The children in Shawinigan called him "crooked face" when he was growing up. He liked street fighting and felt more comfortable in a pool hall than the classroom. He was the eighteenth of 19 children in a small Quebec town where a job at the paper mill was the height of ambition. And he was also the most successful Liberal vote-getter in Canadian history. Jean ChrÔetien was an unlikely prime minister who clawed his way to the top and behaved like an insecure, power-hungry autocrat once there, writes journalist Lawrence Martin in Iron Man. ChrÔetien constantly measured himself against his arch-enemy, Finance Minister Paul Martin (no relation to the author). When the two worked at Power Corp. in Montreal, ChrÔetien liked to play golf against Martin because he could beat him. When ChrÔetien ran for the Liberal leadership against Martin, he boasted to an assistant, "My suit is more expensive than Paul Martin's." In 2000, he ran for a third term in office largely to spite Martin.