Authors: Michael Ignatieff
In early 1968, as a student at the University of Toronto, I went to St. Lawrence Hall to see Pierre Trudeau, then minister of justice in the Pearson government, launch his campaign for the leadership of the Liberal Party (Mr. Pearson had announced his resignation a short time before). I’d never felt such a wave of attraction for a political leader sweep over me. Here was a law professor, an intellectual fresh from the battle to free his province from the dead hand of the Catholic Church and the reactionary, union-busting government of Maurice Duplessis. I was entranced by Trudeau’s charm and elusiveness, but most of all by his authenticity, his evident struggle to remain himself in the cauldron of publicity and politics. I see now that he was often amateurish, pretentious even, as he took his first steps into the ring. He was struggling to control the forces he had unleashed and to
remain true to the inward, introspective person that he was. I see now how decisive his influence was upon me when, forty years later, I contemplated my entry into the ring. He had entered politics in his late forties, right out of a university classroom. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? It was what I thought, though I was certainly no Trudeau.
Trudeau appealed to me because his message combined an implacable refusal to appease nationalist sentiment in his province with a passionate commitment to bring Quebeckers into the centre of our national life. What made him such an inspiring figure was that he knew exactly why he was doing politics and whom he was doing it for. We were sure he was doing it for our generation.
In April 1968 I was pulling wavering delegates over to his side on the floor of the Ottawa Convention Centre at the National Liberal Convention when the fourth ballot tally came in. I watched him rise from his seat in the stands and wave to the roaring crowd that had just elected him the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and, by virtue of that fact, the next prime minister of the country.
He called an election almost immediately to seek a mandate, and I travelled with him on his campaign plane as a national youth organizer as he swept toward his first election victory in June 1968. He was the kind of leader who would saunter down the plane, sit down beside a young staffer like me, and start an interrogation about the book I was reading. I still remember that it was by Viennese architect Victor Gruen, about city planning.
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Trudeau sat beside me in the plane, high above the Prairies, and as I stammered out incoherent answers about the book’s ideas, I felt the steely eyes of a prime minister sizing me up. When the plane landed, we would race to the venue, him in the lead car of the motorcade, me way in back with the baggage handlers. I didn’t have much to do at the events beyond keeping the crowds at bay. Trudeaumania was at its height and I’d never seen such human
frenzy before, the way people grabbed at his hands as he worked a rope-line and the way young women screamed and tried to kiss him. There is a demonic side to the passions that can sweep through a political crowd, and I found it intoxicating to watch.
That summer of 1968 also witnessed the dramatic crest of Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s insurgent campaigns against President Johnson and the Vietnam War. In February 1968, McCarthy had challenged Johnson in the New Hampshire primary and, thanks to an army of young people, forced Johnson to withdraw from the presidential campaign. Bliss was in that dawn to be alive, to be twenty-one and to feel that the political activism of your own generation could be that powerful.
Exhilaration and a dawning sense of our power were not the only emotions from that time. There was also despair and terror. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, his last sermon, from the night before, warning, with agonizing prescience, that like Moses he might not see the Promised Land, but his people surely would. The night of King’s death, Robert Kennedy made a campaign stop in Indianapolis and broke the news to a black crowd. In the darkness, he sought to calm the raw grief and anger in their hearts. He quieted them in a gentle Boston voice, telling the crowd that he had lost a brother, also to an assassin, and that they must grieve together and learn, as the poet Aeschylus taught, to “bear the awful grace of God.”
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I see now how deeply I was inspired by these transcendent examples of what politics should be. Months later, Trudeau’s plane was somewhere over Sudbury, Ontario, on June 4, 1968, when the captain’s voice came over the intercom and announced that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, the night of his conclusive victory in the Democratic primary in California. I remember the devastation of that moment, the stunned awareness
dawning on very young people that the exhilaration of the political life we were living could also bring with it violence and utter loss.
Just three weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, Pierre Trudeau appeared on the reviewing stand of the St. Jean Baptiste Day parade in downtown Montreal, several nights before the election. As the leading federalist politician of his time, he was the target for all the nationalist and separatist rage in his native province. Bottles and beer cans from jeering separatist demonstrators rained down around him, and his security detail tried to pull him to safety. Trudeau’s courage that night was an electrifying sight. I never forgot the display of raw, intransigent political will caught on camera when he pushed restraining hands away and stood to face the anger of the crowd alone.
A week later, after his election victory, his office phoned and invited me out to Harrington Lake, the prime minister’s country residence in the Gatineau hills outside of Ottawa. Jennifer Rae, a strikingly beautiful and seductive staffer on his campaign, was his companion in those days. She was the sister of my college friend Bob Rae, and it may have been Jennie’s idea for me to come out to keep them company. Trudeau had just taken possession of the place and neither of them seemed quite at home in the rambling, old-fashioned country cottage with the views onto the lake. We swam off the dock and talked about books, anything rather than politics, and I can remember thinking that he had won the greatest victory of his life and he didn’t know what to do with it. It was as if the sheer enormity of what he had achieved—storming to the very top of his country’s politics in a mere three years—was suddenly dawning on him. He was withdrawn, remote, trying to call up inner resolve for the demands ahead. I caught a glimpse then of the price of glory, the fear it can engender in even the most fearless of men.
That was the last time I saw him in office. My father continued to work for him as an ambassador and Trudeau occasionally turned to
him for advice on foreign affairs. In 1978, when Trudeau was looking to appoint a governor general—the Canadian head of state and Queen’s representative in Canada—he let it be known that my father was his first choice. For months my father and mother prepared for the job, accompanying the Queen on a visit to Canada and learning royal protocol and etiquette. Vincent Massey, my mother’s uncle and my father’s first boss, had been governor general, and my father would be the first son of immigrants to be selected for the post. It was so much a foregone conclusion that the appointment leaked to the press. At the last moment, Trudeau, seeking votes out west, changed his mind and chose a former premier of Manitoba for the job. Low political manoeuvres don’t save sinking ships, and Trudeau’s manoeuvre made no difference. He lost the 1979 election anyway. My father, on the other hand, was crushed. My brother remembers it as the only time he ever heard my father cry.
Watching my father recover in the years afterward was perhaps my earliest education in resilience. He picked himself up, wrung out the frustrated ambition and went on to the noblest decade of his life, serving as chancellor of the University of Toronto while caring for my mother, who was then drifting into Alzheimer’s disease. My father told me once that failure had been the best thing to happen to him.
Much later, when Trudeau had left power, we met in London, and we were even filmed together once in the early 1990s, staging a rather self-conscious conversation for his memoirs about Antigone and tragic conflicts in politics.
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We never spoke about my father, who by then was dead.
Back then, when I worked for him, the lure—of Trudeau himself—was so strong that I felt I had to pull myself out of his force field. At the end of that summer, I left Ottawa and set my course to go to Harvard for graduate work. I had no skills and wasn’t ready to remain
in Ottawa and become a staffer in some minister’s office. In any case, the euphoric days when I could be invited out to Harrington Lake were over. Layers of bureaucracy now separated me from the man I admired. I was only twenty-one. It was time to get away and acquire some weight. It took thirty-seven years before I came back to politics with, I hoped, the weight I needed.
These stories of mother and father, of Trudeau and Pearson, the tragic and inspiring echoes of Kennedy, McCarthy and King in the United States, shaped my ambitions and propelled me toward politics. But let’s be clear: genetics isn’t destiny and a family history isn’t fate. My brother, Andrew, three years younger than me, was the heir of the same family history, lived the same period of the sixties and felt no impulsion to run for office. He thought I was crazy to put our good name in jeopardy. I chose the family mythology as much as it chose me. When the three strangers invited me to go into politics, it was as if I had been waiting my whole life for them to show up.
The picture they drew of the political landscape back home was grim indeed. The Liberal government of Paul Martin had just survived being defeated in the election of June 2004 and was heading toward collapse, divided by infighting and tarnished by a financial scandal in Quebec. Martin was a decent, principled man who had fought for twenty years to get to the top and now gave the appearance, rightly or wrongly, of being out of his depth. He had been a tough and imaginative minister of finance, but as prime minister, he was being lampooned as “Mr. Dithers.” Like Gordon Brown in Britain, Martin had schemed to hold the crown, and now that it was his, it was turning to dust. The Liberal Party had lost its capacity to recruit good people, had little or no support in the West or British Columbia, and after eleven years in power under Martin’s predecessor, Jean Chrétien, it had run out of ideas. I was being asked to board a ship heading for the rocks.
The pitch from my new political friends was that it was time for a new captain. They drew a flattering picture of me: proud Canadian with an international reputation, a history in the party going back to Pearson and Trudeau, rhetorical skills, good French. Being an outsider, I had no dog in the fights tearing the party apart and no connection to the scandal then dragging it down in Quebec. Would I think it over?
Given how it all turned out, I should have asked harder questions. Questions like, how were we supposed to win the next election? How was I supposed to revive a party that had been bleeding votes for a decade? I must have assumed we were “the natural governing party” and someone would have the answers. We were still the most successful party of government in the democratic world. What I didn’t grasp was that a great franchise had reached the end of the road.
As I weighed up my options, I knew I could never take an active part in American politics. I wasn’t a citizen and I couldn’t even persuade myself to get an American Green Card. My colleague and close friend Samantha Power would soon leave the Kennedy School and enlist in the service of a newly elected junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, but I knew that if I stayed in the United States, I would only be able to watch from the sidelines. If I wanted to get into the arena, it could only be at home. We had our own republicans—the recently re-formed Conservative Party of Canada, under the leadership of Stephen Harper—and it was clear that he was in politics to roll back everything I’d ever believed in: national programs that strengthened the spine of common citizenship, equal rights for all Canadians, and a balanced foreign policy, staunchly independent and internationalist. I could be a liberal spectator in someone else’s country or I could be a liberal activist in my own. The choice seemed obvious.
I did ask myself how I was supposed to overcome my evident liabilities. I’d been back and forth to Canada throughout my life, writing,
teaching, making films, giving lectures, but I’d played no part in the battle over the constitution in the 1980s, the near-death experience of a referendum on Quebec separation in 1995. You can’t find yourself a place in the politics of a country unless you have lived its dramas, and I could be accused of having been missing in action. Still, all my convictions about politics were Canadian. I saw my country as an example of civility, tolerance and international engagement for people the world over. I must have thought that sheer romantic faith in my place of birth would make up for the fact that I hadn’t actually lived there.
I gave a lot of thought to the question of what story I would tell if I came home. Every politician has to have one. Indeed, devising, controlling and imposing your story on the public mind is the central task for anyone seeking public office. In my case, my story had to turn my obvious liability—years out of the country—into a strength. There was only one possibility: I would tell my story as a homecoming. It was one of the oldest ones in the book: the prodigal’s return. In the Bible, didn’t everyone turn out to embrace him when he showed up on the dusty road?
By this point, you have every reason to be tired of the self-dramatization and self-importance in this search for the motives that led me into politics. All I would say is that self-dramatization is the essence of politics. You have to invent yourself for public consumption, and if you don’t take yourself seriously, who else will?
The idea of homecoming was authentic, at least to me. Wherever else I’d been in life, home was still my Aunt Helen’s cottage on Wreck Island in Georgian Bay, my Uncle Dima and Aunt Florence’s Quebec farm, now owned by the Keenans, my family’s three-bedroom house in Toronto and, most of all, the cemetery in Upper Melbourne, Quebec, where they had all come to rest: Count Paul, my grandfather; Countess Natalie, my grandmother; my father; my mother; all my aunts and uncles; and one day, I knew, myself.