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WASHINGTON — A scratchy, long-lost recording reveals a rambling Richard Nixon struggling to discuss trade issues in the Oval Office with a wily and eloquent Pierre Trudeau, someone the president had referred to hours earlier as a “son of a bitch.”
The two-hour conversation is believed to be the only discussion between the two men captured on the infamous Nixon recording system — and the storied chat that later prompted the sputtering president to call Mr. Trudeau “an asshole” and a “pompous egghead.”
Indeed, Mr. Trudeau serves up a miniature lecture on economics to the president throughout a discussion about the Nixon administration's controversial shift towards more protectionist practices against its trading partners, including Canada, which was previously exempt from some punitive American tariffs.
“If you're going to be protectionist, let's be in it together,” Mr. Trudeau tells Mr. Nixon at one point during the tape that's often punctuated by loud but largely indiscernible background noises.
President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau talk in Trudeau's office on Parliament Hill in Ottawa Apr. 14, 1972 photo. (CP FILE PHOTO/Chuck Mitchell)
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A scratchy, long-lost recording reveals a rambling Richard Nixon struggling to discuss trade issues in the Oval Office with a wily and eloquent Pierre Trudeau, someone the president had referred to hours earlier as a 'son of a bitch.'
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“I am not a nationalist, I am not a protectionist ... if you were going to take a very protectionist trend, our whole economy is so importantly tied to yours, we'd have to make some very fundamental decisions,” Mr. Trudeau says.
He hints that Canada, in response, might be forced to enter into trade agreements with other countries that wouldn't be to the liking of Americans.
The recording is among 200 hours of new tapes and 90,000 pages of documents recently released by the Nixon Library, and comes amid renewed interest in the Nixon presidency that ended in disgrace after the Watergate scandal.
An acclaimed new film, Frost/Nixon, is in theatres and already garnering Oscar buzz. It portrays an interview between Mr. Nixon and British journalist David Frost after the president's resignation in August 1974.
The newly released material captures Mr. Nixon and his operatives dishing the dirt on an array of public figures, including snarking about their marital, mental and drinking problems. They also struggle to come up with ideas to contain growing public unrest over the war in Vietnam.
One tape features Mr. Nixon discussing, with his trademark profanity, how to deal with Mr. Trudeau a few hours before their chat on Dec. 6, 1971.
“I got the note, John, on what to say to this son of a bitch Trudeau,” Nixon says to his treasury secretary, John Connally.
Mr. Connally is best known for being seriously wounded while in a limousine with John F. Kennedy when the president was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. He was the man behind the Nixon administration's detested new trade policies that became known as The Nixon Shock.
“Where do you want me to lead Trudeau? I don't know where to lead him,” Mr. Nixon tells Mr. Connally.
Indeed, throughout his subsequent conversation with Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Nixon seems to grapple at times to articulate his administration's intentions when it comes to trade relations with Canada. Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser at the time, occasionally weighs in to provide the prime minister with more details.
Mr. Nixon reassures Trudeau that the U.S. considers Canada a close friend — “you are terribly important to us,” he says at one point — but is standoffish about making any commitments to him on trade issues.
“Both the U.S. and Canada are inevitably going to pursue their own interests ... they have to do that,” says Mr. Nixon, who hosted a White House dinner later that night in Mr. Trudeau's honour.
“We do have a very close relationship, we are close neighbours, and I think Canadians and Americans get along reasonably well, very well as a matter of fact ... be that as it may, let us understand first we both must do what's necessary to serve our nations.”
The legendary Nixon paranoia occasionally reveals itself, particularly when he accuses other countries of “ganging up” on the United States on trade issues.
Finally Mr. Kissinger intervenes to assure Mr. Trudeau that Canada will soon get a fairer shake in the aftermath of The Nixon Shock. As he speaks, the president makes demurring noises in the background.
Mr. Kissinger apparently disagreed with Mr. Connally's economic policies, and his implicit show of support for Mr. Trudeau's arguments seems to illustrate some of the tensions that existed between Mr. Nixon's top advisers.
Mr. Trudeau, who emerged from the meeting touting it as a triumphant one for Canada, seizes upon Mr. Kissinger's suggestions that the measures aren't permanent.
“That is extremely helpful,” Mr. Trudeau tells Mr. Kissinger, sounding relieved.
“I think we're reassured by everything you've said, that this is temporary, this is not a philosophical approach that we want to keep you in a state of domination just because we want to protect our society now, and we'll go back to being more or less free traders ... this is the most important reassurance I can take home.”
Mr. Nixon then softens.
“The long-term goal is to move toward freer trade rather than more protection,” he says. “That's the policy, there's no question about that.”
Later, however, he furiously cursed Mr. Trudeau in comments that were also captured on tape and released several years ago.
“What in the Christ is he talking about?” he asked Mr. Kissinger.
To H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, he fumed: “That Trudeau, he's a clever son of a bitch.”
He then ordered Mr. Haldeman to plant a negative story about the prime minister with Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Trudeau's feelings for Mr. Nixon were apparently equally hostile. When the prime minister later learned that Mr. Nixon had called him an “asshole” after the meeting, he quipped: “I've been called worse things by better people.”
Nonetheless the dinner at the White House the night of the meeting was, by all accounts, jovial. Mr. Trudeau even asked the American guests in attendance what they thought of the state of Canada-U.S. relations and was pleased by their positive impressions.
Mr. Nixon later announced: “Specifically as regards Canada, we don't want to gobble you up.”
That was in apparent reference to an issue Mr. Trudeau raised during their Oval Office conversation that the U.S. could easily build up a trade surplus with Canada in an attempt to essentially colonize the country.
“If we're always in debt towards you, the only way in which we can pay our debts is by selling you parts of our country. This is a question, Mr. President, that is causing concern in Canada,” he told him.
After Mr. Nixon reassured him that the U.S. had no plans to buy up Canada, Mr. Trudeau expressed delight.
“This to me was a fantastically new statement in the mouth of the president of the United States, and it was said with utmost simplicity and not at all in a grudging way,” Mr. Trudeau told a news conference.
Timothy Porteous, Mr. Trudeau's executive assistant from 1968 to 1973, insists that Mr. Nixon and Mr. Trudeau actually had an amiable relationship.
“On a personal level, believe it or not, it was very friendly,” Mr. Porteous said in a recent interview.
Mr. Porteous's name is contained in one of the newly released documents. He's denied 36-year-old allegations by a Nixon staffer, known only as “Advanceman,” that he helped organize a demonstration against the president during his 1972 state visit to Ottawa.
Mr. Nixon was the type of politician who simply played to his audience, Mr. Porteous said, and Mr. Haldeman, among others in his administration, was notoriously nasty.
“Nixon was an ingratiator and he was always trying to get the approval of whoever he was speaking to,” Mr. Porteous said. “If he thought it would win him approval to call Pierre Trudeau names, then he'd call Trudeau names.”
In fact, Mr. Porteous said, the two men liked one another and Mr. Nixon even called Mr. Trudeau to express his condolences during one of the most difficult days of his life — the assassination in 1970 of his friend, Pierre Laporte, by the FLQ.
“Pierre appreciated the call,” he said.
