First and foremost, I would like to thank John Ralston Saul for trusting me with this project and for guiding me through every stage of it. My thanks also to Diane Turbide at Penguin for her editorial input and support and to David Davidar and everyone at Penguin for the tremendous energy and enthusiasm they have put into this series.
George Galt was my first reader, and I thank him for generously sharing with me his own insights on Trudeau and for saving me from some embarrassing errors. Two lengthy conversations I had with Marc Lalonde were important in deepening my understanding of Trudeau, as was a conversation I had with Margot Kidder. John Fraser was kind enough to allow me access to the University of Toronto’s library services for my research. Steven Hayward and Katherine Carlstrom provided both material and moral support. Rowley Mossop and Stephen Henighan gave me sufficient provocation to keep the spectre of my ignorance always before me. Erika de Vasconcelos, as always, bore the brunt of my many inefficiencies. Finally, Bob Jackson and Uli and Thomas Menzefricke provided sanctuary at two critical junctures without which this book may never have been written.
By far my largest debt, however, is to my sources. Given the format of this series and the absence of traditional footnoting or endnoting, it has not been possible in every instance to credit those sources with the thoroughness usual in more scholarly works. The online digital archives of both the CBC and Radio Canada proved invaluable during my research, providing a sampling of material related to Trudeau that spanned nearly fifty years. Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall’s Trudeau and Our Times, Volume 1: The Magnificent Obsession and Volume 2: The Heroic Delusion remain central to my understanding of Trudeau, and are very much present in this work. Max and Monique Nemni’s Young Trudeau, 1919–1944: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada provided me with crucial insight into aspects of Trudeau’s formation hitherto largely unknown. Finally, John English’s Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919–1968 served as my roadmap in my negotiation of the first half of Trudeau’s life. In his exhaustive analysis of the Trudeau archives and in his integration of archival material with other existing sources and his own original research, English has set the standard for future work on Trudeau. I am grateful to him for his book and for his generous permission to quote excerpts from it without fee. I am also very grateful to the Trudeau estate for their permission to quote without fee from Trudeau’s Memoirs and from archival material that appears both in Citizen of the World and in Young Trudeau.