Citizen of the World Read online

  Praise for Citizen of the World

  “[A] magisterial biography drawing on many previously unpublished letters and diaries.”—

  —National Post

  “Citizen of the World is more than just another volume on an already overcrowded shelf. It offers the most intimate look at the most dominant of Canadian political figures in modern times.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “The most illuminating Trudeau portrait…. John English was given full access to the gold mine—all of Mr. Trudeau’s diaries, letters, and papers. It is from that kind of entree that truths emerge. The Trudeau story is more wondrous than imagined.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “English’s work is very readable, balanced in judgment and of course deeply informed…. Trudeau’s energy, passion, ambition, wit, and intellectuality leap off the page, leaving this reader once again with a sense of the extraordinary nature of his life and character.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “John English has written a brilliant biography of the early life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau … Citizen of the World will be as commanding a book as Trudeau was himself.”

  —Dafoe Book Prize jury citation

  “Citizen of the World … is one of the most fascinating and revealing books I have encountered in years…. Sensitively, thoughtfully, and absorbingly written.”

  —The Owen Sound Sun Times

  “The most complete version yet of Trudeau’s life, and one of the most revealing biographies of any Canadian prime minister…. [T]he definitive Trudeau biography.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “Brilliant, so perceptive about Trudeau, so well informed on the context, so beautifully written.”

  —Ramsay Cook, former General Editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

  To Hilde, without whom this book and so much else

  would never have been possible

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 Two Worlds

  2 La Guerre, No Sir!

  3 Identity and Its Discontents

  4 Coming Home

  5 Hearth, Home, and Nation

  6 Nationalism and Socialism

  7 Eve of the Revolution

  8 A Different Turn

  9 Political Man

  10 A Tale of Two Cities

  Notes

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  PREFACE

  Pierre Trudeau is the prime minister who intrigues, enthralls, and outrages Canadians most. Remarkably intelligent, highly disciplined, yet seemingly spontaneous and a constant risk-taker, he made his life an adventure. The outline of the story is well known. Born into a wealthy French-English family in Montreal, he was educated in the city’s best Catholic schools and at university in Montreal, followed by graduate work first at Harvard, then in Paris and in London. When he returned to Canada in the late forties after an extensive journey through Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, he spent the next decade and a half seemingly as a dilettante, writing articles for newspapers and journals, driving fast cars and a Harley-Davidson motorbike, escorting beautiful women to concerts and restaurants, travelling the globe whenever he wished, founding political groupings that went nowhere, and finally getting a teaching position at the Université de Montréal. Then, suddenly, or so it seemed, in 1965 he stood as a Liberal candidate in the federal election, won his seat, and quickly gained national attention as a constitutional expert and an innovative minister of justice. Three years later, he became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada amid a media frenzy usually reserved for rock stars, not politicians. How did it all happen?

  This first volume of The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau offers a key to this mystery. Soon after Trudeau’s death, his executors asked me if I would be interested in writing a definitive biography, based on unique, full access to his papers and including both his personal and his public life. I had doubts, knowing how private Trudeau had been and how little he had revealed of his life in his memoirs, even though his public career ranks among the most influential in Canada. While I admired Trudeau, supported him during his political career and after, and shared many mutual friends and acquaintances, I had met him only a few times, nearly always in political settings, where sometimes he was superb but, at other moments, visibly uncomfortable.

  Yet the enigma of Trudeau intrigued me. Moreover, when I learned from some of his executors—Alexandre Trudeau, Jim Coutts, Marc Lalonde, Roy Heenan, and Jacques Hébert—that he had kept a huge trove of letters and personal documents in his famous Art Deco home in Montreal, I realized I had a rare opportunity and agreed to accept their challenge. These papers, which are now mostly housed in the ancient Tunney’s Pasture research centre of Library and Archives Canada, provide an extraordinary record of his private life. I am the only biographer who has had full access to these papers and to the closed room in which they are preserved. In addition, through the Trudeau family and others, I have had access to other papers that have been ignored, restricted, and absent to earlier scholars. Together these papers form an extraordinary collection that reveals the private hopes, fears, loves, and loathings of Trudeau from his earliest years until his death.

  The personal papers, which were assembled by Grace Trudeau and by Trudeau himself, give a detailed record of his early life. Until the 1960s Trudeau, a literary perfectionist, drafted every letter he wrote and kept most of the drafts—in some cases several drafts of the same letter. In this sense, Trudeau’s papers are more complete than those of Mackenzie King, his only rival in maintaining a full record of his life. Moreover, Grace Trudeau was even more diligent than Isabel King in saving the school records of her favourite son. Virtually every report card, school notebook, award notice, and school essay was preserved. Trudeau also kept materials in his papers that were highly controversial, notably the evidence of his nationalist and secret activities during the early 1940s.

  In reading Trudeau’s own words, I came to realize that the seeming contradictions in his life were more often consistencies, and that this man of reserve to his male colleagues and friends was astonishingly open and honest with women. I uncovered youthful allegiances he hoped to keep secret, yet saw how completely he changed from a socially conservative Catholic to Catholic socialist once he was exposed to different ideas and influences at Harvard and the London School of Economics. I also discovered that his move into political life in middle age was no surprise at all, but something he had planned since his adolescence. He had merely been waiting for the right moment to make it happen. And the playboy who was photographed with one stunning blonde after another had, I found, enjoyed deeply rewarding relationships with a few extraordinary women. His letters to his female friends and his mother are the most frequently quoted in this volume, not because they are sensational but because they reveal most fully the private self that Trudeau quietly cloaked.

  As a youth, Trudeau wrote in his journal that mystery was essential to defining identity and that he wanted to be a friend to all but an intimate to none. It was an intention he held to for the rest of his life. Although he read through many of his papers in his later years, he did not use them in his own brief memoir published in 1993. Nor did he succumb to the temptation to edit or destroy them. Fortunately, he chose the course of integrity and truth, and he retained controversial or intimate items in his archive. Once I had read through the collection, many of his close friends who are still alive generously agreed to discuss these letters with me, and, as we talked, they told me more of their memories of Pierre (I thank them in specific detail in the Acknowledgments to this book). As a result of their generosity and support, my text in several instances revises and even co
ntradicts Trudeau’s own account of his life and other earlier biographies of him. Trudeau, as he emerges in these pages, is a far more complex, conflicted, and challenging character than we have ever known before.

  The first volume of this biography takes Trudeau through the crucial formative years, from his birth in 1919 (a year of disappointment in Canada) to the Liberal leadership convention of 1968 (a year of abundance and promise in the nation he was soon to lead). The second volume will cover his fifteen controversial years as prime minister, his role as husband and devoted father, and his often tumultuous public and private life until his death in the opening year of the twenty-first century.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TWO WORLDS

  The Great War was over; the times tasted bitter. Influenza came back with the soldiers and killed more at home than had died in the trenches. Like the war, it preferred the young to the old. Death usually came quickly as the victims suffocated in a blood-tinged froth that sometimes gushed grotesquely from their faces.1. As winter became spring in 1919, theatres stayed empty. Men and women entered public places warily, concealing their faces behind gauze masks. The plague invaded private spaces, compelling isolation and reflection. What, then, did Grace Elliott Trudeau and her husband, Joseph-Charles-Émile, think when she learned she was pregnant in Montreal in mid-winter 1919? Pregnancy was dangerous in normal times, but the influenza surely terrified her as her body began to swell with her second child.

  The twentieth century had so far been a great disappointment—especially for francophone Canadians. There was some excitement and hope when it began with Canada’s first French-speaking prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, in power, and an increasingly prosperous economy. The great transformation of Western society that occurred as electricity, steamships, telephones, railways, and automobiles upset the balance of the Victorian age profoundly affected the world of the young Trudeaus. In Quebec, as elsewhere, people were in motion, leaving the familiar fields of rural life and traditional crafts for the cities that were exploding beyond their pre-industrial core. In Montreal, the population rose from 267,730 in 1901 to 618,506 in 1921. The rich had clustered together, initially in mansions in the “Golden Square Mile” along Sherbrooke Street and north up the southern slope of Mount Royal, while the poor spread out below them and in the east end. It was said in 1900 that the Square Mile contained three-quarters of Canada’s millionaires. Stephen Leacock, who knew them well, commented, “The rich in Montreal enjoyed a prestige in that era that not even the rich deserve.”2

  Unfortunately, the rich were nearly entirely English; the poor, overwhelmingly French. When the French lived mainly in the villages, the gap was less obvious. In the city, it sowed the seeds of deep discontent. And, as new immigrants, mainly Jewish, flowed in from continental Europe, new tensions emerged in the more diverse city.3

  Even before the war, foreign visitors sensed trouble. In 1911 the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, after a visit to Montreal, said that all reasonable men should advise the French to abandon their resistance to assimilation. They were fast becoming simply an episode in history.4 Among francophones in Quebec, the challenge of the new century brought an increasingly nationalist response, particularly when English-Canadian politicians became entangled in the British imperialism that marked the years before the Great War. By then there was a new prime minister, Robert Borden, and the voice of French Canada in the federal government became faint. And in 1914 the war divided the country as never before between the French and the others.

  Once again, it seemed that a bargain had been broken. Now leader of the official Opposition, Wilfrid Laurier supported the war, along with the French Catholic Church. Even Henri Bourassa, who had founded the nationalist newspaper Le Devoir and become the vocal spokesperson for francophone rights throughout Canada, kept his silence. He and the bishops went along because Borden promised there would be no conscription, but, three years later, conscription was proclaimed, accompanied by vitriolic attacks in English Canada on the French in Quebec. In the bitter and violent Canadian election in 1917, francophones voted overwhelmingly for Laurier’s Liberals, who opposed conscription, while anglophones responded by backing a coalition composed of English-speaking Liberals and Conservatives. There were riots in Montreal and deaths in Quebec City. In 1919 Laurier died, then depression struck, while, at Versailles, the victors divided the spoils even as the world began to understand that the war to end all wars had not done so.

  In their modest but comfortable row home at 5779 Durocher Avenue in the new suburb of Outremont, the Trudeaus could find some comfort. Outremont was neighbour to Mount Royal and, in population, split between residents of French and British origin, along with a substantial number of Jews. They lived far from the crowded tenements of the city below the hill, where death often came for both mother and child during pregnancy.5 Charles and Grace had married on May 11, 1915, and she had become pregnant soon after with an infant who did not survive.6 In 1918 she gave birth to a daughter, Suzette. Charles already had good reason not to enlist and, after the Military Service Act became law in 1917, to avoid conscription.

  When the Trudeaus married, Grace, in common with other Quebec women of the time, acquired the same legal rights as minors and idiots. Her husband owed her protection in return for her submission.7 Yet Grace had her own sources of strength. Her father, a substantial businessman of United Empire Loyalist stock, had sent his daughter to Dunham Ladies’ College in the Eastern Townships, where she had acquired an education in literature, classics, and etiquette that few girls in Quebec possessed. She knew French, her mother’s tongue, as well as English, which she and Charles chose to speak most often at home. Like Charles, she was Roman Catholic and devout.* Though not wealthy in the first years of their marriage, the Trudeaus had the means to hire country girls to help with household tasks.

  Assisted by a midwife at home, Grace gave birth to Joseph-Philippe-Pierre-Yves-Elliott Trudeau on a warm fall day, October 18, 1919.8 The parents immediately chose Pierre from his multiple names, though he, later, took a long time to make up his mind which name he favoured. His mother probably reflected the original intention when she wrote in his “Baby Book” Joseph Pierre Yves Philip Elliott Trudeau. Years later, when he was quizzed about it, Trudeau himself could not recall the correct order.9 He weighed eight pounds four ounces and, from the beginning, suffered from colic. The crying finally stopped when he had an operation for adenoids in May 1920. Along with Pierre’s physical health, Grace recorded his spiritual growth in a diary. It began with his baptism, followed by the moment in October 1921 when two-year-old “Pierre made the sign of the cross.” In December he began to say his prayers alone and “blessed Papa, Mama, Suzette etc.”10 Six months later the proud mother recorded that her precociously bilingual child knew “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” “Little Jack Horner,” “Au clair de la lune,” and “Dans sa cabane.” She continued dutifully to collect mementos of Pierre’s life—school essays, marks, news clippings, and letters—until he finally left her home in the 1960s as a middle-aged man.

  Grace kept only a few documentary fragments revealing the lives of herself and her husband. We have one intriguing letter from Charles in 1921, when he was working in Montreal and Grace, pregnant with Charles Junior (nicknamed “Tip”), was with Pierre and Suzette at Lac Tremblant, where the family had a cottage. He began with an apology for not being in touch but claimed that his daily tasks were overwhelming. Then his emotions flowed freely as he anxiously asked after the children in a hastily written letter:

  How are the “babies”? Always watch them most attentively; and I urge you not to think of me but of them. Watch their steps, their games, their fights, their health. It appears that the little brother [Pierre] is on the right path. This should make you happy, enjoy it; but you must remember that the two of them, the couple, are young and an accident can always happen. If we had to lose one … They are so sweet, so nice—both of them—and you know the proverb: “if you are too nice, you’ll die young.�
� These words are so true that they make me frightened for those two; a third, and a fourth etc…. would be very welcome if only the good Lord would provide more like those we have. I believe now that I am a “garage man” I can use the expression: more of them would make good “spares.”

  After this lame attempt at humour in which he referred to the service stations he had recently purchased, Charles returned to his didactic style, telling Grace to watch their children’s character closely and to correct their faults. Such correction, he urged, was always for the children’s good. After a few more homilies, he closed with kisses and hugs to all: “Salut à Madame, un bon baiser à toi et des caresses aux petits” [Bye Madame, a good kiss for you and hugs for the little ones].11

  Affectionate obviously, hierarchical certainly, Charles has remained elusive, even in the descriptions given by his children and friends.12 He moved outside the familiar categories of his time and place, much as his son would later do. In the beginning, however, his path was familiar. Like most nineteenth-century francophones in Quebec, he grew up on a farm. His father, Joseph Trudeau, was a semiliterate but fairly prosperous farmer at St-Michel de Napierville, south of Montreal. He was a descendant of Étienne Truteau, a carpenter from La Rochelle, France, who had arrived in 1659. Three years later, according to a now vanished plaque that was once affixed to a building on the corner of La Gauchetière and St-André in Montreal: “Here Truteau, Roulier, and Langevin-Lacroix resisted 50 Iroquois, May 6, 1662.”13 By the time of Charles’s birth in 1889, the challenge to the French presence came not from the Iroquois or the British soldiers who had conquered Quebec but from the impersonal forces arising from the transformation of a commercial and agrarian society into one that was urban and industrial.