Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin Page A

society,” he promised dubious Liberals, “this beautiful, rich and energetic country of ours can become a model in which every citizen will enjoy his fundamental rights, in which two great linguistic communities and people of many cultures will live in harmony and in which each individual will find fulfillment.” He was sworn in as prime minister on April 20. Three days later he asked the governor general to dissolve Parliament and call an election for June 25, 1968.
    The swarming that had begun even before the leadership convention became known as Trudeaumania. Partly it was timing. Trudeau emerged on the federal political scene just as the swaggering postwar baby-boom generation, the first to be reared on television, got the vote. Trudeau’s taut, sculpted face with his glittering eyes and implacable stare was ideal for television. As media guru Marshall McLuhan, a friend, pointed out, he had “the perfect mask — a charismatic mask . . . the face of a North American Indian.”
    His appearance, his mannerisms, his eligibility, his ambiguities, and his dangerous flair lured boomers like moths to his charismatic flame. Communications theorist Don Tapscott suggested in an interview that baby boomers, who had grown up with television, looked to the box to find leaders they could follow. By that reasoning, Trudeau — “the command and control, top down, great visionary” — was the quintessential man of his time. “We were passive recipients in a one-way, one size fits all, one-to-many medium, where the messages could be architected and controlled,” said Tapscott, identifying himself as a boomer. “It was about the powerful central authority pushing something out to passive recipients. Trudeau, with his gunslinger mode, was a great master of that.”
    At times, especially in the middle of his long political career, Trudeau’s connection with Canadians attenuated into Trudeauphobia as his economic policies failed to ameliorate the recession driven by the OPEC oil embargo in the mid-1970s, or when the West bristled about the forced sharing of gushing oil revenues under the National Energy Program in the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, with the first sovereignty referendum defeated, the constitution patriated, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined, he seemed to lose interest in Canadians and politics, and they with him, as the deficit soared close to $40 billion and interest rates spiralled. As economist Sylvia Ostry told Maclean’s after Trudeau’s death, “He was highly intelligent and intellectual: he read all of his briefing documents, including the footnotes. He just wasn’t interested in economics. He listened to everything and understood it. But in the end, he had one priority: national unity.”
    He wanted an international platform for his final crusade: a world without nuclear arms. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but the momentum fizzled, largely because of the opposition of those dogged Cold Warriors Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Ronald Reagan of the United States. But the link with Canadians was never severed, even after he left office on June 30, 1984, moved back to Montreal with his three sons, and joined the law firm Heenan Blaikie.
    Most of us who lived through those years, and even those who were too young to be startled by a Canadian prime minister pirouetting saucily behind the Queen’s back at a Buckingham Palace reception, impressed by his dignity in dealing with his flamboyantly rebellious wife, or shocked by reports of him giving the finger to protesters at a B.C. whistle stop in what came to be called the “Salmon Arm salute,” carry contrary images of Trudeau in our heads. Here are five evocative moments from his life.
    The Defiant Prime Minister
    THE 1960S WERE tumultuous times, no more so than in 1968. In France, students were marching through the streets of Paris; in the United States the