Read Online Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci - Free Book Online

rival Jean de Grandpré to stand first in the school; he had read extensively, always beyond the required texts, and had written commentaries on everything he had read. He had been the captain of the hockey team; he had skied, played lacrosse, swum, boxed, and sailed. He had had his debates and his plays, his student politics and his student paper, had played piano and gone to the symphony. Among a group of already exceptionalstudents, he had been more exceptional, for which he had been rewarded with prizes—often, to his pleasure, in cash—and with praise.
    When he emerged from this cocoon of adulation and familiarity, however, schooled in an ideology designed to prepare him to take his place in the French-Canadian elite, he promptly attempted to flee his French self and indulge his English one, applying for a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Until then he had expressed his hopes for the future mainly in the vague, lofty terms adolescents are given to. “I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation,” he had written in his journal in 1938, though he had also flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. In his Rhodes application, however, he stated quite unequivocally that he planned to pursue a career in politics. “For some years now,” he wrote, “I have sought out activities that prepare one most immediately for public life,” among which he included his diction lessons, his acting, and his singing lessons. Whether Trudeau, in the time-honoured manner of application-fillers, was merely trying to suggest some pattern to what might otherwise seem a hopeless hodgepodge, the idea of politics had at least crossed his mind by now, even if in his play, Dupés; Trudeau’s character Ditreau had been rejected by his beloved for being that vilest of things, a politician.
    For once, Trudeau failed to get the prize. The Rhodes, despite his impressive credentials and glowing references, went to another candidate. Unexpectedly, Trudeau found himself at loose ends, and as a fallback began to study law at the Université de Montréal. In the meantime, the Second World War had broken out. In his memoirs, Trudeau gave the impression that he paid as little attention to the war as he could get away with. “[T]he instinct that made me go against prevailing opinion caused me to affect a certain air of indifference. So there was a war? Tough. It wouldn’t stop me from concentrating on my studies so long as that was possible.”
    Again, Trudeau may have overplayed in hindsight his resistance to “prevailing opinion,” not to mention his interest in his studies. His studies, in fact, bored him. Though he performed with his usual brilliance, graduating, in 1943, once more at the top of his class, he often spoke dismissively of law school at the time, and never with any of the excitement with which he spoke of his days at Brébeuf. The one lasting legacy of his years there, perhaps, was that it was where he first came across a man who would later prove a great influence on him, the law professor, constitutional expert and civil libertarian, F.R. Scott, who spoke at the university in 1943 on the question of conscription. At the time,though, Trudeau was apparently just as taken with an extracurricular lecture by Abbé Lionel Groulx, who, despite being a man of the cloth, spoke on the conditions under which armed insurrection could be justified, using the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38 as his example.
    Most of Trudeau’s time at law school, however, was taken up not with his studies but with exactly the sorts of issues which he later claimed to have had little involvement in. If in his desire to go to England—though only as a scholar; he’d shown no interest in going as a soldier—he had at some level been expressing a wish to escape the narrowness of Quebec nationalist culture, now that he was stuck in it he very much continued to play his part. In his memoirs, he shrugged off a speech he gave at