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when his reach suddenly came up against his fear.
    Trudeau’s strategy of deferral, in this regard, had one huge advantage: he could walk away at any moment with no loss of face. Another advantage was that the longer he remained uncommitted, the more he was plied with inducements. Pearson, who was determined he would be the country’s last unilingual prime minister, offered a large one: he arranged for Trudeau, as justice minister, to set out on a country-wide series of talks with the provincial premiers in preparation for a constitutional conference in early February. Thus, while the other leadership candidates were busy with the petty nuts and bolts of their campaigns, Trudeau stood above the fray, dominating the media day after day as he travelled the country and completely eclipsing the leadership race. At each stop he acquired new fans, including such unlikely allies as the fabled Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and British Columbia’s long-standing Social Credit premier, “Wacky” William Bennett.
    Trudeau, however much the issue was to become a defining one for him, had initially been opposed to the constitutional talks. The constitution, he had said, with more foresight than he could have known, was “a can of worms” that would be hard to close again once opened. But now he rose to this challenge as he had to the others that had been put before him, with a confidence and a level of expertise that must have surprised all the fusty old-school politicians on the Hill who had initially dismissed him as a mere showman. The crowning moment came at the constitutional conference itself, which Trudeau dominated, outlining the federalist option in clear and precise terms and completely outshining Quebec premier Daniel Johnson. By now Trudeau was exactly where he wanted—and needed—to be: though he had yet to declare himself a candidate there was a groundswell of opinion for him to do so, though a scant two months before, as Trudeau himself noted wryly, the idea of his candidacy had never been mentioned.
    In this mix it is hard to sort out what was cunning on Trudeau’s part and what was luck, what was people imagining in Trudeau what they wanted to see and what was really there. Given all the behind-the-scenes machinations that went into placing Trudeau just so in the spotlight, the idea that he simply burst on the scene out of nowhere through the sheer force of his charisma doesn’t hold up. But neither does the argument that he had been calculating hisrise from the start. Already from his nomination meeting in Mount Royal back in 1965 Trudeau had been prepared to bow out in favour of his one opponent, Victor Goldbloom, who was a “good man,” he’d said, and surely deserved the nomination as much as Trudeau himself did. Whatever strategy there may have been in this oft-repeated habit of playing the reluctant bride, what made it effective was that Trudeau was clearly bloody-minded enough to walk away from the prize without regrets if he couldn’t get it on his own terms. He had to be cajoled; he had to be convinced; he had to be kept to the path. Without a Marchand next to him, goading him on, or a Pearson or a Norman DePoe, he might simply have strapped on his skis and hit the slopes.
    The rest, as they say, is history. Trudeaumania, already in full swing by the end of the constitutional conference, seemed only to grow more fervent. It managed to carry Trudeau through the leadership convention in April and two months later through the election, where he won the majority that had always eluded Pearson. If anything, what seemed surprising in retrospect was that it had taken four ballots for him to win the leadership, and that if some of those candidates who bitterly opposed him had been smart enough to consolidate their support behind one of his rivals, he wouldn’t have won it at all. On the convention floor,Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh, not realizing the cameras were on her, pleaded with Paul Hellyer