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It was even less convincing when expert examination showed that there had been at least five, and possibly nine, separate and contiguous erasures of the tape, removing a total of 18 mins 30 secs. It was going to be "a turning point for our approach to dealing with Watergate," he later wrote. "We're piling up a horrendous amount of tape," he said.

Under the headline TAPES HAVE PUZZLING "GAP" were two articles. Nobody was, going to listen to those tapes, ever, except himself. As pointed out earlier, the quality of the recordings taken from the EOB office was less satisfactory than those recorded in the Oval Office.

The president was at Camp David that weekend and came in to check on his secretary's progress.

But it would have taken a very dedicated believer in conspiracies to accept that someone would have purposely erased 18½ minutes of this particular tape in order to embarrass me.

After an inconclusive public hearing the matter of the gap was turned over to the grand jury and a panel of court-appointed experts.

Background

Woods, Rose Mary was born on December 26, 1917 in Sebring, Ohio, United States.

But by raising the specter of one gap, Bennett had opened up the possibility that the still-secret four-to-five-minute erasure on the June 20 Haldeman tape would shortly be uncovered in the court hearing. The speech would be followed by ten days of "bridge-building" breakfast meetings and private chats with hundreds of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and a swing through the South to trumpet the message that the president was still on the job and fighting for the country.

This, then, was the setting for one of the more curious episodes in the history of Watergate, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a taped conversation.

As H. R. Haldeman has written: "Were there CIA 'plants' in the White House?

He found the June 20 EOB tape, but could not match up the conversation on the reel with the subpoena list. Such background noise could be the result of either poorly functioning equipment, erasure or purposeful injection, the same source said. They apparently failed to see this as a lapse in standard scientific testing procedure.

One of the court's experts testified that in testing the machine Rose had used, they "of necessity had to open up the interior...

And then Rose and I were the first persons to whom Nixon turned regarding the tapes. Later, in All the President's Men, the authors of the article revealed that it was Deep Throat. Sometime in the first week of November 1973, Woodward initiated a meeting with his source in the underground garage, and received startling information: "Deep Throat's message was short and simple: One or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."

(5) Harold Jackson, Rose Mary Woods, The Guardian (25th January, 2005)

One of the enduring images of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s is a photograph of Richard Nixon's long-serving private secretary, Rose Mary Woods, showing how she had accidentally erased 18 mins 30 seconds of one of the crucial clandestine recordings of the president's Oval Office conversations.

In the whole story of the White House recording system the one question asked over and over again by both friends and foes of Nixon is "Why didn't he destroy the tapes?" In a telephone call long after I left the White House, and during the period when Nixon was going through the agony of listening to many of the White House tapes prior to releasing the transcripts or turning the tapes over to the prosecutors, Nixon laughed wistfully and said, "You know, it's funny, I was,just listening to one of the early April tapes of a meeting between you and me.

The contents of the gap remain a mystery.

She accompanied Nixon to California for a time following his resignation. Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he asked his secretary to tell his wife and daughters that he planned to resign Aug. 9, 1974.

But she was far more than a family friend. And I completely believe Rose when she says that she did not do it.

He would display not the wounded president but the man who had come back from many previous political defeats and who would once more rise from the ashes.