in ideology but also in trade.15

  Almost half a century later, Trudeau’s prediction of the economic challenge of China is fulfilled. Yet today we also know that the misery the travellers saw in Mao’s eyes was very often of his own dictatorial making. In their well-received biography of Mao, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday strongly criticized Trudeau and Hébert for their naïve views of China. The “starry-eyed” travellers, they wrote, ignored all the evidence of famine that refugees in Hong Kong reported in detail to anyone who would bother to listen. In their own book, Trudeau and Hébert did dismiss these reports. Pre-Communist China, they said, was a place “where unspeakable misery and deadly famine were the lot of the unemployed and their whole families. Unemployment meant death by hunger and cold.” With Communism, in contrast, all Chinese had work: “This means precisely that it has been able to guarantee them the right to live. Before this fundamental fact, all our Western reflections on the arduous nature of work in China, on female labour, on the wretched standard of living, on the totalitarian régime, appear as ineffectual quibbles.”*

  Today, these reflections are clearly no longer “ineffectual quibbles.” As Trudeau, Hébert, and the other Western guests participated in long banquets where wine flowed and food abounded, over twenty million Chinese died in the great famine of 1960. While Chinese starved, Mao showered funds on Indonesia, Africa, Cuba, and Albania, seeking to become the “model” for the post-colonial world that Trudeau and Hébert had heralded. But in the epilogue, Trudeau appeared to have some premonition of what was to come: “It is true that, if the authors … are guilty of anything, it is naïveté. We had the naïveté to believe that what we saw with our own eyes did exist; and the further naïveté to think our readers capable of making the necessary adjustments in the often outrageous claims made by our Chinese informants.”16

  Indeed, the Canadians became part of a theatre directed by Mao without realizing that they were players. Yet Trudeau was perceptive in early recognizing that China was forming the base for a strong industrial society and correct in his assessment that the majority of Chinese themselves had more confidence in the regime than they had had in the ramshackle and corrupt quasi-democracy of 1949. Even if the travellers failed to learn about the horrible events in the countryside simply because they did not ask enough questions (and would likely not have received honest answers if they had), they were correct in their analysis that the increased literacy in the cities and in large areas of the country would be a powerful and positive force for future transformation.

  Trudeau was not alone in his overly sanguine view of China. In a review of the book the following year, the writer Naim Kattan observed that the authors exhibited no ideological bias. “Some readers,” he wrote, might find it “a negative description of China”; others might declare it uncritical. “It all depends on the colour of the glasses a person wears. Jacques Hébert and Pierre Trudeau did not wear any.” They reported what they saw, and they did not know that so much was concealed from them—their myopia was shared by many others at the time. Chang and Halliday denounced not only Trudeau and Hébert but also the future French president François Mitterrand, and the former head of the Food and Agricultural Organization, John Boyd-Orr, who commented that China was feeding its people well. Even Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the hero of the Battle of El Alamein, denied reports of widespread famine and dismissed criticisms of Mao. China, he declared, “needs the chairman,” who must not “abandon the ship.”17 Others followed in this same positive vein for many years, including the quintessential realist Henry Kissinger, who bantered most banally with the Chinese leader about sexual appetites.*

  Given Trudeau’s response to other leaders and nations around this time, it’s fair to ask a broader question: Was he generally too sympathetic to authoritarian regimes of the left? Trudeau’s comments about China under Mao followed not long after his optimistic assessment of the Soviet Union during the last months of Stalin’s madness. He also became an early advocate of Fidel Castro, visiting Havana after his failed canoe trip to Cuba. There he met “Che Guevara, with his cigar, mingling with the guests and everything else.” He did not meet Castro, although he attended a huge rally where Castro “made a great speech … and people were just mesmerized by him.”18 And in 1976 he became the first NATO leader to visit Cuba. At home, in his long battle with Duplessis in Quebec, Trudeau had been a strong proponent of “democracy,” “civil liberties,” and “individual” rights—yet it was obvious that the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao in particular were guilty of abundant human rights abuses. Trudeau did change his views of the Soviet Union and Stalin after Khrushchev’s dramatic revelations in 1956. Yet even if he saw little state oppression in China, no objective observer would suggest that the values of democracy and human rights were cherished in the Chinese Communist sta
te—or, for that matter, in the Soviet Union and Cuba. While acknowledging that many others failed to penetrate the thick curtains concealing famine, human rights abuses, and brutality, we have to admit that Trudeau, despite Kattan’s review, did have some rose colour in his glasses.

  There are a number of reasons for his seemingly contradictory approach. To begin with, Pierre Trudeau often reacted against conventional views, and, when he visited the Soviet Union in 1952 and China in 1960, stern anti-Communism was the dominant political current in North America. Already it had caused numerous abuses of civil rights in North America itself. Trudeau’s travelling partner Madeleine Parent and her husband, Kent Rowley, had endured the fierce sting of irrational anti-Communism from the Quebec police, the RCMP, and the press. These events establish a context for Trudeau, who loathed the careless anti-Communism of Duplessis, the anti-Soviet diatribes of Conservative leader George Drew, and the McCarthyism that tainted American public life in the 1950s. They pricked him towards contrary actions. As Robert Ford, Canada’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, later remarked, Trudeau was by nature “antiestablishment” and the Soviets were never the establishment—even on the left.19

  A complex and peculiar incident that occurred during the 1960 Quebec election campaign illustrates Trudeau’s sensitivities on this score. Abbé Gérard Saint-Pierre, in dismissing one of Trudeau’s election comments, called him “the Canadian Karl Marx” in a Trois-Rivières newspaper sympathetic to the Union nationale. A Quebec court had recently held that calling someone a Communist was libellous. Trudeau decided to take action but, interestingly, followed Catholic canon law rather than pursuing the case in civil court. Accordingly, he asked Georges-Léon Pelletier, the bishop of Trois-Rivières, to demand a retraction from Saint-Pierre; otherwise, he threatened to turn to the secular courts. Bishop Pelletier answered on June 20, noting that Trudeau had once said that Lenin was “a remarkable sociologist.” He added: “In common parlance, Karl Marx personifies socialism whether it be political or economic. It is difficult therefore to prove that one can associate this description with heresy, much less communism.” Pelletier cleverly concluded that “the label ‘communist’ actually preceded Karl Marx.” Trudeau therefore deserved no retraction.