Trudeau lectures rambling Nixon in long-lost recording

[Ichingcarpenter]

The Canadian Press

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 Trudeau "an asshole" and a "pompous egghead."

Indeed, 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.


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One tape features Nixon discussing, with his trademark profanity, how to deal with 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.

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.>>>>>>>>>snip

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081207/trudeau_nixon_081207/20081207/?hub=Politics




I grew up thinking Trudeau as Canada's Kennedy