John English - Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919-1968

P ierre 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 citys 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 Universit de Montral. 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 Trudeaus 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 executorsAlexandre Trudeau, Jim Coutts, Marc Lalonde, Roy Heenan, and Jacques Hbertthat 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 Tunneys 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 draftsin some cases several drafts of the same letter. In this sense, Trudeaus 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 Trudeaus 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 contradicts Trudeaus 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.