I think you are correct,
Old Sweat – in your last few posts - on what Trudeau
wanted to do.
He was fairly new to power in 1969 and I
suspect that he was having some trouble adjusting to the realities of cabinet government. His “base” in the Liberal Party was, essentially, built on his own personal charisma and his undoubted ability to win votes based on that charisma. But he did not have a loyal political base – that belonged to people like Turner and Paul Martin Sr.
We can be about 99.99% certain that he faced far more opposition than he ever expected from his cabinet – a few members of which went back to St Laurent’s time – and from the bureaucracy.
My
impression is that his “management” was a bit rocky until 1975.
I think Roberston fought him, hard on some (many?) issues, including NATO (
Roberston, p. 266).
The biggest problem, for me, with the 1968/70 foreign and defence policy reviews and White Papers, was the totally inadequate scope. I stick with my description of them is being written in a fit of childish pique. Trudeau and Head were both
sophomoric anti-Americans. They shared a distaste for
nationalism and they saw post war American nationalism in roughly the same light as pre war German nationalism – a very, very strange view that just goes to prove that a first rate education (Harvard,
Ecole des sciences politiques and the London School of Economics) cannot make one smart. The foreign policy White Paper (released in six colourful little booklets)
totally ignored the USA and our relations with it and was, therefore, absolutely, completely
worthless. It was, at best, intellectual masturbation by a couple of juvenile delinquents.
There was an argument
for reconsidering our defence policy. But, according to my
recollections, there was nothing in the review that could have led one to conclude that withdrawing, even partially, for our
commitments to NATO should be one of the outcomes. Some civil servants and military officers did make a coherent case for leaving the central front (AFCENT)and providing a large,
combat ready, force to, indeed
IN, Northern European Command (AFNOR) but the increased costs – all those additional aircraft (fixed and rotary wing) – didn’t seem,
as I understand what I recall several decades after reading the bumph, to be justified by any significant increase in our international profile.
I don’t think Trudeau was a communist, not even a communist sympathizer. I do think he was an
idealistic internationalist who saw, almost eye-to-eye with Castro, Nasser, Nehru and so on. He
felt like a
oppressed colonial and so he felt most comfortable amongst those with some reasonable claim to that status. His “friends” took anti-Americanism to new heights/depths (take your pick) and he followed, almost joyfully.
One final factor: money. In the ‘60s there was a huge escalation in the costs of military hardware – based, largely, on technological advances made in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Look at the “cost” of a
circa 1965 mechanized infantry battalion or SP artillery regiment vs. their 1945, 50 and 55 counterparts. The day-by-day running/maintenance cost of a
Centurion was far higher than had been the case for a Korea era
Sherman and a CF-101
Voddoo and CF-104
Starfighter was going to cost more to buy and fly than the existing fleets of
Canuck or
Sabre aircraft. Too few admirals and generals and almost no bureaucrats were ready and able to deal with the rapid
inflation of military costs – that was, in fact, the primary “driver” behind Mr. Hellyer’s
experiments in the ‘60s.