Authors: Craig Oliver
In half a century of covering national politics, I have often speculated about the nature of charisma. Politicians either have it or they do not. It cannot be learned but it can be burnished. It is the flame that draws us to individuals whose causes may be good or evil.
Charisma is not defined by gender. Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Eva Perón, even Golda Meir, had it; so too do Kim Campbell, Belinda Stronach, and Iona Campagnolo. Nor is it necessarily connected to physical appearance. Think of the wizened Albert Schweitzer; Charles de Gaulle, with a nose that earned him the nickname “Cyrano”; Winston Churchill, a dumpy gnome; or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, helpless in a wheelchair. Charisma asks for discernible intelligence and a generous spirit, both traits exhibited by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Barack Obama. Though sometimes attached
and Preston Manning missed out. Brian Mulroney possessed it briefly; Stephen Harper remains a charismatic in waiting.
In my experience, charisma comprises an absolute certainty about oneself and an aura of power held in reserve. It is as old as the mysticism of the medieval sorcerer and as alluring as any siren. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada's only truly charismatic leader. He never understood why he was so blessed and once told me he never so much as wanted to lead a Boy Scout troop. But he knew he had charisma and he used it.
Trudeau was not one to allow close relationships with men or women, and his own sons often found him distant. He kept himself aloof and did not show his cards until others had revealed themselves and their intentions. Above all, he valued his privacy and believed others must feel the same. When one of his most admired Cabinet ministers, Don Macdonald, was in emotional pain over his wife's cancer, Trudeau said nothing. Macdonald feared that his circumstances might affect his work and wanted Trudeau to understand. A colleague asked if I would raise the issue with the PM and solicit a few words of support for Macdonald. Trudeau declined to offer them, regarding any gesture as a gross interference in the man's most personal affairs.
He expressed similar sentiments to me after the death of Terry Fox, a national hero who attempted to run coast-to-coast in aid of cancer research. Although Trudeau greatly admired Fox's bravery and determination, he was reluctant to participate in a special CTV fundraising broadcast. I encouraged him to recognize how Fox's odyssey had captured the nation's heart. He protested that he would simply appear insincere, as if pandering to public opinion and exploiting a young man's tragic demise. I argued that if he expressed his genuine feelings, he would give voice to
the nation's sentiments and be appreciated, not condemned, for doing so. In the end he relented, but not happily.
Trudeau's discomfort with open displays of emotion was well-known and perhaps he most feared any spill of personal feeling. There was a revealing moment during one election campaign stop in Newfoundland. The advance man took Trudeau on an unscheduled visit to a community centre for children with mental and physical handicaps. The prime minister was visibly moved, even close to tears, as he circulated among the stricken but cheerful kids. He made a graceful-enough tour and exit, but in the parking lot afterwards, he turned on the aide in a fury, “Don't ever do that to me again.”
A complex childhood, caught between a flamboyant, risktaking father and a stern, somewhat disapproving mother, plus a Jesuit education, no doubt formed his essential character. An amateur psychologist might see Trudeau's life as a struggle between two contradictory natures battling to dominate his psyche. As a young man, Trudeau had been hopelessly smitten with a Montreal woman who was his intellectual equal, but the relationship foundered. Later, his romancing of actress and singer Barbra Streisand gave the sheen of Hollywood stardom to Trudeau's early years as prime minister. Few knew that the Streisand affair became a serious attachment. Friends who spent time with the couple were struck by their mutual admiration and obvious enjoyment of each other's company. But Streisand knew better than Trudeau that their lives were incompatible, and it was she who ended the romance.
Many of the same friends were stunned at Trudeau's surprise marriage in 1971 to Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of James Sinclair, a former Cabinet minister in the governments of Louis
St. Laurent and Lester Pearson. In fact, she and Trudeau had been dating in secret for some time. In her, Trudeau found the kind of woman his mother most likely would have warned him against but who no doubt would have fascinated his father.
Although Margaret was anything but an old-fashioned girl, Trudeau decided to observe an old-fashioned custom. Before the marriage, the prime minister sought parental consent from the father of the bride. According to a Trudeau intimate, he and James Sinclair met alone in the den of Sinclair's Vancouver home. Sinclair had no idea what Trudeau wanted, but expected the prime minister to ask his advice on some government matter. Trudeau caught him unawares by announcing his desire to marry one of his daughters. Which one? Sinclair inquired. When Trudeau replied that his choice was Margaret, Jimmy was not encouraging and suggested instead that another daughter would be much more suitable as a prime minister's wife.
Trudeau's marriage seemed to fly in the face of his upbringing and a lifelong dedication to asceticism, discipline, and reason before passion. On this occasion he opted for self-indulgence and pure physicality; in doing so, he rejected his own intellectualism and also a number of other women, accomplished and intelligent, who regarded his choice with silent chagrin, if not bitterness. Margaret, thirty years his junior, was a self-described nature child who had lived a free-spirited life of casual sex and drugs. She was catapulted unprepared into the serious business of being the chatelaine of 24 Sussex Drive, a challenge even for a mature political wife. She bore three sons in quick succession and finally broke under the strain.
Most Canadians admired the dignity with which Trudeau endured the pain and embarrassment of their terribly public
breakup. Some closer to the marriage were critical of Trudeau: Rather than try to help Margaret, they felt, he closed down and in effect cut her loose. Her revenge was instinctive and unbridled, as witnessed by her behaviour at one of the annual parliamentary press gallery dinners of the time. Trudeau dreaded these much-anticipated events, at which reporters and politicians made speeches poking fun at one another and sometimes themselves. He was not at home telling funny stories and he detested having to feign friendship with people for whom he often had little respect.
In the fall of 1976, however, Trudeau was at one such dinner, and Margaret was at her most outrageous. During the pre-dinner reception in the Centre Block's Hall of Honour, Margaret blew marijuana smoke in the face of the RCMP commissioner, who had to pretend not to know what it was. Later, she would not leave the all-night party at the press club on the other side of Wellington Street from the Parliament buildings. A Cabinet minister, Bryce Mackasey, was sent to fetch her, but she dismissed him with the accusation that he was a “little ass kisser.” Finally, Trudeau himself showed up to take his wife home over her loud objections. This was about as humiliating as it could get for a man as proud and private as Trudeau.
A few months later, I broke the story of the couple's plan to sign a separation agreement. For a full day after the item was broadcast on the CTV national newscast, I fielded calls from newspapers and radio and TV stations around the world, but I declined to elaborate. A close prime ministerial aide had tipped me off about the couple's intentions. I always believed that Trudeau wanted to end the swirl of rumour and get the facts out without doing so through the usual method of a government press release.
After his separation and divorce three years later, there were many women in his life. (Of all the gossip about him, the rumour that he was gay was the most outlandish.) Late one evening I answered a knock at my door to find a romantic interest of my own on the front step with tears streaming down her cheeks. She told me that Trudeau had dropped her because she was becoming too serious. Another time, I took a particularly interesting young woman to a dinner with Trudeau. She had just returned from the Middle East, where she had narrowly missed being forced into sexual servitude by a member of the local ruling family. The next day, Trudeau tracked down her phone number and invited her over to 24 Sussex for an evening swim. I was not mentioned.
Yet another time, when an attractive female TV personality and I interviewed Trudeau at the CTV studios, the lights on the set had barely dimmed before Trudeau whisked his new acquaintance away for dinner, leaving me eating his dust. Never did I hear any of these women speak disparagingly of him, nor did any of them try to exploit their affairs for momentary fame. Their discretion was amazing, though not all were left enchanted by the experience. On a hiking trip with Trudeau into Banff National Park in 1978, I witnessed a mix-up that caught him out in a genuine faux pas.
The night before the climb, we had met in Trudeau's suite at the Chateau Lake Louise for pre-dinner drinks. As usual, he had an attractive young woman with him whom he had invited to join us for the next day's hike. While a small group of us were chatting, a member of Trudeau's security entourage came over and whispered something in his ear. He reacted by slapping his forehead in a gesture that said
Oh, my God
. I assumed that he must have received distressing news of serious national import and my
reporter's ears perked up. Moments later, another stunning young woman joined us, and it soon became apparent that the prime minister of Canada had unwittingly double-booked himself. Needless to say, neither of the ladies was happy with the situation.
Trudeau tried gently to push one of the women in my direction, and since I was unaccompanied, nothing would have pleased me more. But she was having none of it. In a manner that would have made any good feminist despair, the two women began to fling catty remarks at each other, deepening Trudeau's embarrassment. Finally, when it came time for dinner, no further prevarication was possible. He had to decide which woman would sit next to him. After a brief flurry of musical chairs, the woman less favoured made her unhappiness known. She told everyone at the table how she had met a member of the prime minister's RCMP security detail while on a trip to Hawaii. He told her, she claimed, that so many women were coming and going from 24 Sussex they could not keep track of them all for security purposes. Trudeau replied: “Would you be able to recall that Mountie's name? I would like to arrange for him to spend the rest of his career mushing huskies in Tuktoyaktuk.”
Trudeau's third term began with the heady victory of a majority government in 1974, but the mood soon soured. By the next year, the oil crisis was upon us, the economy sank and inflation soared, and Finance Minister John Turner resigned in open defiance of Trudeau's leadership. Two months later, the government introduced wage-and-price controls to widespread public protest. At the same time, Trudeau was badly distracted by the collapse of his marriage and deeply concerned about the welfare of his sons. Senior aides were instructed that nothing short of a national emergency could be permitted to interfere
with his time with the boys. His attention to the job was not what it had been, and his government began to drift.
Despite or perhaps because of the malaise, those were hedonistic times for many in the Liberal government. Trudeau himself never tolerated the use of drugs and drank hardly at all, but among his aides, a few ministers, and the occasional highranking bureaucrat, such recreational consumables were part of the lifestyle. The parties were raunchier, the sex easy, and the pot ubiquitous. It was one protracted end-of-an-era blowout before the 1979 collapse.
Watching Trudeau from the press gallery or from the bow of a canoe was to see a contradiction personified, a man caught between idealism and realism. In his early political days, he sought a dialogue with Canadians based on reason and rationality. Instead, the masses were ready to follow him blindly, without questionâthe opposite of what he professed to want. The idealism was quickly set aside in 1972, when it looked as if Trudeau might lose his second election campaign. He turned himself over to the party's backroom boys and submitted to a campaign of endless photo ops in which even his flower-child wife was exploited.
Some denounced Trudeau's reluctance to get down and dirty in politics, and did their best to help him do it. Such a moment came early in the 1974 election campaign when the campaign managers decided to send Trudeau on a photogenic and seemingly up-close-and-personal train trip. In his private car one morning, Trudeau sat down for coffee with one of his political gurus. The fellow had worked long and hard to keep Trudeau in office and he was blunt. “I would like you to put me in the Senate,” he said. “Absolutely not,” Trudeau replied, and
left the room. The individual never did get the reward many thought automatic. Referring to Trudeau's indignant reaction to this frank appeal for an appointment, one of the campaign staff murmured, “What the hell does he think it's all about, anyway?”
But by the spring of 1979, Canadians were fed up with the Liberals and with a prime minister who seemed increasingly remote, arrogant, and unconcerned. A fatalistic gloom took hold of the government benches and one senior member of the Cabinet told me frankly that his own government had become “an essentially corrupt operation.” Within weeks of the 1979 election campaign launch, Trudeau and his aides knew they would lose, yet according to one of them, Colin Kenny, the prime minister never became angry or irritable even as he endured the rigours of cross-country travel and the animosity of hostile crowds.
Kenny recalls that one wet night during a long car ride to some town or other, Trudeau reminisced about another rainy night, this one from his childhood, when he was invited to join his father and his friends at the family kitchen table while they drank, gambled, and told stories. His father made a ten-thousanddollar wager with one of his drinking buddies that depended on which line of raindrops would win the race to the bottom of the windowpane. On another occasion, Trudeau watched while his father and another man stepped outside to settle a fifteenthousand-dollar bet on who could piss the farthest.