As the leadership contest entered the home stretch, Tory leader Robert Stanfield and national party president Dalton Camp had already drawn their own conclusions. If Trudeau won, he could not be defeated in a general election. “It is going to be Trudeau and it is going to be bad for us,” Camp told Stanfield. “It was because of you people in the media, making him into a god,” Camp later chided a CBC News crew. “He was so beautiful, he was so lovely, he was so gorgeous, he was so intellectual, and he could quote from Descartes and Socrates. And everybody was having orgasms every time he opened his mouth.”96
Yet if, as popular mythology would have it, Canadians had lost their minds and Trudeaumania was sweeping the land in the days before the Liberal leadership convention, the phenomenon was invisible to pollsters. A late March CBC poll, for example, put Trudeau in first place for delegate support but with only 606 votes out of 2,475.97 Two other polls followed in short order and showed the same results. One of Trudeau’s main supporters, Bryce Mackasey, stated confidently that Trudeau was well past the “sound barrier” of 700 votes on the first ballot, but this number put him nowhere near certain victory.
Meanwhile, a Canadian Institute of Public Opinion poll published on March 20, 1968, showed that most Canadians wanted a cautious English Canadian with a business background to be prime minister. And they did not care whether he was telegenic.98
CHAPTER SEVEN
WE WANT TRUDEAU!
The morning of Tuesday, April 2, 1968, Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp held a news conference in Ottawa to announce that he was pulling out of the Liberal leadership race and backing Pierre Trudeau. “I’m not supporting Mr. Trudeau because I think he’s going to win,” Sharp told the roughly 150 journalists who had shown up, “but because I want him to win. I would have preferred to beat Mr. Trudeau. But I preferred Mr. Trudeau to the rest of the candidates.”1 Sharp added that although he had consulted with the prime minister before withdrawing, the decision was entirely his own. No one in the Trudeau camp knew this announcement was coming. They read about it in the Toronto Star.
At 2:20 p.m. the next day, April 3, Pierre Trudeau arrived in Ottawa from Montreal by train. News of Sharp’s support gave Trudeau a huge lift heading into the convention, scheduled to begin the next day. “Trudeau paraît maintenant invincible” (“Trudeau Now Seems Invincible”) declared a front-page headline in Le Devoir.2 As he descended from the train, Trudeau was greeted by a gaggle of reporters and an estimated two hundred Liberal party boosters—most of them orange-clad teenagers hoisting placards and shouting pro-Trudeau slogans. (Supporters of all of the candidates dressed in distinctive costumes and colours. Trudeau’s happened to be orange.)
Trudeau was driven in an open motorcade to Parliament Hill, with reporters and camera operators trailing in their own cars. He headed directly to his own West Block office, where he met in private with Mitchell Sharp. From there, the two men walked together to the National Press Building for a news conference that had been choreographed the day before by Trudeau’s organization. Four members of the Pearson cabinet were on hand to show their support: Jean Marchand, Jean Chrétien, Edgar Benson, and Bryce Mackasey. Chrétien had committed to Sharp before Trudeau had entered the race. At the press conference, he had the look of a man who was relieved at having a second chance to back the only French Canadian in the contest.3 Seeing such Liberal firepower lined up behind Trudeau, a journalist asked him, “Is this your first Cabinet meeting?”4
Trudeau was clearly delighted to have Sharp in his camp. “Mr. Sharp’s support means more than just more delegate votes,” he said. “It means I have the confidence of a man of great ability and great integrity whom I have known and admired for many years.”5 Both men stated categorically that there had been no backroom deals. Trudeau had made it a precondition of his candidacy that he would never be beholden to anyone. “I have not made any promises,” he insisted. “I have not said to anyone, ‘If you run, you will be a minister.’ It is not that important to me to be prime minister. It is very important to be prime minister in order to get my ideas across, but in order to get them through I have to feel free and I do not want to be saddled with 100 promises or 200 that I cannot fulfill.”6 In the hotel suites of Trudeau supporters who had crowded into Ottawa for the convention, there were toasts of “Sharp is dead, long live Trudeau!”7 For the duration of the convention, Sharp, wearing a big “Pierre” button and a placid smile, would work to rally support for Trudeau. As Peter C. Newman noted, Sharp’s endorsement was gold to Trudeau since it conferred on him the blessing of the Liberal “establishment.”8
Newman’s observation proved prescient. On April 4, the day after the paper had singled out Kierans, Martin, and Hellyer as the three most desirable leadership candidates, the Globe and Mail endorsed Trudeau with an editorial entitled “A Man Who Can Lead.” Trudeau had stated his position on national unity, individual rights, economic nationalism, social welfare, NATO, and a host of other concrete matters of concern to Canadians, said the editorial. He had proven himself “flexible, inventive, imaginative,” and he had shown “the courage to act where others have been content to sit.” More significantly, he had excited Canadians “into arguments over issues and values and goals” and “made them feel their opinions are important.”
Delegates could either sit in “the old Canadian cabana with some other delegate,” concluded the Globe, or “move out to make tracks with Pierre Trudeau.”9
A reception was organized for Trudeau at the Chaudière Club in Hull (now Gatineau), Quebec, the evening of April 3. The club could hold a thousand people, but more than two thousand showed up. It was a mob scene—and the first nationally televised instance of Trudeaumania. Trudeau took his time getting to the party. When he did finally arrive, he said a few words, danced for the cameras with a beautiful young woman, chatted briefly with a couple of delegates including Premier Joey Smallwood, then slipped away through a back exit. That was it.
Late the next morning, the candidates, their entourages, and 2,475 registered Liberal delegates straggled out to Ottawa’s ten-thousand-seat Civic Centre (now TD Place Arena) on the bank of the Rideau Canal, where they would spend the next three days deciding the future of their party.
The first day was taken up with policy workshops. If anyone thought Trudeau would hold his tongue and quietly ride his newfound celebrity to victory, they were mistaken. At a morning session on social policy, Trudeau spoke at length against the freewheeling expansion of an unaffordable and undiscriminating welfare state. “It is my belief that we have enough of this free stuff,” he told delegates. “We have to put a damper on this revolution of rising expectations. We must not be afraid of this bogeyman—the means test. We have to be more selective, to help those who live on uneconomic land or in city slums.”10 The speech, Trudeau’s first at the convention, vaulted instantly onto the nation’s front pages. Jack McArthur, financial editor of the Toronto Star, asserted that this “means test” remark was “possibly the single most important thing” Trudeau had said during the campaign. “Trudeau may be a man for the 20th century, but he has come up with a heckuva good 19th century idea,” wrote McArthur.11 Just for good measure, Trudeau also told a group of Western Canadian delegates that he was against farm subsidies.
As he moved between the policy sessions, Trudeau was followed by throngs of delegates and packs of journalists, so much so that other candidates complained about his hogging all the publicity.
At an afternoon workshop on the Constitution, Trudeau alone stood against rising Quebec nationalism, which had the effect, once again, of homogenizing the views of his rivals. “I believe you will never solve the problem of Canada by logic, by the mind or by the intellect alone,” said an impassioned John Turner. “You’ll solve it by the heart and you’ll solve it by the gut because that’s what Canada is all about. I believe the solution lies in negotiation and not in confrontation. This is no surrender or sellout to Quebec, but the simple realization of the need for change.”12 Paul Hellyer s
urprised delegates by claiming that constitutional reform was a simple matter of redistributing powers. “It is easy to have a new constitution that recognizes the legitimate aspirations of French-speaking Canadians but which leaves Ottawa enough powers to ensure full employment and a dynamic economy,” he said.13 Trudeau maintained a straight face and countered with a soft-spoken defence of his well-known position on the Constitution. “When we talk of constitutional matters, when we talk of federal-provincial relations, I like to think of the individual,” he said. “I believe that it is the individual human being which is the backbone of a country. This is something we got away from when we began to deal with these various problems of national unity.”14
The evening of April 4 was reserved for Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who appeared on the convention main stage at 8 p.m. to say farewell to roughly nine thousand party faithful. Pearson’s remarks were warm, spontaneous, and surprisingly sentimental, bringing tears to the eyes of many present, including his normally stoic wife Maryon and Trudeau himself. As he had done so often in recent months, Pearson referred to 1968 as “one of the most difficult periods of political development in our history.” He appealed to his audience to save the Canadian dream. “We face this problem of unity at a time when there is an organized movement to destroy it,” said Pearson. “A destiny that takes Quebec outside Canada means, simply and starkly, the end of Canada.”15
The prime minister’s words had a special meaning for members of the Quebec caucus, where Trudeau and Winters supporters had very nearly carried their clandestine squabbling into open revolt on the convention floor earlier in the day. Meanwhile, in Quebec, Pearson was venerated much as he had been in English Canada, “un grand promoteur de l’unité nationale.”16
While Pearson was delivering his remarks, word reached Ottawa that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been gunned down in Memphis at 6 p.m. local time. The African-American pastor and civil-rights leader had gone to the Tennessee city to show solidarity with striking city workers and to strategize with other activists about protest marches planned for later in the month. Relaxing on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel before heading off to dinner at the home of a local clergyman, King was shot once in the neck by a lone white gunman, James Earl Ray. He was rushed to hospital, unconscious, where he died at 7:05 p.m.
Canadians were shocked by King’s murder. The twin tragedies of his killing and the riots that devoured American cities in its aftermath dominated Canadian news coverage over the weekend of the Liberal convention and beyond.17 Everywhere in Canada, King’s singular contribution to the struggle for equality in the United States was commemorated and the man himself eulogized. Editorialists wrote in superlatives about his faith, his exemplary commitment to non-violence, and, above all, his extraordinary courage.18 Human-interest stories proliferated—about the grievous loss to the King family and to the movement he personified, the condolences of American and world leaders, and the preparations being laid for his funeral and the hundreds of memorials planned in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. It was an American tragedy, of course, but one that elicited Canadians’ deepest sympathies.
In truth, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., was but one terrible flashpoint in a downward spiral that had darkened American public life since the mid-1960s. While many Canadians were out celebrating Canada’s centennial over the hot and muggy summer of love, 1967, so-called race riots were laying waste to Detroit, Newark, and other American cities. University of Southern California historian Joseph Boskin described the carnage from his contemporary vantage point, in 1969. “The toll of the rioting over the four-year period was devastating,” he lamented. “Between 1964 and 1967, approximately 130 civilians, mainly Negroes, and 12 civil personnel, mainly Caucasian, were killed. Approximately 4,700 Negroes and civil personnel were injured. Over 20,000 persons were arrested during the melees; property damages mounted into the hundreds of millions of dollars; many cities resembled the hollowed remnants of war-torn cities.”19
A second crisis had also cast its long shadow over American life by the spring of 1968: Vietnam. U.S. military “advisers” had been active in Indochina since the early 1950s, but not until 1965 did President Lyndon Johnson commit regular U.S. troops to the defence of South Vietnam. The conflict was contentious in the United States practically from the outset, but in early 1968 public dissent burst into full flame. The Tet Offensive, which began on January 31, 1968, and included the short-term occupation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, appeared to contradict official statements that the American-backed regime in South Vietnam was winning the war. President Johnson was forced to fight a rearguard action to contain the “credibility gap.” But he could not prevent discord about the war from dominating the 1968 primary race and virtually all North American media. Among American students, progressives, and left-leaning Democrats like Senator J. William Fulbright, anti-war sentiment soared, as did anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism in the many parts of the world where they had already taken root.
In Canada, the U.S. war in Vietnam had become a permanent fixture on the nation’s front pages and television sets well before Pierre Trudeau set his sights on the Liberal leadership. Like their American friends, Canadians became all too familiar with Vietnamese place names like Hue and Khe Sanh, and also with American military euphemisms like “strategic hamlets” and “rolling thunder.” And like their U.S. counterparts, Canadian newspaper editors put the searing images of guerrilla warfare on their front pages, including, for example, Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize‒winning photograph of South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner.20 Efforts by Washington to open peace talks were dutifully reported, alongside the mounting brutality of the war itself and the increasing incomprehensibility of American war aims (especially after General William C. Westmoreland announced that since he could not wage a war of annihilation, he would fight a war of attrition). The U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, which the normally diffident Lester Pearson had criticized publicly in Philadelphia in 1965, remained so objectionable to Canadians that in March 1968 the government seriously considered a multi-party House of Commons resolution calling for a halt.21
To Canadians on the sidelines, it was not only Vietnam that was burning but the United States as well. “Only in rare circumstances, such as a civil war, has a nation been so divided as is the United States over the Vietnam war,” stated the Globe and Mail on the eve of the 1968 New Hampshire primary. “Conflict between hawks and doves is rife at dinner parties, on campuses and at every political level; and the President’s public appearances are made mostly at military bases and his itinerary is kept secret, for fear of embarrassing—or even dangerous—mob scenes.”22 The prevailing Canadian attitude towards this U.S. crisis was a mix of pity and revulsion. Less than a decade earlier, Canadians had pilloried John Diefenbaker for his presumed anti-Americanism. In 1968, by contrast, when Pierre Trudeau casually stated that he opposed the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, or when John Turner suggested that he had no objection to American draft-dodgers taking refuge in Canada, they were saying nothing particularly controversial.
As the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., came to symbolize so poignantly, civil strife, urban violence, and Vietnam appeared to many Canadians to be turning the United States inside out. More than this, the crisis atmosphere seemed to be distorting the political process in the United States at the highest levels. It undermined any chance Lyndon Johnson might have had at re-election, and it brought powerful dissenting voices into the Democratic primaries, including Bobby Kennedy, the brother of Johnson’s slain predecessor, JFK. It also gave Republican presidential contender Richard Nixon a second lease on political life.
An Ottawa Citizen editorial published in the midst of the Liberal leadership campaign captured the American zeitgeist and its meaning for Canadian politics.
Canada’s new prime minister is chosen today at a perilous moment in history: a crossroads of hope and terror. After years of inconclusive warfare,
the gleam of hope shines through at last for Vietnam. But almost at the same time, the United States is pushed across the borderline of anarchy by the vicious murder of a great, good man. In the midst of these world-shaking events, about which Canada can at present do very little, the Liberal party must choose its new leader, the man who will become prime minister later in the month. It is a time for courage, coolness and the application of intelligence to those problems that are within our power to solve.23 Maxwell Cohen, dean of law at McGill University, agreed. “There will be little use in building a new Canada if at the same time we do not bear our full share of the continental, regional and international tasks besetting us and all of mankind.”24
It would later be said of Trudeaumania that it represented the advent of a new Canadian nationalism that had been gestating in the Pearson years and born during the 1967 centennial. But this was certainly not how Pierre Trudeau understood his own place in Canadian politics. Over the turbulent winter of 1968, nationalism had no more claim on Trudeau than ever. Nor was he sympathetic in the least to the undercurrent of anti-Americanism that was taking root among left-nationalist cultural and political elites in Canada.
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