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to withdraw and throw his support behind Robert Winters. “What’s the point of going down and letting that bastard be there?” she said. But the bastard won.
    There was one Liberal stalwart whose allegiance wasn’t in doubt, however. While Lester Pearson, as was appropriate, had kept up a look of judicious impartiality during the convention, allowing himself only the merest smile at the final numbers, his wife, Maryon, clearly smitten, couldn’t suppress her glee.
    IN RETROSPECT , despite the serious aberration that Trudeaumania was from the country’s usual habits, the whole phenomenon took on an air of inevitability, as if exactly what should have happened, had. But what had actually happened? A collective delusion, of the same sort that put demagogues in power? Or, seen more positively, a coming of age, a willingness to take risks, to bet, in Trudeau’s words, “on the new guys with new ideas”? For a moment, at any rate, our aspirations seemed incarnated before us in the flesh. Not a very long moment, as it happened. “Good Will for Trudeau, for a Time,” a Toronto Telegram headline read after the convention. For Maryon Pearson, the bloom wentoff the Trudeau rose within a couple of weeks. While she had been able to forgive Trudeau his jibes at her husband in the pages of Cité libre, she couldn’t forgive him the short shrift he gave Pearson after his leadership win, when, among other slights, he dissolved Parliament for the election before the House had had a chance to give Pearson the traditional tribute accorded to outgoing leaders.
    In any event, he didn’t have much need of Pearson after his leadership win: the crowds were mobbing him, women were kissing him in the streets, and the media was lapping it all up. Not everyone, of course, was on side. Despite the unprecedented level of interest in Trudeau, the election in June wasn’t exactly a rout. Although the Liberal popular vote rose by some 5 percent—a massive shift as far as winning seats was concerned—most of the gain was at the expense not of the main opposition parties, which held fairly steady, but of the Alberta-inspired Social Credit Party, which more or less disappeared at the time, only to resurface years later as the Reform Party after Trudeau had left the scene. What the numbers indicate, perhaps, is that however captivated Canadians were by Trudeau, they weren’t ready to give away the farm. From the start, in fact, the interest in Trudeau had as much to do with the fervour of his detractors as with that of his supporters.
    Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, in their seminal work Trudeau and Our Times, looked at Trudeaumania through the lens of sociologist Max Weber’s theories of charisma. Trudeau, in their view, presented the classic features of a political charismatic: a certain foreignness and a “sexual mystique,” among other qualities, but “above all, an extraordinary calling or vocation and along with it, the fighting stance of the crusader preaching social change.” For Clarkson and McCall, however, the Trudeau charisma was a mask hiding a reality that fell far short of the image. Marshall McLuhan had also taken note of the Trudeau mask, though his own, koanlike pronouncements on it sounded entirely approving. “This is your ‘cool’ TV power,” he wrote to Trudeau after watching one of the televised leaders’ debates. “Iconic, sculptural. A mask ‘puts on’ an audience. At a masquerade we are not private persons.”
    Whether we see it as a lie or a skill, a useful illusion or dangerous deception, Trudeau’s mask did indeed become many things to many people during his rise, tapping into a sudden desire or need for a hero in a country generally better at burying its heroes than raising them up. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which traces the basic narrative underlying most hero stories, may give us aframework for understanding the Trudeau phenomenon to put next to Max Weber’s.
    A hero