Free Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Page B

bitternessseemed genuine: he had seen past some scrim, had seen the divide between talk and action. He himself, despite a legitimate claim to divided loyalties, had been willing to give over the whole of his energies to the call of the collectivity. He may have found that others, for all their talk, were not quite so ready to rise to the challenge.
    A YEAR OF ARTICLING was enough for Trudeau to grow bored, as his father had, with the practice of law. “[T]hat’s the problem when you have an office,” he told George Radwanski. “People come to you with their problems.” Then, in 1944, he finally received permission from Canadian authorities, denied the previous year on account of the war, to leave the country to study in the United States. The next years would prove crucial. As John English shows in Citizen of the World, through Trudeau’s correspondence and other writings of this period, the man who left Quebec feeling intellectually bankrupt and hollowed out would return to it five years later with an outlook that was much changed from that of his youth, and that would come to define him for the rest of his life.
    Trudeau had chosen to go to Harvard, to study “Political Economy and Government.” In his memoirs, he said he had been torn “between law, psychology, sociology, and politicalscience.” After consulting many people, including the great Quebec intellectual and political leader Henri Bourassa, by then in his seventies, Trudeau finally took the advice of André Laurendeau, at the time a Quebec MNA, who pointed out to him that Quebec was sadly lacking in economists. In his Harvard application, however, Trudeau stayed true to the hope he had expressed when he had applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to follow a career in politics. “I need not hide my conviction that Canada is decidedly lacking in statesmen. We French-Canadians in particular have too few political thinkers to lead us, and the sight of such splendid people going to ruin appalls me.”
    It did not take Trudeau long to realize how blinkered his life in Quebec had been over the previous few years. In his memoirs, he recalled that in the “super-informed environment” of Harvard, he began to grasp, for the first time, the “true dimensions” of the war. Harvard had on faculty several professors who had fled the Nazis, including Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, Heinrich Brüning. “I realized then that I had, as it were, missed one of the major events of the century in which I was living.”
    A great deal seemed to go unstated in this recollection. He ended it thus: “Did I feel any regret? No. I have always regarded regret as a useless emotion.” But as the war wasending in 1945, he wrote to the girlfriend he had left behind in Montreal expressing exactly that, regret, seeming mortified at the mindset that had allowed him to remain caught up his own partisan pursuits while unimaginable horrors were occurring across the sea. His laments had the quality of a cri di cœur —understandably so, given that the “true dimensions” of the war had been well enough known for some time by then, and he had chosen to discount them. As much as he later downplayed this moment of revelation, it was likely determinative for him in setting the future course of his thinking.
    Trudeau’s notes from the time show he had been reading up on Fascism and National Socialism and understanding how narrow and unreflective his own political thinking had been. Commenting on one of his readings he noted that “democracy is not synonymous with capitalistic exploitation,” with the tone of someone who had just emerged from a pampered dictatorship to discover that the wider world was not the den of iniquity he had been led to believe.
    Trudeau mentioned that Heinrich Brüning, a Catholic, had fled the Nazis for Harvard, but he didn’t mention any Jews who had found refuge from the Nazis there, probably because none had. Despite the massive influx of Jewish