A few days ago I told a friend that Pierre Trudeau used to remind me of my father, but I wasn't sure why. The two men were the same vintage (Trudeau was born in 1919 and my dad was born in 1923) but bore little physical resemblance to each other except that they were both tall and thin and had receding hairlines. To me, the resemblance was more in the way they carried themselves: perhaps one takes on a similar aura of self-confidence bordering on arrogance whether one is running a country or cutting people open to remove an offending organ or two.