1968 - Mark Kurlansky [205]
Baseball was having a great season, but it was getting difficult to care. Attendance was low in almost every stadium except Detroit, where the Tigers had their first good team in memory. Some of the stadiums were in neighborhoods associated with black rioting. Some fans thought that the pitching had gotten too good at the expense of hitting. Some thought that football, with its fast-growing audience, was more violent and therefore better suited to the times. The 1968 World Series was expected to be one of history’s finest pitching duels, between Detroit’s Denny McLain and St. Louis’s Bob Gibson. It was a seven-game series in which the Tigers, after losing three out of four games, came back to win the next three, thanks to the unexpectedly brilliant pitching of Mickey Lolich. For baseball fans it was a seven-game break from the year 1968. For the rest, Gene McCarthy—who was said to have been a respectable semiprofessional first baseman—said that the best ball players were men who “were smart enough to understand the game and not smart enough to lose interest in it.”
The only thing as out of step with the times as baseball was Canada, which was in the strange embrace of something called Trudeaumania. This country that became the home to an estimated fifty to one hundred U.S. military deserters and hundreds more draft dodgers was becoming a weirdly happy place. Pierre Elliott Trudeau became the new Liberal prime minister of Canada. Trudeau was one of the few prime ministers in the history of Canada to have been described as flashy. At forty-six and unmarried, he was the kind of politician whom people wanted to meet, touch, kiss. He was known for his unusual dress, sandals, a green leather coat, and for other unpredictable whimsy. He even once slid down the bannister of the House of Commons while holding piles of legislation. He practiced yoga, loved skin diving, and had a brown belt in karate. He had a stack of prestigious graduate degrees from Harvard, London, and Paris and until 1968 was known more as an intellectual than a politician. In fact, one of the few things he was not known to have experienced very much of was politics.
As Americans faced the bleak choice of Humphrey or Nixon, Time magazine captured the thinking of many Americans when it wrote:
The U.S. has seldom had occasion to look north to Canada for political excitement. Yet last week, Americans could envy Canadians the exuberant dash of their new Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who, along with intellect and political skill, exhibits a swinger’s panache, a lively style, an imaginative approach to its nation’s problems. A great many U.S. voters yearn for a fresh political experience. . . .
In a time of extremism, he was a moderate with a lefty style, but his exact positions were almost impossible to establish. He was from Quebec and of French origin, but he spoke both languages beautifully and it was so uncertain whose side he was on that many hoped he might be able to resolve the French-English squabble that consumed much of Canada’s political debate. While most Canadians were against the war in Vietnam, he said he thought the bombing should halt but that he was not going to tell the United States what to do. A classic Trudeauism: “We Canadians have to remember that the United States is kind of a sovereign state too.” He was once apprehended in Moscow for throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin. But he was sometimes accused of communism. Once, when asked flat out if he was a communist, he answered: “Actually I am a canoeist. I’ve canoed down the Mackenzie, the Coppermine, the Saguenay rivers. I wanted to prove that a canoe was the most seaworthy vessel around. In 1960 I set out from Florida to Cuba—very treacherous waters down there. Some people thought I was trying to smuggle arms to Cuba. But I ask you, how much arms can you smuggle in a canoe?”
It is a rare politician who can get away with answers like that, but in 1968, with the rest of the world turned so earnest, Canadians were laughing. Trudeau, with his lack of political experience, would