Pierre Trudeau Is Dead at 80; Fighter for Canadians & Unity

September 29. 2000 - Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the long- serving prime
minister of Canada who successfully defended his vision of federalism and a
unified nation against the aroused forces of Quebec separatism, died
yesterday in Montreal. He was 80.

Mr. Trudeau suffered from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer and, more
recently, pneumonia.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trudeau altered his country's traditionally
staid and fusty image with atypical flamboyance.

He was a dashing figure who made his countrymen and women proud that a
Canadian was so highly visible on the world stage.

Mr. Trudeau was prime minister for nearly 16 years, serving two spans
during the years 1968 to 1984, interrupted by a nine-month hiatus during
which his Liberal Party lost its majority to the Conservatives.

Finally, in 1984, after a meditative walk in the snow, he chose to step down.

Mr. Trudeau was propelled into power in June 1968 by an enthusiastic
electoral surge that came to be known as Trudeaumania, a political
equivalent of the paroxysms evoked by the Beatles.

During his time in office, he determined the substance and tone of the
evolving debate that came to define Canada as a modern nation.

Long after he left office, Canadian politics were still being pursued
within the national agenda he had shaped.

Mr. Trudeau supervised the process by which Canada replaced its ties to
Britain with a constitution of its own.

He fostered economic and cultural nationalism that often put him and his
country at odds with the leadership of Canada's neighbor.

While firm in promoting a unified Canada, he was also sensitive to the
needs of the mostly French-speaking Quebec.

Mr. Trudeau saw to it that the role of the French language was reinforced
when the entire country was made officially bilingual in 1984.

Mr. Trudeau recognized Communist China long before the United States did.

He led sometimes quixotic campaigns for world peace and nuclear disarmament
while allying himself closely with Socialist leaders like Olof Palme of
Sweden, Willy Brandt of Germany and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

But for most Canadians, his greatest achievement was his successful
struggle against the Quebec separatist movement.

After bombings, bank robberies and kidnappings by terrorists, and after he
was scorned as an apostate to Quebec's cause, he ultimately won the support
of most Quebec voters.

They sided with him in a referendum in 1980 that took the wind out of the
sails of the independence movement.

"Reason before passion," was his personal motto, and he used it in arguing,
on economic and moral grounds, that Quebec should stay within the federation.

The separatist challenge was a major crisis in Canadian history, and his
admirers say he saved Canada by defeating the movement.

In his heyday, Pierre Trudeau ran his country with a panache that was
aggressively and un-Canadianly immodest.

He drove sports cars, flaunted his wit, dated celebrities like Barbra
Streisand, toured the discos, married a former flower child much younger
than himself and once, in an act of apparent insouciance, was photographed
as he pirouetted alone in Buckingham Palace while other guests walked off
to meet Queen Elizabeth.

Many years later James Coutts, one of Mr. Trudeau's aides, disclosed that
far from being spontaneous, the pirouette, like many other
attention-getting gestures, had been planned and even rehearsed by the
prime minister.

As Michael Valpy, a political columnist for The Globe and Mail, noted in
1998 on the occasion of Mr. Trudeau's 79th birthday, the prime minister had
become impressed early in his political career by an idea advanced by
Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher of media.

McLuhan believed that the public sees prominent figures as if they are
wearing masks, and that it is the character of the mask that the public
identifies with, not the person behind it.

Mr. Valpy, who is married to Deborah Coyne, a constitutional lawyer who is
also the mother of Mr. Trudeau's youngest child, a daughter, maintained
that the mask Mr. Trudeau selected was that of the warrior chief.

He added: "It would require a Joseph Campbell to explain to Canadians - the
beaver people of peace, order and good government - why they found magic in
a warrior chief's mask. But magic they found, served up by a practiced and
consummate magician."

Defining Canadian-ness Annoyed the Neighbors

Another Canadian commentator, Richard Gwyn, maintained that Canadians were
fascinated with Mr. Trudeau precisely because his image was not the way
they saw themselves but the way they wanted to be seen.

"He teases, taunts, inspires and bugs the hell out of Canadians because
they know he is utterly un-Canadian - but exactly what they want other
people to think Canadians are like," Mr. Gwyn wrote in a collection of
essays called "Trudeau's Shadow."

In a country so devoted to understatement, Mr. Trudeau's ascendancy marked
a radical departure.

His success was compared to the transformation of style and leadership that
took place eight years earlier in Washington when John F. Kennedy was
elected president.

Predictably, such a change drew complaints at home and abroad.

In the United States, Mr. Trudeau's assertion of Canadian prerogatives
frequently raised eyebrows and indignation.

There was the time, for example, when he referred to a Washington
bureaucrat as "a pipsqueak."

There were protests in America when he tried to limit American investments
in Canada, particularly in the oil industry.

And when he urged NATO to make a dovish retreat from its first-strike
nuclear strategy, the Reagan administration thought him to be naive,
dangerous and presumptuous.

Still, like all Canadian leaders, he remained preoccupied by his country's
relationship with the United States and even charmed critics with comments
like those he offered in 1969 after meeting President Richard M. Nixon in
Washington: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an
elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can
call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."

And when Mr. Trudeau retired 15 years later, James Reston wrote in his
column in The New York Times: "Some of us down here think he was a good
neighbor and a good friend. We liked his crusty arrogance and the rose in
his lapel. He gave us his truth as he saw it, even if we didn't always like
it."

Joseph Philippe Pierre Ives Elliott Trudeau was born on Oct. 18, 1919, in
Montreal.

His father, Charles-Emile Trudeau, the son of French-speaking Quebec
farmers, was a lawyer then on his way to wealth as the owner of a chain of
gas stations.

He also acquired profitable mines, the Belmont amusement park in Montreal
and the Royals, the city's minor-league baseball team.

His mother, Grace, was of mixed Scottish and French descent.

The family spoke mostly French at home, but Mr. Trudeau could not remember
a time when he did not also speak English.

At a Jesuit high school where he studied Latin and Greek, he systematically
tested teachers in contrarian debate.

"I realized that I must never interrupt a teacher to make an impertinent
remark, because that would be certain to infuriate him," Mr. Trudeau wrote
in 1993 in a book he called simply "Memoirs."

"But if I waited until he paused and then I slipped in a wisecrack, the
class would burst out laughing before he had a chance to get angry."

He said the pleasure of such moments led him to a lifelong habit of
"opposing conventional wisdoms and challenging prevailing opinions."

In 1940 he entered the University of Montreal, only vaguely aware that the
war in Europe "might constitute the most dramatic adventure the men of my
generation would ever confront."

But as he also observed, "If you were a French-Canadian in Montreal in the
early 1940's, you did not automatically believe that this was a just war.

We still knew nothing of the Holocaust, and we tended to think of this war
as a settling of scores among the superpowers." In any case, he did not
enlist; he even rallied against conscription of French-Canadians.

In 1943 he graduated with a degree in law, and after clerking in a law
office he went to Harvard for graduate study in political economy.

At Harvard, he recalled, he was made to understand the parochialism of
Quebec, meeting professors, refugees from Europe, who did make him aware of
"missing one of the major events of the century."

Until he was 30, he spent his time in study and travel.

He left Harvard for Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris, where he roared
across the city on a motorcycle and tasted from a rich and fashionable
intellectual menu: the Christian left, the worker-priest movement, orthodox
Marxism, classical liberalism, existentialism and particularly personalism,
an attempt associated with the writer Jacques Maritain to reconcile the
needs of individuals and society.

A year later he was studying at the London School of Economics, principally
with Harold Laski, the eminent professor of political science who was also
the chairman of the British Labor Party.

Mr. Trudeau has written that his basic philosophy of government was
established there, at a time when Britain was on the verge of instituting
the welfare state.

- continued in part 2 -


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