Just Watch Me

by John English

  When Thatcher produced her draft, and Trudeau and Mitterrand objected, even the jovial Reagan lost his temper. During the debate, Thatcher icily mocked Trudeau’s fears of nuclear weapons, and with Schmidt replaced by the conservative Helmut Kohl, Trudeau had only Mitterrand as an ally. Annoying Thatcher intensely by speaking to each other in French, they tried to thwart acceptance of her draft but without success. Reagan watched in admiration as Thatcher thundered and dominated the discussion. “I thought at one point,” he wrote in his diary, that “Margaret was going to order Pierre to go stand in a corner.” Gotlieb sympathized with Thatcher in his diary: “Our prime minister, true to form, is playing the bad boy.” While conceding that Trudeau was “probably sincere in his peace-loving role,” he could not understand his “lack of acknowledgement of the limitations on Canada’s interests in all this.” There were many angry moments and denunciations of Trudeau to Gotlieb by American hardliners, but in the end Trudeau did manage to ensure that a short paragraph was added, in which the leaders stated that they had “a vision of a world in which the shadow of war has been lifted from all mankind, and we are determined to pursue that vision.” Trudeau smoothed matters by praising Reagan’s hosting of the summit both privately and publicly, but, devilishly, he taunted Gotlieb, whom he regarded as too fearful of American conservatives. As they flew back from Williamsburg on a helicopter, Trudeau quipped: “I wouldn’t be upset if they were upset with me … but I acknowledge it would have been a lot more difficult for you.” It was, Gotlieb commented, a “deft twist of the Trudeauvian stiletto.”53

  Trudeau knew he had lost. He left Williamsburg quite shaken, and soon after, the stationing of the missiles began. As Margot Kidder had urged, he called and met with Helen Caldicott, who impressed him. Principal Secretary Tom Axworthy and diplomat Robert Fowler also set up a meeting with Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defence under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had become a strong critic of NATO’s policy and the nuclear arms race. McNamara told Trudeau that with East and West now arming rapidly and fears billowing, it was imperative to act immediately. Old politicians simply became “ghosts,” he told the wistful and pensive prime minister, and he should act while he still had a political life. Axworthy and Fowler informed him that nuclear dangers were mounting monthly, and he listened to Kidder’s taunts about her lover being on “the other side,” watched the Caldicott film If You Love This Planet, dodged angry protesters chanting on Parliament Hill, and thought about “all the retired generals, admirals, and politicians … who had spoken out about peace after they had left office.” Finally, he said to himself in late August 1983, “Well, I’m not going to do that. I was for peace before I entered politics, and I’m not going to wait until I’m out before speaking out and trying to get things changed.”54 His time to act had come.*

  Trudeau’s peace initiative drew on his personal ambitions, and was fired by his friendships and his sense that time was running out, but it also reflected his belief that the world had reached a dangerous crossroads, where a wrong turn could lead to nuclear catastrophe. He was not alone in his fears in the fall of 1983. Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor as general secretary of the Communist Party, and his colleagues in Moscow interpreted the NATO manoeuvres as possible preparations for a “first strike,” and the Soviet military was put on high alert. Word of the Soviet fears and action came back to the United States from their leading spy, Oleg Gordievsky, and against the wishes of administration hardliners, Reagan learned about the Soviet suspicions and the high alert from some of his officials. He, like Trudeau, became terrified about the possibility of a nuclear war, but their positions were very different after Soviet fighters shot down a Korean Airlines plane with 269 passengers, 10 of them Canadians, which had strayed into Soviet territory on August 30.

  The Canadian Embassy in Washington reported that Senate “doves” had had the “ground cut out from under them,” while the conservative response bore a “distinctly anti-Russian flavour” that bordered on the demagogic. The “minority” view was that the incident confirmed the need for “even more strenuous attempt[s] by both superpowers for viable arms control agreement,” but the vast majority now favoured Reagan’s massive increase in spending on arms to intimidate the bellicose Soviet Union. Reports from the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, where Lester Pearson’s son, Geoffrey, constantly counselled against provoking the Russians, found a sympathetic ear in Trudeau’s office, though not at External Affairs, where fear of offending the Americans was strong. The minister, Allan MacEachen, favoured a strong reaction, though he had few sanctions left to implement against the Soviets because most of the cultural and economic agreements had been suspended after the Afghan invasion. The Soviet response, at first denying responsibility for the deadly attack and then turning on the accusers, was nasty, brutish, and stupid.55

  While favouring a more cautious route, Trudeau let MacEachen impose sanctions on an Aeroflot flight into Montreal—an action welcomed by the Americans but ferociously denounced by the Soviet Union. Privately, Trudeau expressed doubts, saying that the harsh response from the Americans had put the Soviet regime off balance and created their foolish response of initially denying the clear evidence of an attack. By October he was expressing his beliefs publicly. He called the Korean aircraft incident an “accident” and later told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that “it was obvious to me very early in the game that the Reagan people were trying to create another bone of contention with the Soviets when they didn’t have a leg to stand on.” Both sides “were talking past each other.” Tom Axworthy recalled that “a whiff of Sarajevo was in the air.” In this tense atmosphere, Trudeau ordered his assistants to begin making plans for an international initiative to start the superpowers talking.56

  External Affairs grumbled, but Ivan Head, still at the International Development Research Centre, prepared a memorandum arguing for a comprehensive initiative from the two superpowers to eliminate “the fear of pre-emptive strike systems.” Canada’s position and Trudeau’s reputation and seniority among world leaders, he declared, placed “an inescapable burden” on him to act. Robert Fowler, the foreign affairs officer seconded to the Privy Council, wondered whether his diplomatic colleagues were up to the task, and he warned Trudeau that there would be bureaucratic opposition and tangles. Nevertheless, Trudeau persisted, debating intricacies of arms control strategies and listening carefully to an array of experts that Head, Fowler, and Axworthy had arranged for him to meet. On September 21, Trudeau listened to their ideas, doubts, and plans while he rocked back and forth with his head in his hands. At the end of the day, he established a task force to turn the abundant ideas he had heard into concrete proposals.57

  At this meeting one External Affairs official warned that the initiative could be seen as “political.” An irritated Trudeau snapped that officials should leave politics to the politicians. But, of course, the initiative did have a political purpose, as Trudeau himself freely admitted to the task force on October 7. Ever since April 17, 1982, when Trudeau had joined the Queen to sign the Constitution, the Quebec issue—the propeller of his political success—had faded. Lévesque had lost his way, his party divided, and separatism seemed a spent force in Quebec and in Canada. With the economy in dire straits, the only area where Trudeau scored well against Brian Mulroney, the bilingual, youthful new Progressive Conservative leader, was international affairs. Pollster Martin Goldfarb, Tom Axworthy, and Keith Davey all saw potential rejuvenation for the sagging party in the peace initiative—and a powerful argument for Trudeau remaining at the helm of power. Gotlieb, increasingly critical of Trudeau, concluded that the initiative was the “culmination of a lot of planning in the PMO and PCO to get Trudeau back on centre stage and combat his decline in the polls.” It was certainly that, but it was also much more for Trudeau. It reflected the challenging and encouraging voices of Kidder, Garnett, and many other personal friends, his desire to make an international mark before he left office, an
d, not least, a genuine fear as a father of the terrifying confrontation between East and West.58

  Significantly, Trudeau chose a university, Guelph, to launch his peace initiative on October 27, 1983. There, standing before a row of Maple Leaf flags, he delivered a sharply worded, often eloquent speech, in which he announced that he would meet with the heads of the five nuclear states and other foreign leaders to go beyond the “two-track” NATO approach. He suggested that he would add a third rail “of high-level political energy to speed the course of agreement—a third rail through which might run the current of our broader political purposes” in the interests of peace. He was deeply critical of superpower rhetoric and behaviour, deplored the breakdown of arms negotiations, called for the five nuclear powers to negotiate reductions in their strategic arsenals, yearned for the days of détente, urged the “imposition of a political dynamic upon the static” Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks in Vienna, and called on the superpowers to accept “a sense of responsibility commensurate with their power.” He pointedly concluded that “you can not make a desert and call it peace.”59

  The crowd, made up largely of students and peace activists, thunderously applauded his conclusion, even though many of them had read columnist Michael Valpy’s warning that morning in the Globe and Mail that Trudeau had “charmed us eloquently before in the role of world statesman, and failed to deliver.” The morning after, Valpy, clearly affected by Trudeau’s obvious passion, saw ironic echoes of Pearson’s commitment to active internationalism but claimed that Trudeau’s engagement this time was complete and impressive.60 But could he rise to the challenge he had set for himself? The Americans had just invaded the small Caribbean island of Grenada without informing Canada. Would they pay attention to Trudeau? Did Canada matter?

  Wisely, Trudeau began his travels in Europe, where, Granatstein and Bothwell write, “the stays were short, the conversations slightly tepid, the press coverage … insipid.” He had omitted Britain from his schedule because he had debated the issues of war and peace with Thatcher in late September in Ottawa. But Thatcher noticed that the foreign offices were buzzing about Trudeau’s intervention, even though the European press was ignoring him, and she observed that Mitterrand had surprisingly and disappointingly expressed an interest in five-power negotiations on nuclear weapons. So the annoyed British prime minister invited Trudeau to meet her in London, where, at lunch, the “Iron Lady” memorably told him that “one had to remember that things were growing again one year after Hiroshima.”61 Trudeau was shocked.

  Despite Thatcher’s opposition, Trudeau’s European trip encouraged him, and he made plans to raise the issue at the Commonwealth Conference in India in late November. He angered Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi by calling for an expanded Non-Proliferation Treaty, but he did get an endorsement of the initiative from other Commonwealth leaders, many of whom had become friends during his long tenure. Then he received more good news: China, one of the five critical nuclear powers, accepted his request for a visit, and he flew on to Beijing from Goa. He managed to see China’s most powerful figure, Chairman Deng Xiaoping. It was a bizarre meeting where Deng, regarded as a heroic reformer, smoked incessantly, spat into a spittoon, and refused to be interrupted. He raged on about the superpowers and told Trudeau that even though a nuclear war would leave two billion dead, “China would survive.” Trudeau cut the meeting short and flew home, arriving on December 5.62

  He was disheartened with his progress, but Patrick Gossage, recalled from the Washington Embassy to become a press officer on the peace initiative, reported, in early December, that the press was generally supportive. Older journalists remembered the halcyon days of Mike Pearson—a memory the government jogged by renaming the Toronto International Airport in his honour. Within the Liberal caucus, long depressed by bad polls, the initiative sparked new hopes. Toronto MP Roy MacLaren, no peacenik but a businessman with close ties to the military, wrote in his diary on December 7: “International relations given pride of place in today’s speech from the throne. And rightly so. Trudeau’s ‘peace initiative’ has evoked a notable response. At a time when many Canadians have concluded—for the nth time—that they don’t like him, the support for his four-part peace initiative is overwhelming.” A few days later, the NATO ministerial meeting gave Trudeau his first tangible gains: an agreement that ministers would attend an important disarmament meeting in January 1984 in Stockholm and would support, despite British and American opposition, a declaration calling for “genuine détente.” Now Reagan noticed, and he invited Trudeau to meet with him on December 15.63

  Trudeau arrived in Washington just as Andropov had pulled the Soviet Union out of disarmament talks in Geneva and denounced the Americans for duplicity. U.S. intelligence had learned that the Soviets saw NATO manoeuvres as preparations for war, and Reagan, to the despair of his officials, was increasingly anxious to depend less on nuclear weapons. Along with tens of millions of Americans, he had watched the “made for TV movie” The Day After, a powerful depiction of a devastated America following a nuclear attack, and he was deeply moved. Hardliners in his administration were angry with George Shultz and others whom they feared were drawing Reagan away from his rigid anti-Soviet stand. A statement Reagan made in the Japanese Diet in November against nuclear weapons and war troubled this group—Richard Burt, Richard Pipes, Dick Cheney, and Lawrence Eagleburger. They were right to worry. What one American journalist has called “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” against “hardline” advisers had begun—and eventually it would lead to the remarkable meeting of Gorbachev and Reagan in Iceland in 1986, where both essentially agreed that nuclear terror must end. The eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm pays tribute to Gorbachev for the initiative, but he rightly adds: “Let us not underestimate the contribution of President Reagan, whose simple-minded idealism broke through the unusually dense screen of ideologists, fanatics, careerists, desperados and professional warriors around him to let himself be convinced” of Gorbachev’s arguments.64

  Reagan’s internal thoughts, far distant even to those nearest to him, were unknown to Trudeau when they sat down to speak for a tightly scheduled hour in the White House that December day. With hindsight, it is clear that Reagan was far more receptive to Trudeau’s message than either the Canadians or the president’s advisers had expected. Trudeau had noticed Reagan’s speech in the Japanese Diet, but on Gotlieb’s advice, he was “soft” in his approach to his host. For his part, the genial Reagan talked freely about the dangers of nuclear war and the media’s distortion of his message. When the two leaders emerged on the White House lawn, both men said that their discussions had been useful, and Reagan bade Trudeau “Godspeed” on his peace mission. Canadian officials sighed with relief.

  But even before Trudeau arrived, negative leaks had appeared in the press from American officials demanding that he stay away from Soviet-American relations: great powers did not work through intermediaries, they claimed. Trudeau attacked the source of the leaks as “pipsqueaks,” but Richard Burt, a frequent guest at the Canadian Embassy and an influential American official, confronted Gossage, insulted Trudeau, and coarsely attacked the peace initiative with four-letter words. Then, after the generally good press following the meeting and Reagan’s comment that the talks were useful, a “senior [American] official” reportedly said off the record, but to a large audience: “Whoever thinks we would agree to [Trudeau’s proposals] must have been smoking something pretty funny.” Reporters soon exposed his identity—Lawrence Eagleburger, the State Department official responsible for Canada, and Gotlieb’s most senior and best contact in the administration. Eagleburger apologized, said his words were spoken in jest, but tauntingly told Gotlieb that some large Canadian corporations had offered him a job. Gotlieb wrote, “I’m not sure he was joking.”65

  Trudeau never met Andropov, who died in January 1984, and his peace initiative flagged after the Reagan meeting. When a reporter asked what impact Andropov’s death would have on
his initiative, Trudeau continued walking, looked straight ahead, and said, “I won’t be seeing him.” He and MacEachen fought over whether he should visit Eastern Europe and challenge NATO’s tactics there, but he did go, en route to Andropov’s funeral, where he met the Soviet president’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko. The January disarmament meeting in Stockholm took place with ministerial representation, and Andropov’s death brought a pause in the angry rhetoric. However, the peace initiative was clearly losing steam as Canadian officials quarrelled and the international climate changed. In response to press criticisms that little had been accomplished in Washington and that he had been too soft on Reagan, Trudeau noted that his “tactic was essentially to nail Reagan down publicly to the newer and more positive aspects of his Diet statement, and—even more important—to commit him publicly & personally to the progressive statement made by NATO in Brussels.” That progressive statement owed much to Canadian pressure. Moreover, “if [Reagan] should flinch in pursuit of this new course, he can be held to account.”66