bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1990), pp. 7–9
The following is an excerpt from Professor(s) J.L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell’s book entitled Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy published in August 1990 by the University of Toronto Press, (477 pp., $35.00). The excerpt is taken from Chapter 2, A Curious Absence: High Policy in the Relations of Canada and the United States.
Trudeau had not troubled to identify himself with the outgoing Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnston. ’We got the idea that Trudeau didn’t want anything to do with us,’ Johnson’s secretary of state remembered. ’The attitude was hell, these guys are on the way out anyway.’ When Nixon and the Republicans moved into Washington in January 1969, there was no need for the Canadians to atone for any presumptive Democratic partisanship.
That said, it could not be disguised that Trudeau was a Liberal and that Nixon was not. The Canadian prime minister communed with the ex-Canadian economist and Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, an admitted liberal and no friend to the Republican administration in Washington. Although Canada was seldom reported in the United States, early rumblings were felt in March 1969 when Trudeau was quoted as saying that an American anti-ballistic missile system then under consideration would endanger the peace of the world. Kissinger moved to squelch ’an over-reaction on our part’ — presumably some authorized fulmination from the White House. A few days later, as Trudeau’s defence policy review moved towards its climax, one of his old Harvard professors approached his erstwhile colleague, Kissinger, to get him an appointment with Nixon so as to discuss ’the drift in Canadian policy toward neutralism.’
Whatever the instinctive White House response to errant Canadian sentiment, negative American opinion of Trudeau was muted or mute. Canadian assessments of Nixon for their part were cautious. Formidable as Nixon might be, he was not likeable. The president was not a gifted communicator, Trudeau was told. He lacked charisma and strained to prove his sincerity. He was not inclined to give of himself, preferring to be insulated behind a praetorian guard of California cronies. He looked at problems from a long-range view and was not given to quick solutions. He was prepared to spend a year on a problem before it began to be settled. He was also, as time would show, mistrustful to a fault, especially of those with connections to his many enemies. Yet he was ’confident and self-assured’ on policy matters, especially foreign policy, which he used to compensate for his relatively modest domestic accomplishments. ’A complex man,’ Trudeau would say in 1985, ’full of self-doubts… very strange.’ And yet, he added, ’even without Kissinger he would have had a shrewd appraisal of world politics.’ Trudeau adopted a professionally dispassionate approach to Nixon, treating him less as a discrete personality than as the embodiment of the American executive branch. He therefore merited ’respect,’ and got it, as did the other occupants of the Oval Office, Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter. Trudeau did draw the line at Ronald Reagan, but that is the subject of another chapter.
On foreign policy, Trudeau learned, it was the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who counted. Kissinger dealt with great issues and grand strategy; less important matters could be left to the secretary of state, William Rogers, the titular head of the American government’s foreign-policy establishment. Together, Nixon and Kissinger formulated policy on the issues that, they agreed, must concern them. Heading the list, obviously, were East-West diplomacy and Vietnam. Somewhat further down the list were certain European questions, followed by the rest of the world and non-security matters. Given the limited amount of presidential time available, such economy of effort made eminent sense.
In American diplomatic practice, Canada was bracketed with Western Europe. A ’Europeanist’ by the Canadian embassy’s definition, Kissinger did not rank Canada very high in the European constellation — perhaps on the level of Belgium. He gave no sign that Canadian views, or Canadian contributions, were essential or even important in his vision of world order. ’He didn’t take Canada seriously,’ Dick O’Hagan, the embassy’s man in charge of press and public relations, recalled. ’I could understand it… He felt, “I’m a big league guy and I can settle big league problems.” ’ It would not be easy to get, and retain, Kissinger’s attention.
The Canadians tried. In 1970 Canada sent down to Washington one of the country’s most expert political diplomats, Marcel Cadieux, an experienced international lawyer. He had been undersecretary, and there were those who suspected that he considered himself undersecretary still. Cadieux loaded the files in Ottawa for the next five years with learned and perceptive analyses of events. In terms of the daily conduct of business, however, his efforts were largely wasted, for few in the American capital were interested in what he had to say on the larger questions of politics, and economic affairs, the embassy’s bread and butter, rolled on without any need for, or benefit of, high-level political negotiations. It was all the worse because Kissinger’s monopoly over the high-flying, high-policy end of diplomacy.
In such a league, in Kissinger’s opinion, Canada had little to offer. When the Canadian ambassador finally got to see Kissinger, according to a witness, he brought with him a thick briefing book. Kissinger raised his eyebrows. ’Well,’ he said, ’I hope you didn’t come here to talk to me about the sex life of the salmon.’ It was only one indication of how Cadieux found Washington bitterly disappointing; that was especially so when events began to move in a direction that he was not well-equipped to handle.
If Cadieux found Kissinger disappointing, Trudeau did not. According to Jules Léger, governor general from 1974 to 1979, Trudeau was ’fasciné par Kissinger — par sa force physique aussi bien que par sa force intellectuelle.’ He considered Kissinger’s views to be attractive and found the man altogether impressive. Léger added that Trudeau ’est souvent pris par les personalités politiques qui font montre de vigueur physique.’ Kissinger’s charm — an attribute not generally stressed by his chroniclers — may also have played a part. “As soon as he could divine the object of any petitioner,’ an American ambassador wrote, ’he would proclaim that object to be his very own, and proceed to discover a great and possibly unanticipated commonality of purpose as well as a deeply-shared mutual respect.’
No doubt Kissinger also found Trudeau intriguing, but he did not find him importunate. Trudeau was not prepared to allow Vietnam to determine the pace of Canadian-American relations, nor was he engrossed by American politics or American concerns. Like other thoughtful Canadians, however, he speculated on the implications for the longer term of racial conflict and urban disorders across the border, and the State Department briefed Nixon to discuss these concerns when Trudeau paid his first call on the new president. Unlike Martin or Pearson, he had few personal connections in the United States; his most spectacular American acquaintance of the period was the actress Barbra Streisand, his date on several well-publicized occasions.
Trudeau’s fondness for spectacular dates seems to have been a quality Kissinger shared; perhaps it was a symptom of a broader rapport. At any rate, they had no difficulty in agreeing that they were witnessing ’la disparition de la position spéciale que le Canada possédait vis-à-vis Washington.’ As far as they were concerned, a special Canadian-American relationship was outside their personal experience. Neither man, in 1969, saw its utility as outweighing its liability — at a time when the Canadian political elite seemed determined to assert Canada’s autonomy and distinctiveness as far as the Americans were concerned.
The first step was to establish communications. Most diplomatic traffic was handled through the Canadian embassy in Washington, since the American embassy in Ottawa, through most of Trudeau’s time in office, was in the hands of political appointments. The Canadian envoy in Washington, A.E. (Ed) Ritchie, was an old Washington hand who had served briefly as chargé at the embassy in the 1950s. His strength lay on the economic side of external policy, and he was proficient at catering to his government’s economic policy abroad. But as an ambassador his links were with the State Department, and Secretary of State William Rogers and the State Department counted for little in Kissinger’s Washington. ’You never kidded yourself,’ Ritchie remarked, ’that Rogers was going to change the world.’
When Trudeau visited Washington in March 1969 he adapted to the Washington style. On the sidelines stood Kissinger and Trudeau’s own foreign-policy adviser, Ivan Head; to Head fell the duty of briefing the prime minister and preparing his speeches. This was correctly perceived in External Affairs as a reproach, for Trudeau did not like its briefings or its manner of preparing his speeches; but it was not entirely so. Nixon had his own foreign-policy staff, and they expected to deal with their Canadian opposite numbers. It was a situation that Mitchell Sharp accepted with considerable external grace. If that was what Trudeau wanted, he had his reasons which, by definition, were sufficient.
The meeting accomplished little of a concrete nature. Trudeau wanted to hear Nixon’s and Kissinger’s view of the world, and his officials wanted to establish that the Canadian and American leaders could communicate civilly and coherently when required. Trudeau for his part wanted it established that Head could call Kissinger whenever necessary; and it was done. For the rest the Canadians had few illusions. ’It’s great if you’re the guest,’ Head recollected, ’but you have to remember that for Nixon it’s one of three or four appointments in an afternoon.’
Nixon and Trudeau traded platitudes in public and compliments in private. No harsh words were exchanged, thereby masking the fact that, as Kissinger put it, ’it cannot be said that Trudeau and Nixon were ideally suited for one another.’ Nixon would later say as much, referring to the Canadian prime minister on at least one later occasion as ’that asshole Trudeau.’ As to Trudeau’s real opinion of Nixon, we can only speculate.
What was important was that Nixon did not exploit the opportunity, either in March 1969 or subsequently, to lecture Trudeau on the rights and wrongs of Canadian foreign policy; nor did Trudeau read Nixon sermons on the morality of deploying an anti-ballistic missile system, even though that was much desired by Canadian commentators. As Trudeau told the cabinet, Nixon hoped Canada would not withdraw from NATO, but he did indicate ’in strict confidence’ that ’he too hoped to bring troops back in time.’ Within days of his return from Washington, Trudeau authorized cuts in Canada’s forces in Europe; and within months Canada would recognize the Communist government of China. It was a policy that might have affronted the old Nixon; it did not greatly trouble the new.
It did irritate some of Nixon’s supporters. Their reaction was conveyed by ’one of the highest officials of the State Department’ to a well-connected Canadian journalist. It was that Canada had ’crawled on its belly’ before the Peking regime, thereby losing ’the respect of decent Americans’ and imperilling transborder relations. It was, perhaps, fortunate that Nixon and Kissinger were contemplating a visit to Mao’s China to chat over tea with its rulers. Despite resentment at lower levels, the administration would not use China, or NATO, as a club to beat Trudeau, partly, we must assume, because Canadian policy was not regarded as especially significant, at least in multilateral terms. Capitalizing on this insignificance, Trudeau put a value on inaction: ’We may be excused, I hope, if we fail to take too seriously the suggestion of some of our friends … that our acts — or our failure to act — this or that way will have profound international consequences or will lead to widespread undesirable results.’
That left bilateral relations as a field of endeavour. Here, Trudeau, primed by Head, was eloquent. Addressing the National Press Club in Washington, he pointed out that Canada depended on foreign trade, especially with the United States, where Canada sold and bought more than any other country in the world. In fact, Trudeau added, Canada bought more than the next four American trading partners (Japan, Britain, Germany, and France) combined. There was, of course, an obvious disparity between the two countries; and in one of his most frequently misquoted phrases, Trudeau tried to illuminate the disparity: ’Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant: no matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.’ The reporters heard elephants, thought mice, and confused the two, placing a Canadian mouse in bed with an American elephant. And so it stuck in the public memory — an image, an attitude, but no single policy.
The Americans did not really expect there to be any policy. Relations with Canada, to American officials, meant bilateral issues. As one senior Kennedy and Johnson administration official, McGeorge Bundy, later reflected, Canadian-American issues are included to be ’both complex and relatively minor so that it would be hard to treat them effectively except at disproportionate length.’ Bundy was writing as a historian, but the comment retlects his experience as a White House aide. ’The real wonder,’ he added, ’is not that Canadians occasionally get annoyed when Washington fails to pay attention to problems that are large in Ottawa, but rather that the Canadian government, more often than not, made allowances for its large neighbour and goes on do to at least its share in resolving differences.’
Despite frequent contacts between Canada and the United States, at the United Nations or at NATO, there was seldom any urgency to them. On world issues and matters of global policy, positive Canadian opinion counted for little. Negative opinion, however, mattered, though not in quite the way that advocates of open-mouth diplomacy thought. If the Americans believed themselves obstructed or thwarted by Canada, then they might take it out in bilateral policy. And bilateral policy meant maintaining the world’s largest trade flow, not to mention the patterns of life and standards of living of millions of Canadians. Those same millions, however, had views and feelings about Vietnam. If for no other reason, Canadian policy had to be carefully gauged.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1990), pp. 7–9. Read the rest of this issue →
