by John English
These diary reflections were written for the moment and are not a mature consideration of Trudeau’s complex policy or of his attitudes toward democracy and dictatorship in the early 1980s. Of course, Trudeau was angry with the Americans, loathed Reagan’s approach to international affairs, and believed that the Soviet Union’s interests were lost in the “obsessive” anti-communism in Washington and, more recently, in London. And yet, as Gotlieb pointed out in the same diary entry, Trudeau had increased defence spending steadily since 1975, despite economic pressure, and had provided the forces with the new equipment they needed for the defence of Europe against possible Soviet aggression. Moreover, Gotlieb noticed that Trudeau’s rhetoric about the Third World was not matched by the realpolitik that marked many of his policies, as, for example, in South Africa.
Despite these efforts, Gotlieb knew that he faced distrust in Washington. With characteristic energy, he placed himself in the whirlwind of official Washington, where he found cold, angry winds blowing northward. He tried to still them, but Ottawa, particularly Trudeau, often frustrated his efforts. Trudeau’s apparent indifference to the remarkable rise of the anti-communist labour movement in Poland—an expression of his realpolitik if not his own early support for Catholic trade unionism—irritated American conservatives and, of course, Polish Canadians. When the Polish government, under pressure from the Soviets, imposed martial law, Trudeau’s statement in the House of Commons on December 18, 1981—that “if martial law is a way to avoid civil war and Soviet intervention, then I can say it is not all bad”—was even used by the Polish communists to justify their move.35 Inevitably, there were consequences.
In July 1982 Helmut Schmidt called on Trudeau in Ottawa, his last visit as chancellor, and told him how “negative” Americans had become toward both Canada and him as the country’s leader.* Canada’s diplomats had long ago conveyed that message, but Trudeau’s animosity toward American foreign policy had become much more pronounced in the early eighties with the renewal of the Cold War. At the Montebello summit, Trudeau was the sole voice questioning the harsh analysis of Soviet motives, and his press conference after the summit did not reflect his genuine differences with the others. In Australia, at the Commonwealth Conference, in the presence of an irritated Margaret Thatcher, he made a plea for a return to the policies of nuclear suffocation in all countries, a stance he had advocated vigorously in the seventies. At that time the Soviets had achieved a strategic balance with NATO through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the SALT I treaty, but in recent years the sclerotic Brezhnev regime had become arrogant and was challenging Western interests in the Third World, installing SS-20 missiles to intimidate Western Europe, and invading Afghanistan. While Western military spending had fallen considerably during the period of détente, Soviet spending had grown rapidly—as was obvious from the endless parade of tanks, rockets, and goose-stepping soldiers in Moscow on May Day.
Carter’s response to Afghanistan had surprised Trudeau, but he understood it to be the product of anger and fear. But Reagan was different. On May 17, 1981, at Notre Dame University, Reagan had declared that the future would be great both for America and for the cause of freedom: “The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism … it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are now being written.”36 The next year it was Trudeau’s turn to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame, but his message was very different. Gotlieb, who accompanied Trudeau to South Bend, said that the speech on East-West relations was “exactly the speech he should not have given because it was anti-hardline on dealing with the Soviets.” Gotlieb agreed that expression of that view was not “deplorable” in itself, but felt that Trudeau had injected the “moral equivalence” theme into the discussion, in which both the Soviets and the Americans were “bad boys,” jeopardizing world security.37
A close reading of the speech does not justify the charge that Trudeau suggested moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union, but there is a subtlety and ambiguity to Trudeau’s argument that Canada is a part of the Western alliance and that the United States should “take bold initiatives” and “pledge” that “we will not be the ones to start a war.” Gotlieb’s reaction, which MacGuigan and senior Reagan administration officials shared, reflects the intensity of belief in Reagan’s Washington that fruitless and dishonest negotiation with the Soviet Union was counterproductive and that firmness was needed to counter Carter’s “spineless” approach to Afghanistan.38 Trudeau profoundly disagreed, and in the spring of 1982, with arms control in a shambles and the Reagan administration bitterly attacking his government’s National Energy Program, the Foreign Investment Review Agency, and the NATO “two-track policy” of rearmament, Trudeau only irritated American wounds. MacGuigan arrived in Washington on June 11 and told Gotlieb that at the NATO and G7 summits in Europe, “our leader constantly contradicted, refuted, and needled Reagan.” Moreover, “he was the only one to do it.” In Alexander Haig’s opinion, Trudeau had behaved “mischievously.” MacGuigan, who was present at the summit, agreed. Trudeau’s “inner impulse” compelled him to “support the underdog Mitterrand and harass the powerful Reagan.”39 Mitterrand, who had ended the French government’s flirtation with Quebec, was increasingly in harmony with Trudeau on international matters.
Rumours, almost certainly untrue, swirled that Trudeau had called Reagan an imbecile. It was true, however, that when Reagan was fumbling questions at a press conference in May 1982, Trudeau quipped: “Ask Al [Haig]. He knows.” Such behaviour confirmed suspicions that Trudeau was a dangerous socialist who threatened American economic interests and did not respect Reagan. Even though Canada’s November 1981 budget signalled that FIRA would be reined in and that the NEP would never be a precedent for other areas, it was not enough. Canadian conservative columnist Lubor Zink published a scathing article on June 25 in William Buckley’s National Review, a favourite of Reagan’s court. A menacing photograph of Trudeau dominated the cover, and the inside story painted the Canadian prime minister, in lurid prose, as a communist dupe. Shortly afterwards, when senior White House adviser Michael Deaver confronted Gotlieb at a dinner party, he told him that “things went poorly between our two guys at the recent [G7 and NATO] summits” and added that Zink’s article “made an impression on the president.” “You mean the president read that garbage?” an incredulous Gotlieb asked. The answer was yes. Fortunately, Reagan’s own diary suggests that he thought little about Trudeau or Canada in a late spring that saw the British invade the Falklands, Haig resign over policy differences, and the president worry whether his agnostic father-in-law would die without accepting Christ. Reagan’s neo-conservative courtiers, however, cared very much, and Gotlieb worked quickly with Michael Pitfield and MacGuigan to try to make amends. Canada, they agreed, could not afford to anger a highly nationalist American administration when the Canadian economy was faltering badly, the president was unpredictable, and the Canadian business community was organizing as never before to counter the Trudeau government’s policies.40
Their efforts, which included a grovelling letter to Reagan, the replacement of MacGuigan with Allan MacEachen (who knew the new American secretary of state George Shultz well), and more significantly, a commitment by Canada to test the cruise missile within its borders, calmed the storm, but the dislike and distrust of Trudeau abided at senior levels in Washington. The cruise missile and the advanced version of the Pershing missile were the core of the NATO response to the Soviet’s SS-20 missiles, which destabilized the balance in Europe.41 Trudeau had agreed to the “two-track” strategy of confronting the Soviet Union with these weapons while at the same time negotiating arms reductions. He was profoundly reluctant to accept both rearmament and Canadian testing for the cruise missile—a view that reflected the swelling antinuclear movement in Canada and the West. These activists, spurred by the nuclear plant disaster at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, stoked by the end to the SALT II negotia
tions, and fired to a new level by Reagan’s harsh rhetoric against the “evil empire” of Soviet communism,42 promptly took to the streets. Among their targets was Pierre Trudeau—the man who had proudly worn the symbol of peace in the sixties, ferociously denounced Lester Pearson’s decision to accept nuclear weapons in 1963, embraced peaceniks John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969, cut off nuclear assistance to India when it exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974, emotionally urged the United Nations to suffocate nuclear weapons in 1978, and irritated Thatcher and Reagan at NATO summits with his pleas for negotiation with the Soviet Union. But all was forgotten and nothing forgiven when Trudeau’s government agreed to consider American testing of the cruise missile in northern Canada.
Trudeau’s doubts about the decision were profound, but Helmut Schmidt was insistent: “Pierre, you’re part of NATO and you’re part of the club. You have reduced your troops and your budget, but … NATO has made a decision to deploy new missiles. I’m going to catch hell for that from my peace movement. You’re being asked to test an unarmed Cruise missile over your North.” It was, Schmidt said, “the least you can do.”43 For Trudeau, the least was a lot, and the American charge that Canada was not fulfilling its defence responsibilities was exaggerated. During the early seventies, when the U.S. defence budget shrank, Canada’s grew steadily. From 1972 through 1978, by which time Trudeau had committed to long-term regular increases in the defence budget, the Canadian expenditure had more than doubled, from $2,238 billion to $4,597 billion, while the United States, taking advantage of the détente dividend, had risen only from $112,934 to $178,189 billion. While it is true that Canada’s defence budget dropped from approximately 2 percent of GDP in 1970 to approximately 1.7 percent between 1970 and 1979, it began to rise again under Trudeau in the 1980s and had reached 2 percent when he left office in 1984.* Moreover, the Canadians had significantly improved their equipment, with Leopard tanks, Orion patrol aircraft, CF-18 aircraft, and six shiny new frigates.
“Typical sleazy Liberal tactics,” NDP defence critic Pauline Jewett thundered on July 15, 1983, to hundreds of peace demonstrators gathered on Parliament Hill with banners denouncing Trudeau. His defence and external affairs ministers had just announced that Canada would allow the testing of the cruise missile in the North.44 MacEachen wrote that same day to his friend George Shultz, telling him that the cruise missile decision had been a “serious concern” for the Canadian government. Now that it was made, the government must be able “to assure the Canadian public that the arms control aspect of the negotiations in Geneva is being pursued as vigorously and as earnestly as is the deployment of new missiles.” He concluded in a surprisingly personal note: “As you may be aware, George, one of our major long-standing preoccupations in Canada has been and continues to be our firm belief that the problem of verification is at the core of the disarmament and arms control issues.”45 For many Canadians it was not truly a “preoccupation,” though it increasingly was one for Trudeau and some of his closest friends.
Trudeau paid little attention to Jewett, a former Liberal MP, but protests by students against his defence policy stung him sharply. For the first time in his life, on defence and nuclear issues, he found himself on the wrong side of the barricades—as some of his friends regularly reminded him. In 1983 Gale Zoë Garnett, who remained close to Andreas Papandreou, expressed the Greek prime minister’s profound doubts about American leadership—views that Trudeau knew well from NATO meetings, where Papandreou railed against the policies of Reagan and Thatcher.
Even more virulent was Margot Kidder, ever the peace activist, as she had been when she first met Trudeau and wrote a letter to her prime minister asking that Canada oppose nuclear weapons. Trudeau told her, correctly, that Canada, as a NATO member, had no choice but to lend support for these weapons—the key component in the NATO arsenal. Nevertheless, he asked to meet her to discuss the question. Not for the first time, “peace” was hardly the real purpose for his invitation—but it became important in 1983 as their relationship flourished.
Trudeau asked Ambassador Allan Gotlieb to invite Kidder to a dinner when he visited Washington on April 26–27, and Gotlieb agreed, noting that “the Vancouver lady will add glamour and a dose of Hollywood radical chic” to the occasion. At the black-tie event, held under a tent in the embassy garden, celebrities, including Christopher Plummer, Donald Sutherland, and Norman Jewison, enjoyed “Newfoundland halibut, Quebec maple surprise, Manitoba whitefish caviar,” and other delicacies. Kidder, sitting beside Trudeau, argued vehemently with senior Reagan administration officials while he urged her on by squeezing her thigh each time she scored a point. There was “much gossiping throughout the evening about the fact” that the National Film Board production celebrating Australian antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott had won the Academy Award. Later, Trudeau danced slowly and sometimes frenetically, but always exquisitely, with Kidder. In Gotlieb’s view, the prime minister’s “mysterious magnetism” and the flavour of Hollywood stole the evening.46 At his most charismatic, Trudeau even charmed the leading Washington socialite Susan Mary Alsop to the point where she asked if she could write an article for Architectural Digest on the extensive renovations he had recently made to his art deco house in Montreal.*
The next morning, Gotlieb found Trudeau exhausted when he picked him up for his meeting with Reagan and senior officials, and he blamed Kidder. During the discussions, Trudeau pressed the arms issue, but to Gotlieb’s delight he also praised the president’s speech from the previous night and warmly acknowledged the United States’ role as the true leader of the West.
Fortunately, Kidder did not hear the remarks. Encouraged by their wildly successful date, she sent Trudeau a formal letter on May 17, arguing for a nuclear “freeze” and urging him to meet peace activists Randy Forsberg and Helen Caldicott. She was troubled by the “premises” in a letter he had sent to peace activists in Canada. Still, he was her best hope: if the “Conservatives get in, we in the Peace Movement are up shit creek without a paddle,” she said. “We have a vested interest, to say the least, in keeping you in power. You’re a potential ally. (I’ll get you on our side if it kills me.)” She promised to see him in July, when he would have to listen to her arguments against the cruise missile and respond to them, “if you’re to have any credibility at all regarding your present position on it.” She urged him to speak to liberal American senators who opposed cruise testing and suggested that she would join the Liberal Party to stir up enough “shit to make sure the issue of nuclear arms gets on the party platform.” In conclusion, she summarized her confusion:
This is weird. I’ve never mixed politics & romance before. At least not when I’m dealing with someone who appears to be on the “other side.”
I think of you often with confusion, with fondness, with many questions about what it is you might want from me. But I do think of you often, so I hope you’re flattered. (Isn’t it the man who’s supposed to say this stuff?) I’m too spoiled. I’m too used to being courted. Oh well, fuck it. Love, Margot.47
Slowly, Pierre began to shift to her side.
The Williamsburg G7 summit took place shortly after this exchange with Kidder. Trudeau arrived in the historic American town fresh from two days of meetings in Ottawa with Mikhail Gorbachev, the impressive Soviet agriculture minister. In the foul Cold War climate of 1983, a session with Gorbachev had political costs for Trudeau, and he initially hesitated to see him just before the summit. However, he trusted Soviet ambassador Alexander Yakovlev, who told him he simply must meet Gorbachev. “Why?” Trudeau asked. “Gorbachev is the future leader of our country,” Yakovlev replied.48 The meeting took place, and to Yakovlev’s surprise, Trudeau confronted Gorbachev immediately and directly, asking why the Soviets were escalating global tensions by mounting the SS-20s. “I am speaking to you frankly, Mr. Gorbachev,” he said bluntly, “so you will know there is a lot of criticism [in Canada] of the United States. But on the need for a reduction in the SS-20s we are in agreement.” While
both men concurred that the Reagan administration’s rhetoric was overblown and that the world was increasingly dangerous, they disagreed on Soviet policy since the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite their differences, Gorbachev and Trudeau impressed each other enormously, and Trudeau was encouraged by their discussions to speak out more forcefully at Williamsburg.49
Trudeau determined to moderate the hard line he expected Thatcher and Reagan to take there. What he had read about Reagan’s recent views troubled him greatly. In a speech to evangelical Christians on March 8, Reagan had intensified the rhetoric, declaring that the Cold War was a “struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” Americans, he declared, were “enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” The Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” soon followed, with its promise to build a shield over America that would end the “mutual assured destruction” on which deterrence was based.50 The words and the action astonished and puzzled Trudeau, as well as advisers such as his principal secretary, Tom Axworthy, whose brother, Lloyd, both inside and outside Cabinet, was angrily opposing cruise testing. The plan for Williamsburg was to have no draft communiqué from bureaucrats but a discussion and then a statement, in the hope of encouraging an informal exchange of views. Welcoming this informality, Trudeau arrived prepared to talk, wearing a “snappy brim-down straw hat, a well-tailored brown suit, and a long-collared yellow shirt.”51 A much more conservatively dressed and very determined Thatcher came with a draft committing the meeting to installation of the cruise and the Pershing. For his part Reagan didn’t bother about his briefing book, and watched The Sound of Music with his wife, Nancy, before the meetings opened on May 27.52