A Leader Must Be a Leader by Jerry S Grafstein

Author:Jerry S Grafstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771614092
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Published: 2019-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

116Pierre Trudeau’s full name was Joseph Phillipe Pierre Yves Elliot Trudeau. He preferred to be Pierre Elliot Trudeau and used the acronym PET. Elliot was his mother’s name born of Scottish and French-Canadian descent.

117It was the spirit of Expo 67 and the era of the Beatles and the memories of movie-like political ‘celebrity’ of John F. Kennedy that still resonated across in Canada. Pierre Trudeau offered Canadians their first political taste of political ‘celebrity’ marked by raging ‘teenyboppers’ who ranted and screamed at him as if he was a ‘rock’ star. He personified a distinct break in politics away from the vitriolic exchanges between Pearson and Diefenbaker and the sedate politics of the St. Laurent era.

118In retrospect, this seemed a strange early ambition in Pierre Trudeau himself a loner. Perhaps the two tropes intersected as he also considered to be a man destined for action.

119Later as Prime Minister, he flew a jet fighter with a RCAF pilot and broke the sound barrier – the only Prime Minister to dare to do so.

120Robert (Bob) Kaplan was a second cousin. His mother Pearl, my first cousin, was born a Grafstein. Bob was a brilliant multi-linguist and close friend of Trudeau before politics, ran for Parliament in 1968 and became Solicitor General in Trudeau’s cabinet in 1980.

121Trudeau by far was the most multilingual of all Prime Ministers. Trudeau had an ease with languages. He could order Chinese food in impeccable Mandarin. Of course, he was fluently bilingual in both speech and writing. He easily acquired a good speaking ease in Latin, Spanish, Italian, and passing knowledge of German and some Arabic. He could order a Chinese dinner for eight or so in impeccable Mandarin with ease and then frugally divide the tab between each diner based on what they asked him to order for them.

122Two Innocents in Red China’ with Jacques Hébert (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007).

123At Harvard, he worked towards a Masters Degree in Political Economy where his Harvard dissertation was on Communism and Christianity and then went on to study in Paris in 1947 at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris where he intensified his interest in Emmanuel Mounier, the French philosopher and founder of the ‘Personalist’ school premised in the individual’s choice of political action. Paris was then in a political, philosophic, and cultural ferment, divided between the Gaullists on the right and the Communists on the left that affected every part of civic society and culture. Trudeau considered himself a ‘personalist’ influenced deeply by. He was also attracted to the writings of Nicolai Berdyaev and his book Slavery and Freedom. Politicians, academics, journalists, writers, and artists were deeply divided. This attempt to build a third political force ended a few years with little or no impact to break the stalemate was led by established writers like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Malraux considered a leftist and became a major supporter of DeGaulle and his first Minister of Culture. It was called the ‘Middle Way’. Budding American

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