Documents and secretly recorded Richard Nixon tapes released Wednesday include an unexpectedly warm call from then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau offering support to the embattled president during the Watergate scandal.

“I wanted to phone you to tell you how distressed I was about all this noise that is going on around the Watergate thing,” begins Trudeau during the brief phone call on May 11, 1973, less than a year after the Watergate break-in.

“Amongst politicians, we realize how an issue like this can be seized upon and distorted.”

“Right, well, how kind of you to call,” responds Nixon, later adding “But I’ll tell ya, we’ll survive it, Mr. Prime Minister.”

“I’m sure you will, Mr. President,” said Trudeau.

“But your call I will always remember,” said Nixon.

The call — made upon Trudeau’s return from vacation — came just two weeks after Nixon fired the White House counsel and demanded the resignation of two of his chief White House advisers and the U.S. attorney general. The televised Watergate hearings began a week later.

“I’m kind of astonished,” says John H. Thompson, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University.

“In my book (Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies) I don’t even try to pretend Nixon and Trudeau had a good relationship, because they didn’t,” he said. “They didn’t have a terrible relationship — presidents and prime ministers have things that constrain them.”

Thompson refers to the previously released recording in the Oval Office, where President Richard Nixon described Trudeau as a “son of a bitch” before their two-hour conversation, and afterwards as “a pompous egghead” and “an a--hole.”

Robert Bothwell, a historian at the University of Toronto, says the “official-friendly” call is not what he would have expected.

“But thinking about it, it’s not that impossible . . . . Trudeau and Nixon got on pretty well on an official basis,” he said

“Trudeau is well aware of Nixon’s importance. He has every reason to be conciliatory, even ingratiating if he had to. They are 10 times the size of us, they took 65 per cent of our exports. That would dictate a certain approach, however insincere.”

Still, he suggests, another reason for the call may have been that Trudeau admired the “highly intelligent Nixon,” though he certainly didn’t like him.

During the recording Trudeau refers to a previous phone call from Nixon that begins, “Well, I certainly never forgot that you called me when I was ...” before petering out.

Bothwell says that likely refers to a call from Nixon during the October Crisis in 1970.

“He would have expressed support. It was an official call from president to prime minister.”

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The phone call is a small part of the 94 tapes released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum along with 30,000 declassified documents. The recordings taken from Nixon’s recording system between April 9 and July 12, 1973 is the final batch currently permitted for release.

The new tapes also reveal that on the day of the resignations, Nixon received supportive phone calls from two future presidents.

Ronald Reagan told him “this too shall pass,” and George H.W. Bush said “this is gonna come through good.”