Tape released of Pierre Trudeau`s phone call of support to Richard Nixon in 1973
Posted August 22, 2013 4:00 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A final batch of audio recordings from the Richard Nixon White House include a brief and friendly 1973 phone chat with then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
The two-minute call was placed on May 11 that year during the height of the Watergate scandal that eventually doomed the Nixon presidency.
Trudeau said he wanted to let Nixon know how ”distressed” he was by ”all of this noise that is going on around the Watergate thing.”
Trudeau added that he had ”great confidence and respect” for Nixon and how politicians realize how an issue like this can be ”seized upon and distorted.”
Nixon replied to Trudeau that it was kind of him to call and referred to the Watergate controversy as a ”deplorable incident.”
The friendly tone of the conversation is in contrast to what has long been widely regarded as a prickly relationship between the two leaders. Previously released White House recordings include Nixon occasionally using crude language to describe the former prime minister.
The Nixon-Trudeau chat was released Wednesday by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum among 340 hours of recordings from 1973.
The recordings, which capped the release of 3,000 hours of tapes, were accompanied by more than 140,000 pages of text materials.
