In its January 1968 issue, Maclean’s commissioned five “top image makers and marketing experts” to evaluate the style of the Liberal politicians vying for the party’s leadership. The experts weighed in with their insights on key political assets such as “The Image,” “Sex Appeal,” “Youth Appeal,” “The Face” and “The Clothes.” “Dull, dull, dull” was the merciless verdict.

There was one possible candidate, however, whose profile was anything but dull. (Pierre) Trudeau’s image was as significant a factor in his rise to power as Trudeau himself, whoever he was. It started with his personality, especially the way he came across on TV, and was supplemented by his fashionable dress and lifestyle. His image was then embroidered by media commentary that invested him with key features of ’60s culture and nationalist ambition presented in a mod style.

Though media of all types played a role in creating and disseminating Trudeau’s image, his rise was attributable primarily to television. It was, by the late 1960s, the medium through which most Canadians got most of their political information. Television was in its second decade and was becoming less studio-bound and easier to produce and edit. Production values were rising rapidly, close-ups were more sharply defined and intimate, and black and white was blossoming into colour. Elites, political and otherwise, were becoming more adept at incorporating it into the existing mass communications regime of radio, film and mass print.

As television was adapted to existing institutions, practices, and power structures, it had significant effects within them. For one thing, it boosted the existing trend towards a politics of image focused on the party leaders. Its emphasis on the visual accentuated the journalistic proclivity for playing up the human-interest angle by giving viewers the impression they knew politicians personally. In bringing the world into the living room, television made its personalities familiar, naturalizing the association between the nuclear family and the national community.

It was television that first introduced Trudeau to the public, put him on the leadership radar screen with its coverage of his legal reforms, and made him a national celebrity in the opening weeks of 1968. Television provided him with a huge advantage over his political rivals because he came across far better on it than they did. “Trudeau is the only candidate who consistently manages to reach through the lens, through the little square screen, to get at the viewer,” wrote a journalist in a piece typical of the media’s increasing self-consciousness about the influence of television in politics. In discussing Trudeau, journalists used terms such as his “presence” or his “aura” that showed how the medium still struck them as somewhat magical and mysterious. At other times they called his special power “charisma,” without explaining what exactly that was. What was it about Trudeau that made him so telegenic? On this point there was endless speculation.

Contemporary conventional wisdom had it that since television was an intimate medium, political performers should open up about themselves to enhance viewers’ impression of having a direct personal encounter with them. A panel of pundits, convened on Pierre Berton’s CTV interview program in early March to assess the performance of the Liberal leadership candidates he’d had on the show in preceding weeks, agreed that those who had done this had made the best impression. They criticized Trudeau for his reserve, concluding that he would never reveal all and, in fact, would find such a display distasteful.

Yet clearly they were missing something, because it was Trudeau whom the television producers kept inviting onto their shows. They were confusing opening up about one’s personal life with the medium’s ability to engage the viewer through an up-close, personal encounter. The Berton pundits underestimated the power of holding back, leaving the audience wanting more. “Your own image is a corporate mask, inclusive, requiring no private nuance whatever,” seer-du-jour Marshall McLuhan informed Trudeau. “This is your ‘cool’ TV power. Iconic, sculptural.”

Trying to identify the root cause of the Trudeau boom, journalist Anthony Westell thought that, Berton’s pundits to the contrary, Trudeau was somehow able to establish a personal connection with TV viewers. One explanation was that he had a face television loved. Gordon Donaldson, a seasoned journalist working for the CBC who met Trudeau as Minister on the Move was being filmed early in 1967, was struck by how well he came across on camera: “I don’t know what he said, because I was fascinated by the film possibilities of his face — the oriental serenity as he listened, fingertips together as in prayer; the graven elegance of the high cheekbones and the big nose; the sudden animation, the deprecating smile, and the depth of the huge eyes . . . masterfully assembled for the lens.”

Inevitably, celebrity experts were buttonholed to weigh in on the issue. On Feb. 15, Dr. Desmond Morris, author of the bestselling The Naked Ape, paused on his way through Montreal to say that the justice minister had “certain animal leadership properties — as a zoologist, I’m tremendously impressed with Trudeau. He has an intellectual virility which is exceedingly important . . . His anatomy, his gestures, his facial expressions are animal qualities that set him apart and bring him to the top of the heap.” The search for explanation in some atavistic factor was a common feature of such analysis. It was consistent with McLuhan’s argument that the privileging of sight and the linear logic of print culture had transitioned into a more holistic sensorium that put emotion and interpersonal chemistry back into play, retribalizing society.

Television was an audio as well as a visual medium, and Trudeau’s speech combined with his appearance to lend complexity and depth to his performances. When interviewed, Trudeau was in the moment, fully engaged in the exchange. He was not a scripted performer, ponderously stringing together memorized phrases. When asked a question, he didn’t laboriously bridge to a set-piece speech, but rather seemed to consider the question seriously and then respond with a complex and directly relevant answer.

He hinted at ambiguity and complications, while structuring his arguments with either/or logic accompanied by proofs that supported his position. He spoke deliberately in long sentences that required verbal skill to complete correctly. Once he was launched into one, there were successive peaks of dramatic tension as the viewer-as-listener tried to anticipate how he would finish it with syntax intact. The contrast with Robert Stanfield, the most politically significant comparison, was stark. Though he too seemed reserved, Stanfield was a slow talker whose speech patterns suggested the creaking of mental wheels turning ponderously.

Trudeau’s claims to rationality and his ability to speak in sentences coherent enough to be published provided a counterweight to the seductive visuality of television, thereby soothing mediation anxiety. Viewers thought him candid. Even seasoned media observers were impressed: “His unspoken slogan could have been the street phrase: ‘I kid you not.’ No temporizing, no sliding away, no circumlocutions. This is pretty shocking stuff, not to be told what you want to hear . . . Trudeau doesn’t think the people want to be conned.”

As another journalist put it, he “can be brutally blunt, bitingly scornful, stingingly witty or casually indifferent. It comes out cool and frank.” Journalists were suspicious of the prepared response, the pat phrase, and liked Trudeau for “the total lack of any political rhetoric or the little verbal and vocal tricks that get so tiresome in other candidates.” In short, Trudeau performed ably that most highly prized of ’60s virtues: authenticity.

He also provided action that kept the television viewer entertained. When he was interviewed, his face, hands, and body supplemented his words. His face was mobile, but in subtle ways, with little expressions that refined his meaning. He chuckled or sometimes grinned in a sly, self-conscious fashion. His almond eyes seemed half-hooded, yet crinkled mischievously. Sometimes his eyebrows shot up to suggest that whatever proposition he was rationally refuting really was preposterous. A soon-to-be-famous shrug, performed with hands flipped palm up, often accentuated his incredulity. Historian Paul Rutherford, noting how television helped Trudeau rocket to power, attributed it to his acting ability.

“He was something of a showman,” he explained, “who had, as [Trudeau biographer] George Radwanski claimed, an instinctive ‘sense of drama and timing that most professional actors would envy.’ He knew how to appear charming or firm, how to be witty or sincere, how to seem humble or shy, whatever the occasion might demand.” Every Trudeau interview was a live performance by a virtuoso jamming in real time. As any jazz musician knows, successful improvisation requires great discipline and training. Trudeau had been working on his television persona for years. It was yet another of the prized arenas of modern life that he challenged himself to master…

Sometimes — dramatically, improbably — Trudeau became a ham, performing stunts for the camera. On a CBC public affairs show, he sashayed like a hep dude down a staircase at the back of the set as the hosts faced the cameras up front, then suddenly collapsed and tumbled out of sight. After a moment he popped back up and continued on as if nothing had happened. On another set, when a TV clapperboard snapped shut near his face as cameras rolled, he snapped his teeth back at it. Once when he was onstage in front of a live audience, he pretended a hanging mike was a punching bag and gave it a playful smack. During the leadership convention, he slid down a banister while leaving the Château Laurier, then, when seated in his box at the arena, tossed grapes up into the air, catching them in his mouth. These stunts worked on two levels — they provided entertaining visuals for a visual medium and at the same time drew attention to the staged nature of proceedings.

Every television appearance enhanced Trudeau’s reputation. Fascinated by the television personality, journalists researched his background, assembling various colourful bits into a pleasing arrangement. The result was an image that grew luxuriantly under the bright television lights. Analyzing the Trudeau image is challenging insofar as it was not a rational construct within which various components locked logically into place. This was in part because he was a complex, contradictory character, and in part because his image was shaped as much by what people wanted as by who he was. Mass-mediated images aren’t static cardboard cutouts, but rather multidimensional, constantly evolving constellations of impressions. When Trudeau appeared in the media, he acted in response to his perception of what was expected of him, and viewers filtered the impression he made on them through their preconceptions of him. As a result his image was an unstable, evolving montage of prominent features of ’60s culture and nationalist ambition. In an age of teenage boomers, sexual revolution, political protest, passionate nationalism, and a fascination with alternative mental states (both drug and eastern-mysticism induced), Trudeau was portrayed as young, sexy, athletic, a political philosopher, an outdoorsman, and a naturally bicultural Canadian who was also a free-thinking cosmopolitan adventurer.

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Since the Trudeau image was a projection of the wish for renewal, one of its basic but essential components was novelty. “He makes no promises,” said the Montreal Star. “He holds before them the prospect of something new and different . . . a new kind of Canada in which familiar old things will be changed into something exciting and new.” This impression of novelty was facilitated by his recent status as a relative unknown. “Mr. Trudeau’s popularity derives first from the fact that he is a new face in the political world at a time when disillusionment with some of the old ones is general,” observed the Halifax Chronicle Herald.

Christina Newman thought it worth noting that “Trudeau had been in Ottawa for two and a half years but he’d never been of it.” Though this seemed improbable, the sentiment was revealing. Not being guilty by association with the desultory federal scene was a significant qualification for success in the new world aborning, so Trudeau was absolved of any such complicity. In an interview with Patrick Watson broadcast during the leadership convention, Trudeau waited until close to the end and then suggested it was time for “new guys with new ideas,” a pithy and resonant line designed to appeal to those wanting change.

A closely related attribute was that Trudeau was an alternative to the status quo. “All the other leadership candidates represent the greyness of orthodoxy,” editorialized one paper. “He brings to Canadian politics a different and even radical approach.” This kind of characterization allied Trudeau with the ’60s antiestablishment ethos. In the opening sentence of his foreword to Federalism and the French Canadians, the English version of the collection of his old essays that hit the bookstores at the end of February, Trudeau claimed, “No other constant in my thinking need be sought than opposition to accepted ideas.”

Allusions to his one-time flirtations with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation reinforced the notion that the Trudeau difference was that he was progressive. When W.A.C. Bennett, premier of British Columbia, called him a “socialist playboy,” it did Trudeau more good than harm. The story about him throwing a snowball at Stalin’s statue in Moscow got endless play because it symbolized his independence from orthodoxy while providing reassurance that he resisted communism’s authoritarianism — and did so in a symbolically Canadian fashion.

The outsider was an increasingly trendy pop culture type. The man of the hour was no longer the organization man, the suburb-dwelling conformist, and standards of masculine good looks shifted to represent the change. The Arrow-shirt masculinity of JFK and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit had been superseded by the flawed but interesting antihero. “What was handsome in the early ’60s is dead,” Charles Lynch would observe a few years later, “supplanted by the shaggier, acne-scarred machismo of the newer male.” Trudeau had the acne and the outsider posturing. In keeping with the liberation and self-realization imperatives of the ’60s, he was also seen to be radically free, an individual who had willfully shaken off the dead hand of consensus mediocrity in order to realize his unique innate potential. Who better to transform the nation than a man who had already transformed himself in like manner?

Printed with permission from Trudeaumania by Paul Litt, published by UBC Press. Available Oct. 15 online and in bookstores.