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On this day in 1973, President Richard Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, told a federal court that she'd accidentally caused part of the 18 1/2-minute gap in a key Watergate tape. There is, ahem, some doubt as to her veracity.
According to Wiki, Rose Mary Woods (December 26, 1917 – January 22, 2005) was Richard Nixon's secretary from his days in the Congress in 1951 until the end of his political career but became well-known during the Watergate affair. Her involvement in the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap that occurred in a tape that was key to the investigation made her a household name.
According to...Woods, on Sept. 29, 1973, she was reviewing tapes of the June 20, 1972, oval office recordings, tape 342, that had been recorded just three days after five men with ties to President Nixon's re-election campaign had been arrested while trying to bug the phones in the offices of the Democratic Party's National Committee at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC.[1] Ms. Woods said Nixon came in and was "pushing the buttons back and forth." The recording was of a conversation between President Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that the topic was the aforementioned arrests at the Watergate Hotel.[2]
White House lawyers said they first heard the now infamous 18½-minute gap on the evening of Nov. 14, 1973. Judge [John J.] Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until Nov. 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer.[2]
The 18½-minute gap can be heard here [mp3, 17.0 MB].
In earlier testimony in November 1973, Woods said,
"The buttons said on and off, forward and backward. I caught on to that fairly fast. I don't think I'm so stupid as to erase what's on a tape."[3]
Later that month [after the gap was revealed], she testified she had made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. On October 1, 1973, while playing the tape on the Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she testified that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be re-recorded. She insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident: seated at a desk, reaching far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applies constant pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine.
Her extremely awkward posture during the demonstration, dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch," resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.[4]
Image courtesy Wiki
No firm explanation for the gap was ever given and attempts to rescue the lost conversation have thus far been futile. However, a special Advisory Panel appointed by Sirica concluded that the
gap was due to erasure[8] performed on the Exhibit 60 Uher [the one with foot pedals].[9] The Panel also determined that the erasure/buzz recording consisted of at least five separate segments, possibly as many as nine,[10] and that at least five segments required hand operation, that is, they could not have been performed using the foot pedal.[11]
So Rose Mary Woods became the "fall guy" for Nixon's cover up. Just like Oliver North would later become one for Ronald Reagan in Iran-Contra and Scooter Libby became one for Dick Cheney when Cheney outed undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.
It's one of the things Republicans are good at.
Special Thanks
Special thanks to bronte17 for gathering comments tonight and minding the store. I have to cover a high school basketball game and likely won't be here till around 11:30 ET. Thanks in advance for reading and for tips and recs. Please show some love by reccing bronte17's comments liberally.
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November 25, 2011
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