After June 5, neither Trudeau’s RCMP guards nor local police forces were taking any chances. At his Sudbury talk, twenty plainclothes police officers were assigned to him. Everywhere Trudeau now went, sharpshooters were placed on rooftops overlooking his speaking venues and his helicopter landing sites. The number of local security police in the prime minister’s motorcades came to rival or exceed the number of VIPs riding with him. Journalists and even his own aides were now routinely frisked for guns, as security precautions reached “fever pitch.”81 Everywhere he went, the press asked whether there had been threats on his life. The answer almost invariably came back in the affirmative.
A week after the Kennedy shooting, Trudeau made a scheduled appearance in Windsor, Ontario, where he would give a major speech on national unity. The big story, however, was that police had received an anonymous death threat against the prime minister, one that they were taking extremely seriously. From the moment he stepped off his plane, Trudeau was enveloped within a sixty-man security cordon, the likes of which Canadians had never seen (thirty-five local police, fifteen Ontario Provincial Police officers, and the remainder his RCMP officers).
Asked about the threat, Trudeau remained imperturbable. “There are always crack-pots,” he said.82
CHAPTER NINE
A MAN FOR TOMORROW
In early February 1968, before Pierre Trudeau had declared himself a candidate for the Liberal leadership, a postcard was sent anonymously to Canadian MPs. On it was a cartoon depicting Trudeau driving a “Liberal bus” down “Abortion Street.”
Ottawa was abuzz with the smear, but no one seemed to know its origins. Only on February 16, the day Trudeau announced his candidacy, did it come to light that the postcard campaign had been organized by someone working for Eric Kierans’s leadership campaign. Kierans immediately issued a written statement. “I must accept full responsibility for the actions of those working for me,” it read. “It is all the more incomprehensible since all of my supporters are fully aware of our personal friendship. Meanness has no place in this leadership campaign.”1 Speaking to reporters, Kierans was clearly rattled. “My God, I’ve known Pierre for years,” he said. “We’re friends. I can only say I hope nothing like this happens to any other candidate.”2 Kierans promptly fired the man who had sent the postcards.
The slurs did not end there. Far from it. For the duration of the 1968 campaign and beyond, Pierre Trudeau was smeared with an intensity without precedent in Canadian history.
The main aspersion made against him was that he was a closet Red. A direct-mail campaign run by an organization calling itself the Canadian Intelligence Service claimed that Trudeau, a “Communist,” was using the Liberal Party as an “instrument” to impose his radical views on Canada. The Canadian Intelligence Service was run by Ron Gostick of Flesherton, Ontario. Gostick claimed, among other things, that fluoridation, racial integration, and the United Nations were subversive, and that National Brotherhood Week was “the brainchild of organized Jewry.”
A “news sheet” issued by the Canadian Intelligence Service to smear Trudeau cited American Opinion, a publication of the right-wing John Birch Society. The Canadian document was mailed to every delegate to the April 1968 Liberal leadership convention, apparently using a mailing list poached from the Martin campaign (the evidence for which was that misspellings and typos were reproduced exactly as they appeared in the original). Martin’s organization was quick to distance itself from the smear. “We deplore this,” said campaign manager Duncan Edmonds. “We have not done this. Our mailing list was not used with our authority.”3 Anecdotal reports from the convention floor suggested, however, that the anti-Trudeau literature was having the desired impact, particularly among delegates from Atlantic Canada. One party member told the press he thought the misinformation campaign was the work of the CIA.
The Montreal-based Pèlerins de Saint Michel (Pilgrims of St. Michael) added their voices, praying that their patron archangel might save Canada from “the rottenness and domination of Satan.” An article by Louis Even, director-general of the organization, appeared in the special election issue of their broadsheet Vers Demain. In it, Even claimed not merely that Pierre Trudeau was “pro-Soviet, pro-Castro, pro-Mao” but that “the beast of Sodom” had inspired his liberal legislative reforms of the previous year. “It was with the stench of Sodom that Pierre Elliott-Trudeau presented himself for the leadership of the Liberal Party,” wrote Even. “He had, in fact, introduced his ‘omnibus Bill’ to the House of Commons, a bill of which two points have marked Trudeau with shame and which would spread shame on Canada if they were adopted. One legalizes homosexuality. The other permits abortion in certain cases, thus legalizing the murder of innocent human beings. This is Trudeau. Trudeau marked by the sign of the Beast.”4
Even’s leaflet had been translated and published as a glossy English-language pamphlet by the Reverend Harold C. Slade, minister of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and president of the Canadian Council of Evangelical Protestant Churches. Slade advertised the sale of the pamphlet in the council’s fortnightly Gospel Witness—cover price ten cents—and sales appeared to be brisk. By mid-June, the pamphlet was in its third print run of ten thousand copies. Slade’s church happened to be in MP Donald Macdonald’s Rosedale riding, which incensed the young Trudeau devotee. “The people behind this hate literature are diseased—mentally diseased,” he railed in a speech to the Toronto Liberal Businessman’s Club. “And the disease is as virulent as any physical sickness. They must be isolated, quarantined and, if possible, cured before they destroy us and the society we live in.”5 When Toronto reporters asked Slade about his connection to Even, Slade said only that he had demanded evidence from the Quebecer for the charges Even was making about the prime minister and that Even had provided the evidence. He would not divulge Even’s address when asked. In late June 1968, with just days to go in the election campaign, an unrepentant Reverend Slade would call for a wide-ranging government investigation into the Communist conspiracy to take over Canada.6
Initially, Trudeau reacted casually, recounting activities from his past that his enemies cited as incriminating. For example, at the televised press conference he held on February 17, 1968, to announce his candidacy for the Liberal leadership, Trudeau was asked whether it was true that he had once been blacklisted from entering the United States.
“Yes, I can give you facts,” he replied. “I assume the reasons could have been twofold. I had been to the economic conference in Moscow in 1952 at a time when Stalin was at the height of his power and not many foreigners were going into Russia, especially at government-sponsored organizations, and needless to say I was roundly attacked when I got back for being a Communist. Another thing was probably that I’d always received periodicals and papers and I suspected then that there was some check on the mails and who was on the mailing lists, and so on. So you know, they must have arrived at the conclusion that I was interested in—what’s the expression in those days, the United States used to say?—in ‘Liberal’ or liberal-oriented organizations or ‘progressive’ things.”
Trudeau was then asked how he had cleared himself.
“It’s a very easy proposition,” he said. “You say that you think that you shouldn’t be blacklisted and they look into your past and they assess you, I suppose. I must say that the consulate officers who did it were extremely able and extremely nice about it. You go to the consul and you say, ‘Look. I’m not as bad as the book says I am and will you look into it?’ There’s no problem.”7
What about his attempt to paddle to Cuba in 1960?
“I have canoed down most of the great rivers not only of Canada but of the world,” he said. “I have canoed from Hudson Bay to Montreal. I have canoed down the Coppermine River and down the Mackenzie. I have barged up the Nile and so I tried to canoe across to Cuba. I didn’t make it but friends of mine who wanted to go to Cuba took a plane the very next day, from the very same place, and flew to Cuba from Key West.
I was picked up by a shrimper or fishing boat, which helped bring me back to Key West. I just drove back because my vacation was over.”8
Several weeks later, just before the Liberal leadership convention began in Ottawa, Trudeau came clean on another potentially sensitive issue. Why had he not enlisted to fight in the Second World War?
“Like most Quebecers, I had been taught to keep away from imperialistic wars,” he said. “The error was on the part of the politicians who promised in the 1930s there would be no conscription and if there was it would be over their dead bodies. Many of us in those years had been brought up to think that the Canadian role was to stay out of world affairs, and keep away from imperialistic wars. We were young men caught up in this logic.”9 Trudeau added that he had been active in the anti-conscriptionist cause in Quebec in the 1940s, and that he had been a bit of a troublemaker in the Canadian Officers Training Corps, which he was required by law to join when the war broke out in 1939.
The smears continued. In late March 1968, a ninety-six-page French-language booklet entitled On a “fourré” la vieille garde (Tricking the Old Guard) was mailed to every Liberal convention delegate in Ontario and Quebec. Among its many provocations, the publication compared Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, and accused him and Jean Marchand of McCarthyite tactics and “taking themselves for God.”10 The tract was also sent to all members of the Ontario and Quebec provincial legislatures and to every national news outlet in Canada. In total, four thousand copies of the publication were shipped. The moving force behind the booklet turned out to be René Lagarde, a disgruntled Quebec Liberal organizer who had been shunted aside when the three wise men ascended within the party. He was known to be backing Paul Hellyer in the leadership race, but Hellyer claimed no knowledge of the publication.
Another active participant in the Trudeau smear campaign was Igor Gouzenko. The world’s most famous Soviet defector wrote and circulated during the Liberal leadership campaign a pamphlet entitled Trudeau, A Potential Canadian Castro. “Because Canadian and U.S. press, radio and television largely ignored the past activities and writings of Trudeau, the public is not aware of a real possibility that on the 6th of April, 1968, the next Prime Minister of Canada might be a self-admitted radical socialist, and Canada might with ever increasing pace turn into a second Cuba,” wrote Gouzenko. “The situation is already pregnant with a multiple threat to Canadian freedom.”11 Only “lack of funds” prevented Gouzenko from distributing the pamphlet to all Liberal delegates.
Having failed to prevent Trudeau’s elevation to leadership, Gouzenko wrote to U.S. presidential hopeful Richard Nixon using the alias “P. Brown.” The two-page letter included Gouzenko’s pamphlet coupled with a warning to “the next president of the United States” that in Canada “the left-wingers” were gaining ground. “Trudeau’s methods of turning the country into a radical socialist state might be different from Castro’s,” Gouzenko informed Nixon, “but the result would be the same in time. The dream of the Soviet government to outflank the U.S. from the south and north is becoming a reality.”12 Although in 1961 Nixon had personally assisted Gouzenko in selling the movie rights to his novel The Fall of a Titan, there is no evidence that he replied to Gouzenko’s pleas in 1968.
The smear campaign was so successful leading up to election day that the New York Times covered it. Liberal Party president John Nichol estimated that Canada had been flooded by hundreds of thousands of copies of Ron Gostick’s diatribe alone. “It’s an expensive operation,” Nichol said. “Somebody is paying for it, but we don’t know who.”13 Ottawa Liberals confirmed that Gostick’s pamphlets had blanketed the capital “like a snowstorm.”14 An exasperated Peter C. Newman devoted an entire column to dispelling its claims. “Never before in a Canadian election,” wrote Newman, “has a prime minister been the subject of so much hatred and innuendo as has been flung at Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the current campaign.”15 Canadian editorialists followed suit.16 Both the Canadian Council of Churches and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada issued statements condemning the smears.
Finally, in mid-June, Trudeau took off his gloves. “I’m told that in this part of the country it might be worthwhile talking a little bit about some hate literature which is being sent around,” Trudeau told a crowd of supporters in Montague, P.E.I., where thousands of copies of Gostick’s pamphlet were said to be circulating. Personally, he said, he considered the claims “pretty funny.” But it was also apparent that the prime minister was tired of being badgered by the mainstream press as if the extremists’ claims had merit. “All these things, really, they don’t matter much,” he explained. “As I say, it’s the first time that I’ve even bothered to mention them in this campaign. But I think it might be worthwhile for some of the other parties and other politicians in other provinces if they are responsible for this—I don’t accuse them of it because there are all kinds of sick people in our society who don’t have respect for the intelligence of the people—but I suggest that all of us politicians of our party and any other party—I suggest it is our duty to dissociate ourselves from this type of garbage.”17
The story of Trudeau finally hitting back at “hate literature” made headlines across the country the next day. Eddie Goodman, national campaign organizer for the Progressive Conservative Party, held a press conference to express his party’s “repugnance” at the slurs directed at the prime minister. Robert Stanfield issued a statement promising that he would discipline any Tory candidate participating in the smear campaign.
Alas, Stanfield’s tough talk was too little, too late. Perspicacious reporters had already exposed a Tory whispering campaign against Trudeau in Quebec, which, among other things, linked his reforms on homosexuality to his being a bachelor.18 Marcel Faribault’s charge that Trudeau was “a doctrinaire socialist” had also played into this campaign. On June 15, Trudeau spoke to a crowd of six thousand in Quebec City, his last stop in a sweep that included Chicoutimi, Jonquière, Alma, and Saint-Félicien. There, he lashed out at those in Quebec who would stoop to inciting hatred to gain political advantage.
It doesn’t disturb me if they say I am trying to destroy the traditional values of French-Canada, that I am trying to pass laws that are bad and are mortal sins. That doesn’t disturb me, but what disturbs me is this sort of campaign which is led by we don’t know who, but there are publications like Vers Demain which are being distributed by certain Conservative candidates. It doesn’t disturb me if they attack me, but they are trying to exploit in the people the hate, the ignorance and the envy. It is serious that some people are trying in this election to prevent the people of Quebec from accepting that they live in a pluralistic world, from accepting a united Canada.19
There was plenty of irony in all of the smears against Trudeau, of course—as there has been ever since about his ostensibly “socialist” economic policies. As an example, while right-wing extremists were branding the prime minister a radical leftist, Tommy Douglas was accusing him of adopting the vicious economic policies of the American right. William Kashtan, general secretary of Canada’s Communist Party, held a press conference in April 1968 to reassure bona fide Marxist-Leninists in Canada that “Mr. Trudeau has never been and is not a Communist.”20 Far from alienating Bay Street, Trudeau had inspired the confidence of Canadian business people. “Trudeau’s election would spark a regeneration of investor confidence in what Canada has to offer,” remarked Toronto stockbroker T.R. Bradbury early in the election race. “Mr. Trudeau may have the positive qualities to cut through the tangled undergrowth of restrictions hampering the development of Canada’s capital markets. His election may also foreshadow a saner fiscal policy and the close links he has almost magically established with Canadians at large may enable him to persuade the public to accept financial restraint.”21
It is impossible to gauge the impact of the smear campaign on Trudeau’s popular support. The slurs against him would continue well into his prime ministerial tenure, but by then they had mostly moved offshore. “We�
��ve got a crypto-Communist premier in Canada just above us,” said Alabama governor George Wallace in 1971, when he was testing the waters for a second run at the U.S. presidency. “He’s got a worse background than Cuban Premier Castro himself.” That same year, the John Birch Society mailed to doctors and dentists in the Toronto area a glossy publication for their waiting rooms. “Since June of 1968,” it read, “Canada has had as a Prime Minister a Communist named Pierre Elliott Trudeau, with a known record more blatant than that of Castro.” The following year, the Birchers published a booklet entitled Canada: How the Communists Took Control, in which “Red Mike” Pearson and the communist Pierre Trudeau were the main villains. A 1976 editorial in the U.S. business magazine Barron’s accused the prime minister of “virulent collectivism” and was reprinted in its entirety in the Globe and Mail without comment.22
One person who could not abide such smears was John Diefenbaker, Canada’s foremost anti-communist. Diefenbaker’s terse advice to Trudeau in the spring of 1968: sue those responsible for such libel.23
Heading into Canada’s first-ever televised leaders’ debate, scheduled for June 9, the prime minister and his campaign team knew they had to make up some lost ground. A June 8 Canadian Institute of Public Opinion poll revealed that the Liberals had dropped four points since May 25. They remained the first choice of 46 per cent of decided Canadian voters, as compared with 29 per cent for the Tories and 15 per cent for the NDP.24 But the numbers seemed to confirm that the Trudeaumania blitzkrieg strategy was not delivering the Liberal vote.
Over the early part of the campaign, media buzz about a possible televised leaders’ debate in Canada had been constant—undoubtedly because Canadians recalled the first televised U.S. presidential debate between JFK and Richard Nixon in 1960 as decisive to both the Kennedy mystique and the Kennedy victory. As it turned out, Canadians who spent the evening of June 9 in front of their TV sets hoping to see Pierre Trudeau’s famous telegenic charisma in action were disappointed. “Nobody really won the great television debate,” groused Peter C. Newman. “The clear loser was the audience.”25 Everyone agreed that, with the exception of Réal Caouette and to a lesser extent Tommy Douglas, the party leaders had appeared wooden and cautious, utterly lacking in spontaneity. Media critics joked the next day that Canadian viewers had defected in the millions to watch Bonanza. Chastened television executives wondered whether they should even bother with televised debates in future. “I thought the whole thing was pretty dull,” Trudeau commented after the broadcast. “I wouldn’t want to impose another one on the Canadian public.”26 Ramsay Cook, who had prepped Trudeau by arming him with reams of statistics, later remarked that he should have been fired.27
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