Trudeau: The Magnetic Enigma

Trudeau: The Magnetic Enigma Nelson Wiseman John English. Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 1919–1968. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 567 pp. Notes. Index. $24.95 sc. John English. Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 1968–2000. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 789 pp. Notes. Index. $39.95 hc. Pierre Trudeau continues to be revered and reviled in different parts of Canada, but few dispute that his legacy is remarkable. John English’s two tomes on Trudeau are both weighty and light. Weighty because they tip the scales at just less than five pounds, light because of their graceful accessibility. English’s formidable chronicle adds to the already crowded bookshelf devoted to Trudeau. Bibliographies for the books, relegated to two websites, keep the books’ combined 1,300 hundred-plus pages from being even longer. English’s prose is unaffected and appears effortless. His treatment of Trudeau is impressively thorough: a swollen story told well. No less impressive is the non-judgemental posture; this is no fawning elegy. The author and editor of books on some of Trudeau’s prime ministerial predecessors—Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen, Mackenzie King, and Lester Pearson—English also served as a Member of Parliament and cabinet minister for Jean Chrétien in the 1990s. Nominated for a number of awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, the volume on Trudeau’s political career, Just Watch Me, won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Shaugnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2010. With access to Trudeau’s prodigious cache of private papers, English mines well beyond the public record. He also interviewed lovers, colleagues, and bureaucrats. His subject’s élan shines through, but English also probes the soul and maps the heart of Trudeau’s vast, publicly unseen, inner self. The books’ photos impart much of the man, his self-image, and the picture the public has had of him: exuberant, impetuous, and dashing. The first volume’s cover shows Trudeau in a pullover [End Page 227] sweater looking like an academic, a stacked bookshelf in the background; the cover of the second volume has him in a paisley shirt, steely-eyed and debonair. The photos between the covers (unfortunately those in the second volume are somewhat washed out) depict some of Trudeau’s youthful adventures, including a shot of him with like-minded colleagues, rifles in hand, pondering a right-wing coup in 1942. There are also snapshots of domestic politicians he governed alongside, international figures he dealt with, including Castro, Nixon, and Chou En-lai, women he befriended and bedded, the sons he fathered and, finally, his funeral cortege attended by his out-of-wedlock daughter. English’s first volume, Citizen of the World, is also the title of an earlier book about Thomas Paine, but two other Liberal leaders, Pearson and Michael Ignatieff, have reasonably stronger claims to the title than does Trudeau. Like Paine, author of the Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, Trudeau sired a Charter of Rights and offered a personal motto of “reason over passion.” Nevertheless, despite being thought of as a philosophic liberal, Trudeau’s diaries and letters are oddly devoid of references to towering liberal figures such as Locke, J. S. Mill, and Jefferson. In this volume, the brilliant, Jesuit-educated, prize-winning student (over one hundred awards and honourable mentions in the years preceding his failed application for a Rhodes scholarship) converts from being a socially conservative Catholic to become a Catholic liberal-socialist influenced by the thinking of Emmanual Mounier who blended Catholic thought and the egalitarianism of socialism. Trudeau’s transformation is also attributable to his exotic travels and his exposure to Harvard and the London School of Economics. Dismissing his early studies as wasted time, the intellectual millionaire dilettante travels to escape his own society. Seemingly troubled by his wealth, he is a cheapskate when tipping waiters, but is generous with friends. If not for Trudeau’s political success, this first volume, brimming with detail, would likely not have attracted a publisher’s attention and printer’s ink. As a biography without a driving thesis or snappy story line, its...

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