Final collection of Richard Nixon's private conversations released The U.S. National Archives released its last installment of White House conversations that were secretly recorded by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, a batch of tapes that include a telephone call in which Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau expresses "great confidence" in Mr. Nixon over "the Watergate thing." The 340 hours of conversations cover a three-month period from April 9 to July 12, 1973, the day before the existence of Mr. Nixon's taping system was revealed by presidential aide Alexander Butterfield in testimony before a U.S. Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate scandal. Mr. Nixon resigned from office about a year later, in August, 1974, facing almost certain impeachment over the involvement of his staff and campaign team in an attempt to bug his Democratic opponents" offices at the Watergate complex and their efforts to cover it up. One of the recordings that came to light on Wednesday was a conversation between Mr. Nixon and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Mr. Trudeau called Mr. Nixon on May 11, 1973, to express his "great confidence and respect" to the embattled U.S. President over "the Watergate thing." It was less than two weeks after the resignations of Mr. Nixon's top White House staffers and the firing of his White House counsel in the wake of the growing 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," Mr. Trudeau said. I'll tell you that, as far as I'm concerned, the people here ... and certainly myself have great confidence and respect, and amongst politicians, we realize how, how, how initial actions can be seized upon and distorted. Mr. Nixon appears to appreciate Mr. Trudeau's comments, saying: "I'll tell ya, we'll survive it, Mr. Prime Minister. ... but your call, I will always remember." But most of the never-before-heard material from the latest batch of 94 tapes - made available through the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, administered by the National Archives in Mr. Nixon's birthplace of Yorba Linda, Calif. - deals with subjects other than Watergate. They include conversations related to such Cold War-era events as the Vietnam peace settlement and the return of prisoners of war, as well as the aftermath of the 1972 superpower summit between Mr. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The voice-activated system also captured the 1973 Oval Office meeting between Mr. Nixon and Mr. Brezhnev, the only summit-level meeting ever recorded by a U.S. presidential taping network. Among the range of domestic-policy subjects are conversations about wage-and-price controls, energy policy, campaign finance reform and the Native American uprising at Wounded Knee, S.D. Archive officials say that any newly disclosed mentions of Watergate are confined to conversations deemed not to involve government abuses of power, such as discussions of press coverage of the scandal and how it was affecting White House scheduling. The bulk of Watergate material, including tapes used as evidence in various Watergate-related trials or by special investigators with the prosecutor's office, was released in four previous batches between May, 1980, and November, 1996, according to the National Archives. The non-Watergate material has been made available to the public after years of litigation, under a settlement among the National Archives, Mr. Nixon's estate and Stanley Kutler, a historian who sued to win release of the tapes. Mr. Nixon's taping system, known only to a few aides before it was disclosed, extended not only to the Oval Office but also to the White House cabinet room, the Lincoln Sitting Room in the mansion's living quarters, Mr. Nixon's office at the Executive Office Building next door and the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland. Mr. Nixon was not the first president to secretly record his White House conversations. A certain amount of taping was done by each of his predecessors, going back to Franklin Roosevelt. Reuters with a report from staff