LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Pierre Trudeau: Man
built 192 days ago
Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much pubilicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the greatest Canada has produced in this century.
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Pierre Trudeau was a man of the left. Indeed, when the secret history of his era is finally written, it will probably emerge that his connections were much farther left than any establishment journalist can currently conceptualize.
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Considered without the partisan hysterics, the Nemnis' portrait of Trudeau is that of a thoughtful, high-spirited young man lodged securely in the values of his time and society. If there’s a dramatic development within the book it’s the surety with which Trudeau crawled out from under them. One gets the sense that his intellectual energy and precision of mind prepared him—perhaps forced him—to move beyond the limitations of his training and his heritage. When he reached Harvard at the end of the war, the transformation to more cosmopolitan views was predictable, and it arrived swiftly. In both its totality and its detail then, the Nemnis' biography of Pierre Trudeau as a young man provides further texture to Trudeau’s singularity and greatness.
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On a train ride through Beautiful British Columbia, Trudeau decided to respond to the protests of the province’s citizens by thrusting his arm out of his window and waving his middle finger at them with callous disregard for civility. Far more than being simple bad manners, this was a general affront to the sensibilities of the province’s citizens, and proved just how much he cared what they thought.
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Trudeau is seen by many as embodying the spirit of his age: youth, ambition, and anti-conformism. His energy, charisma, and confidence as prime minister are often cited as reasons for his popularity even though a large number of Canadians disapproved of his policies.
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A close reading reveals that even if Trudeau was immoderate, he wasn’t ever a fool. He read well beyond the prescribed Jesuit canon—not easily done in those years—took copious and articulately critical notes, and made discriminating judgments about what he was reading that are often interesting in their own right. A 1941 entry, for instance, concerning the drawbacks of democracy cites “ignorance, credulity, intolerance, hatred for superiority, the cult of incompetence, an excess of equality, versatility, the passions of the crowd, the envy of individuals”. Those are the weaknesses of democracy, past and present, even if they’re being drawn up by a very young man who spent eight years being indoctrinated by Jesuit priests. Then there’s democracy’s virtues, the loyalty to which, without an understanding of the weaknesses, is merely sentimental faith, itself a dangerous kind of Anglican indifference we’re drowning in today.
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