Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci

Author:Nino Ricci
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-670-06660-5
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2009-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Just Watch Me

“An election is not a beauty contest,” NDP Leader Tommy Douglas said after Trudeau’s victory in 1968, echoing the feeling of many even within the Liberal Party that Trudeau had come to power more on show than on substance. There was plenty of truth to the charge, though part of Trudeau’s success had come exactly from playing down his actual assets. In 1969, he told The New Yorker that he had “probably read more of Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Tolstoy than the average statesman, and less of Keynes, Mill, and Marx,” even though he had read plenty of the latter three. This image of himself as being above the usual hurly-burly of politics had by then become part of his positioning. Already he was referring to himself as a “statesman” rather than a mere politician, a profession whose bad repute he had recognized all the way back in his play, Dupés.

The truth was that much less separated Trudeau from his two main rivals in the House, Douglas of the NDP and Robert Stanfield of the Progressive Conservatives, than met the eye. Stanfield was only five years his senior, and would outlive him, and both he and Douglas probably shared more general culture with Trudeau than Trudeau shared with the hippie generation he had become associated with. In Terence McKenna’s 1994 documentary series on Trudeau, Trudeau admitted that he felt bad for Stanfield, who simply didn’t have the right image for the times, but to whom he was probably more closely allied in both temperament and outlook than to the made-up Trudeau of Trudeaumania. As for Douglas, he was a much more logical political father for Trudeau than Pearson had been, and surely part of Trudeau’s strategy of running more on image than substance had been to hide that fact.

Trudeau later said of the fans who had fuelled Trudeaumania that he wondered “how closely they were listening to my ideas, which sometimes I expounded rather dully.” He had good cause to wonder, given that many of those fans, like the girls who had chased him up Parliament Hill, were teens still several years from voting age and couldn’t have been much interested in theories of federalism. Within months of Trudeau’s election, that sort of star-struck adulation had lost much of its currency and the media emphasis had already begun to shift from a kind of boosterism to a mix of voyeurism and censure. At a Commonwealth conference in London early in 1969, Canadian reporters stalked Trudeau on his various forays into the city and on his dates with German jetsetter Eva Rittinghausen and actress Jennifer Hales, then filed stories suggesting he was spending more time living the life of the playboy than meeting his obligations as Canada’s leader. At the end of the conference, Trudeau, just before rushing off to join Barbra Streisand and Princess Margaret for the London premiere of Funny Girl, gave reporters the first of the many tongue-lashings he was to administer to them over the

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