- continued from part 1 -

Girdling the Globe To Learn About Home

In the spring of 1948, Mr. Trudeau set off on a slow voyage of discovery,
ostensibly to do research for a doctoral dissertation, never completed, on
the interplay of Christianity and Marxism in Asia.

Actually, as he later explained, he was embarking on a different odyssey,
eager to mix with local people and to see and sense the world.

He was arrested in Arab Jerusalem on suspicion of being an Israeli spy.

He was detained when he crossed the new and tense border between Pakistan
and India.

He hitchhiked across an Indochina already rent by warring factions.

He was in China during the 1949 revolution there.

His presence at a lawyers' meeting in Moscow led to instructions to
American immigration officials in the anti-Communist 1950's to deny him
admission if he tried to enter the United States.

After two years, Mr. Trudeau returned home dismayed that the authoritarian
government of Maurice Duplessis and the local ecclesiatical establishment
that had ruled Quebec since his childhood were still in firm control.

He committed himself to work for a "democratic revolution" in the province,
seeking separation of church and state, electoral reform and educational
changes.

He founded an intellectual quarterly, Cite Libre, and used its pages to
call for a coalition of democratic forces against the Duplessis regime.

In 1961 he became a law professor at the University of Montreal, which
earlier had steadfastly shunned him for being too radical and anticlerical.

By this time a quiet revolution was well under way in Quebec, with urban,
cosmopolitan and secular values rising to challenge the old culture and the
old politics.

In 1965 Mr. Trudeau joined the Liberal Party and won election to the House
of Commons.

In Parliament, he sympathized with many grievances of the French-Canadians,
advocating support for their language and culture.

But at the same time he steadfastly opposed any legislative action that
would give them special status.

He was a federalist, and he despaired of any separatist solutions that
suggested ghettos.

"French-Canadians must refuse to be enclosed within Quebec," he wrote in
one of his essays.

"The die is cast in Canada: there are two main ethnic and linguistic
groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly
bound to a mother culture to engulf the other.

"But if the two will collaborate at the hub of a truly pluralistic state,
Canada could become the envied seat of a form of federalism that belongs to
tomorrow's world."

He was quickly singled out by Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who named him
to his cabinet in 1967 as minister of justice and concurrently attorney
general.

He produced legislation expanding social welfare, tightening gun control
and liberalizing laws relating to divorce, abortion and homosexuality.

When Mr. Pearson announced his intention to resign, Mr. Trudeau competed
with 19 others for the post of party leader, which carried with it the
prize of prime minister.

Mr. Trudeau was victorious, and on April 20, 1968, he was sworn in as
Canada's 15th prime minister and its third of French descent.

Three days later he dissolved Parliament, calling for general elections.

Mr. Trudeau campaigned on the promise of "a just society," urging the
richer provinces to pay for programs in the poorer ones.

He conceded that the expanded programs he wanted would mean higher taxes,
but declared, "If you want pie in the sky, you'll have to vote for another
party."

It all went over well with the voters, and on June 25, propelled by
"Trudeaumania," the electorate gave the Liberals a comfortable majority.

But the euphoria was shattered in 1970 when a terrorist group, the Front de
la Liberation de Quebec kidnapped James Cross, a British diplomat, and a
week later seized Pierre Laporte, a minister in the Quebec provincial cabinet.

As a condition of their freedom, the Front demanded the release of members
who had been imprisoned on charges or convictions of murder, bank robbery
and bombings carried out in the pursuit of separatism.

While demonstrators rallied in support of the Front and nonviolent
supporters of separatism called stridently for full appeasement of the
kidnappers, Mr. Trudeau painfully and reluctantly invoked the War Measures
Act to protect Canada from a "cancer of an armed, revolutionary movement."

Using provisions of the act, he sent thousands of troops to Montreal and
canceled some civil liberties. Some 400 people were arrested and detained
without charges.

Two days later, on Oct. 17, a message from the Front told authorities where
they could find the body of Mr. LaPorte.

Four men were eventually charged with his murder and imprisoned. Mr. Cross
was then released, and his captors were allowed to leave for Cuba.

Mr. Trudeau's tough responses proved highly popular, and terrorism
effectively ceased in Quebec.

But the issue of separatism for Quebec did not disappear. Indeed it kept
growing, advanced no longer simply by terrorists but by popular politicians
of the Parti Quebecois, notably Rene Levesque, an old friend of Mr. Trudeau
who was to become his chief opponent on the issue.

By 1976 the separatist party had taken control of the provincial government.

Paradoxically, it was the success of Mr. Trudeau's policies toward Quebec
that led to his brief ouster from office in the elections of May 1979.

With the risk of Quebec's secession seemingly ended by his efforts, the
western provinces were encouraged to lash out against Mr. Trudeau's party,
which they viewed as favoring federal power at the expense of the authority
of their provinces.

The Liberals won no seats west of Winnipeg, and Joe Clark, the leader of
the Progressive Conservative Party, became prime minister.

But then Mr. Levesque inadvertantly came to Mr. Trudeau's rescue.

Realizing that the elections had removed the strongest proponent of
federalism from power, Mr. Levesque felt it opportune to prepare a
referendum that would ask the people of Quebec whether they wanted to
empower provincial officials to begin negotiations on independence.

But by that act he strengthened Mr. Trudeau's support throughout the country.

Some of those who had voted against him, thinking the separatist danger had
ended, now openly missed his voice.

And Mr. Clark quickly stumbled. He lost a vote of no confidence, and new
elections were ordered.

Mr. Trudeau rallied impressively, and by March 1980, he was once more prime
minister.

He immediately set off to challenge the Parti Quebecois in Mr. Levesque's
referendum, scheduled for May.

A Bitter Debate On Canada's Meaning

The debate became personal and nasty, with Mr. Levesque, who was seeking a
yes vote, at one point dismissing the prime minister's arguments against
the proposition.

"His name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. and this is the Elliott side taking
over, and that's the English side, so we French-Canadians in Quebec can't
expect any sympathy from him," Mr. Levesque said.

The prime minister counterattacked. He cited the Ryans, the Johnsons and
the O'Neills - who despite their Anglo-Saxon names were famous
French-Canadian political families.

Then he declared: "Of course my name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Elliott was
my mother's name. It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada
more than 200 years ago. My name is a Quebec name. But my name is a
Canadian name also."

It worked. On May 20, 1980, 59.6 percent of the electorate voted no.

In the showdown over the destiny of Quebec, Mr. Trudeau's vision had
overwhelmed Mr. Levesque's hope of pulling an independent Quebec out of the
federal system.

Though only the foolhardy could claim that Mr. Trudeau's victory over the
forces of separatism was permanent, none could dispute that it was profound.

There were other successes.

In 1982 he succeeded in (re - sic.)patriating the Constitution by having
the British Parliament pass an act that ceded full responsibility for
amending Canada's national charter to Ottawa.

He saw bilingualism and multiculturalism become national programs.

And his vision of Canada as a compassionate and benevolent government open
to the rest of the world yet different from the United States has survived
his term of office.

There were setbacks over nuclear disarmament and over his attempts to limit
foreign involvement in the economy.

But it was in his private life he proved most vulnerable.

In 1970, at the Club Med in Tahiti, the 51- year-old Mr. Trudeau met
Margaret Sinclair, 21, the daughter of a Liberal Party politician from
British Columbia.

They were married the next year and by 1975 they had three sons, Justin,
Alexandre and Michel.

Soon after campaigning with her husband in the 1974 elections, Mrs. Trudeau
suffered exhaustion and was hospitalized.

When she emerged from the hospital, she became a photographer, following
rock musicians and frequenting nightclubs, where she was often photographed
in ways that were humiliating to her husband.

Her friendship with Mick Jagger and other pop icons provided more grist for
tabloid gossip columnists on several continents.

The couple separated in 1974 and were divorced in 1984, with Mr. Trudeau
getting custody of the children.

After stepping down as prime minister, Mr. Trudeau moved to Montreal, where
he kept largely to himself, avoiding interviews or public appearances.

He suffered from Parkinson's disease, but even before the symptoms of his
illness intensified, he kept close to home.

He was always considered an aloof, insular man, and his former wife had
once said that he "destined for eternal solitude."

His public mask, the one he had designed and shaped, seemed to have slipped
away and friends who had known him for years described him as an
increasingly unhappy man.

In 1998 his youngest son, Michel, a 23-year-old microbiologist who worked
as a ski instructor, was swept to his death in an avalanche in British
Columbia. Mr. Trudeau grieved privately.

He was close to his surviving sons and until his last illness frequently
visited his daughter by Miss Coyne, the lawyer, whom he had first met
professionally. The girl was born when Mr. Trudeau was 71.

Nonetheless, despite the aloofness of his last years, memories of the
warrior chief persisted in Canada.

Fourteen years after he left office, when a sampling of Canadians were
polled about which public figure they would most want to have dinner with,
Pierre Trudeau came in a close second.

The only Canadian who was more popular was the hockey star Wayne Gretzky.

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

janet paterson
53 now / 44 dx cd / 43 onset cd / 41 dx pd / 37 onset pd
TEL: 613 256 8340 URL: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/
EMAIL: [log in to unmask] SMAIL: PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada