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| PIERRE TRUDEAU | |
 October 3, 2000 
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MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, remembering former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. For that, we turn to Ray Suarez. (Pipe organ playing) RAY SUAREZ: Today's state funeral in Montreal paid tribute to one of Canada's most colorful, most controversial leaders. World leaders past and present, who knew and worked with Pierre Trudeau, attended the funeral Mass at the Basilica of Notre Dame for the man who served as prime minister for 15 years. Earlier in the week, in Ottawa's Parliament building, some 60,000 Canadians came to remember one of the most celebrated politicians of his day. SPOKESMAN: The prime minister of Canada, the honorable Pierre Trudeau! (Cheers and applause) RAY SUAREZ: In 1968, the phenomenon of Trudeaumania swept Canada. The country was infatuated with the flashy bachelor who in three years went from obscure law professor to parliament member, to prime minister. Trudeau quickly became known for his sports car, the company he kept and the signature red rose on his lapel. Trudeau's style of leadership often clashed with official Washington. He opposed the Vietnam War and welcomed American draft dodgers; expanded economic relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba; promoted peace with the Soviet Union, to the dismay of then-President Reagan; and fought to protect Canada's identity from its imposing neighbor to the South. PIERRE TRUDEAU: We're a different people from you, and we're a different people partly because of you. Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. RAY SUAREZ: At home, the prime minister fought to keep Canada united. In 1970, he authorized police raids and suspended civil liberties in Quebec after separatists killed a government minister, and kidnapped a British diplomat. PIERRE TRUDEAU: There's a lot of bleeding hearts around, who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed. But it's more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak- kneed people who don't like the looks of... REPORTER: At any cost? At any cost? Would you go w? How far would you extend that? PIERRE TRUDEAU: Well, just watch me. RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: Ten years later, Quebec held a referendum on independence. Trudeau led the fight against it, and he won. PIERRE TRUDEAU: These people in Quebec and in Canada want to split it up, they want to take it away from their children, they want to break it down. No! That's our answer. RAY SUAREZ: Toward the end of his career, the prime minister embarked on a global peace mission, promoting nuclear disarmament and aid to developing nations. But the world traveler was often accused of ignoring economic affairs back home. Throughout the 70s, Canadians faced sky-high interest rates as well as inflation and unemployment crises. Many blamed Trudeau's budget policies for their plight. In February 1984, to the surprise of official Ottawa, Trudeau resigned. PIERRE TRUDEAU: I walked till midnight in the storm, just singing. And then I went home and took a sauna for an hour-and-a-half. It was all clear I was going to leave. And I went to sleep, just in case I'd change my mind overnight. And I didn't. I woke up and felt great. To use the old cliché, this is the first day of the rest of my life. Here we are. RAY SUAREZ: One of Trudeau's successors, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, remembered him Friday. JEAN CHRETIEN: Pierre Trudeau's motto was reason over passion. But it was his passion for Canada that defined him. It was his dream of a just society that captured the imagination of the country and made the entire world sit up and take notice. Pierre, you made us young. You made us proud. You made us dream. Merci... ( Speaking French ) JEAN CHRETIEN: (speaking through interpreter) Thank you, dear friend, and farewell. RAY SUAREZ: In the last few months, Pierre Elliott Trudeau suffered from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer. He died Thursday at the age of 80. RAY SUAREZ: For more on the life of Pierre Trudeau, we turn to Stephen
Clarkson, coauthor of "Trudeau and our Times" and professor
of political economy at the University of Toronto. He's a fellow at
the Woodrow Wilson Center. And Richard Duncan. He was "Time"
Magazine's Ottawa bureau chief from 1968 until 1971. He later became
executive editor of "Time" and editor of time.com. STEPHEN CLARKSON: Well, that's a big question. He had a tremendous impact on the Canadian consciousness. There's been... Now that he's just died, there's been an amazing response from the Canadian public. It's quite clear in what man and women in the street interviews are saying that he touched them. They connected with him. For them, he was the definition of a multicultural, bilingual Canada that had a very generous social service, social welfare system, that was very... Not quite the United States, a very good country of which he made them feel proud. RAY SUAREZ: Was the place very different when he left from the country that he took over in the late 60's? STEPHEN CLARKSON: Yes. He had changed the constitution, which for Americans would be hard to conceive. But he... The constitution was still under British control, oddly enough, and in the process of patriating the constitution, getting constitutional sovereignty, as it were, he inserted in it something like the American bill of rights. It was called a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that changed the parliamentary system into something like the American, where people feel that they've got special rights. And that made a big impact on minorities, gays and lesbians, native peoples, handicapped, women felt they now had more rights than they had had before. So that was a huge change that he made in our system. RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: Richard Duncan, we saw a bit of the prime minister's personality in that report. When asked by a reporter how far he was willing to go, a very in-your-face reply, "just watch me." And this was a very critical moment in his time as prime minister. RICHARD DUNCAN: Exactly. And I think that that remark was vintage Trudeau. He never backed down from a challenge and that sort of thing. Verbally he was combative. I'm not sure he always meant it, but he always highlighted the issues pretty well that way. RAY SUAREZ: Many of the obituaries over the past week have noted his hard work to keep Canada unified, to keep Quebec in the confederation. But the question still isn't settled. Can we say that a united Canada is part of his monument today? STEPHEN CLARKSON: Well, no. Because we still don't know. There could be another referendum in which the Quebec population voted yes in a big enough majority that they legitimately could become independent. So in a way we won't know what his long-term legacy to us is for another ten, 20, maybe even 30 years. But in other respects, it's very clear that he did have an impact on the country in many, many other policy areas and in the foreign policy questions that you highlighted in your introduction -- he did play a role in the summit meeting, the economic summits and the commonwealth heads of state, in the francophonie... The French-speaking states, even in the United Nations. He wasn't representing a big power, because Canada was something like seventh on the totem poll, but he had an intelligence, he had a knowledge of international issues which other heads of state respected, including President Carter, for instance, who really did phone him up and ask for his advice because he, Trudeau, had had a lot of experience in international affairs for over ten years, whereas Carter was a new boy in that group, and he appreciated Trudeau's advice. And Trudeau was respected by third-world leaders because he had traveled a lot and he very much respected the cultures of other countries. He spoke many languages. He could quote you "Don Quixote" in Spanish. And other world leaders, Fidel Castro being one who came to the funeral just now, really found him unusual, an unusual western head of state. RAY SUAREZ: Richard Duncan, on this side of the border, though, one of the ways that we seem to know Pierre Trudeau was because he sort of joined politics and political power with his status as a celebrity. RICHARD DUNCAN: I think he was one of the first major politicians probably in the world to realize the uses of celebrity. Everyone tends to use a little bit of that now, and the glamour of office has become merged with the glamour of movie stars or whatever. And celebrity encompasses politics. It's hard to remember that that wasn't very much so at his time. And I think he used it very effectively, in a calculated way, and in a way that many would try to imitate after him. STEPHEN CLARKSON: I think that's true, but I think one has to realize that that celebrity status, his dating Barbara Streisand, for instance, was just the persona... is the mask that he had on in front. Basically he was an intellectual. He was a very, very intelligent man. He had trained well. He went to Harvard and studied with the best minds of political economy at Harvard, Champeter, Frederick, Hanson. He had studied government for ten or fifteen years before even going into politics, and he knew what he wanted to do. And at the same time, he was a very shy person, quite timid. And he was also very aggressive. He used these women as a way to buttress himself and play to the cameras, because he was, as Mr. Duncan said, very adept at creating his own image and posing for the camera shot that would make him look terrific, doing something like making a pirouette behind the back of the Queen of England to call attention of himself. So he was a very complex, and therefore, fascinating figure. RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: But Richard Duncan, by registering with such a high public profile, did he help define Canada for the 200-plus million of us down here? RICHARD DUNCAN: Well, there was the trendy Pierre image, the very sort of shallow image that we had here, I think, which didn't define Canada very well. It simply defined one aspect, the most public aspect of his personality. I think he... he had more important things on his plate than relationships with the U.S. And it's mild contradiction to some of the coverage of the funeral that we had. I would not, looking back, emphasize very strongly his differences in policy between the U.S. He had them, but he had, I believe, at least in the time that I was there, more important issues on his plate. Those were low-priority issues, and he was... RAY SUAREZ: Well, what were what were some of those more important issues? RICHARD DUNCAN: Canadian issues. RAY SUAREZ: Mm-hmm. Like? RICHARD DUNCAN: Like unifying... Like "b" and "b," whether it worked, bilingualism and biculturalism, whether it worked or not. His trying to turn a lot of Canadian attention toward the Pacific Rim and to emphasize trade rather than the good gray high-minded diplomatics that have been typical of Canada's foreign policy before. He emphasized linking trade and economic matters with diplomacy, and I think quite effectively. He had a lot of things going on in Canada so that when, for instance, I remember accompanying him to Washington to meet Richard Nixon -- he didn't go to Washington to pick fights. He had a pretty good idea that the United States had its hands full with its own ugly problems, and he was, in that case, merely polite. And while he didn't agree with a lot of the policies of the U.S., and a lot of the policies of Richard Nixon and his successors, I don't think he emphasized differences between Canada and the U.S. However, I do think that perhaps one of his weaknesses was that he at least early on underestimated the strength of Canadian nationalism, much of which was centered in English- speaking Canada. There was a different nationalist problem in Quebec. And he had to be pulled into that issue, I believe. Perhaps Professor Clarkson sees it differently. STEPHEN CLARKSON: No, I think that's right. I think for American viewers, probably if you blended Adlai Stevenson and al Gore, you would have something that would approximate Trudeau: Very intelligent, very committed to certain issues. And one of those was a tremendous concern about nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. And it's on that issue that he got into a fight with President Reagan. It certainly wasn't because he was anti-American. He just felt that in the first three years or so of Reagan's presidency that he was dangerously escalating the tension with the Soviet Union. And at the summit in Williamsburg in May of 1983, he got into a big fight with both Margaret Thatcher and Reagan over the question of how the West was dealing with the Soviet Union, which he felt was in too provocative a way. And subsequently, the following fall, he went on a big mission around the world, including starting in the White House, trying to persuade Mr. Reagan that his peacefulness was being misinterpreted in Moscow, and he really needed to change his line. And it's not to argue that he convinced Mr. Reagan of that, but two or three months later, Reagan did change his line and became much more accommodating with the Soviet Union, and ultimately that led to the deal with Gorbachev. RAY SUAREZ: Well, gentlemen, we'll leave it there. Stephen Clarkson, Richard Duncan, thank you both. |
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