It’s been 50 years since the 18½ minute gap was discovered in the White House tape of June 20, 1972, and we are no closer to resolving its origins than we were during the Watergate scandal.
To put it into context, five Watergate burglars were caught red-handed in the offices of the Democratic National Committee early Saturday morning on June 17, 1972. They were quickly tied to President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee, raising the obvious question of what Nixon had known and at what point he had known it. The grand jury issued a subpoena for nine specific tape recordings in July of 1973, within a week of the taping system’s existence becoming known. One of the subpoenaed tapes was of a meeting between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, on Tuesday morning, June 20, their first meeting following the break-in arrests. The D.C. Circuit Court upheld the subpoena in October, and the gap was discovered by Nixon’s defense lawyer, Fred Buzhardt, when making copies at the National Security Agency, in preparing to turn over the originals to Judge Sirica. The gap, a buzz for three minutes followed by a change in pitch which lasted for the next 15 minutes, coincided with the point in the meeting when Haldeman’s notes contained the single word “Watergate.” The entire hullabaloo was over what might have been said at that point in their meeting.
Here is the backstory, whose facts are generally unknown to the public. None of Nixon’s defense lawyers had heard any of the subpoenaed tapes until after Nixon had agreed on Oct. 23 to turn them over following the Saturday night massacre. Up until then, Nixon had adamantly maintained that doing so would be a waste of his lawyers’ time, since the tapes were never going to be turned over under any circumstances. Nonetheless, Nixon asked his long-time personal assistant, Rose Mary Woods, to prepare written transcripts for his personal review. Thus, she began the laborious task of transcribing them. It was time consuming and awkward to constantly turn the knob between forward and rewind, so the Secret Service jury rigged a foot peddle on the Uher 5000 recording machine she was using. (READ MORE from Geoff Shepard: Reevaluating the Saturday Night Massacre)
It was over the weekend of Sept. 29–30, 1973, when she was with the first family at Camp David and working on the transcription of the tape of a June 20, 1972, meeting between Nixon and Haldeman when she realized that a segment of conversation of about five minutes had somehow been obliterated and replaced with a buzzing sound. She immediately informed the president, who phoned Buzhardt. Buzhardt initially believed the conversation in question was not covered by the subpoena, but nine tapes were subject to the subpoena and not eight, as Buzhardt had believed. This made what was thought to be a five-minute gap more significant, but nothing earth-shattering.
It was only following the Saturday night massacre, once Nixon had agreed to turn over the nine subpoenaed tapes and Buzhardt asked someone at the National Security Agency to make copies, in anticipation of giving the original tapes to Sirica, that the full 18½ minute gap revealed itself.
Buzhardt could not find any innocent explanation for the gap. He thought it most likely to have been done by Rose Woods, who had already told Nixon that she must have been responsible for the initial erasure. Buzhardt ceased any further contact with Rose and urged her to retain her own lawyer. On Nov. 21, Buzhardt disclosed the gap’s existence to special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and asked for his assistance in ferreting out those responsible. Jaworski, however, insisted on immediately informing Sirica, who quickly called for a public hearing that very afternoon. Since Buzhardt was the only one who knew anything about the gap, he was the only witness, and, as prosecutors’ questions implied, he was somehow responsible.
Rose was among the very first witnesses then called to testify at Sirica’s evidentiary hearing. She maintained that she certainly had not deliberately caused the erasure and was unsure as to just how it had happened. Perhaps, she testified, it had occurred when she received a phone call in the midst of transcribing that particular tape. She was asked to reenact how that might have occurred. Her reenactment, quickly dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch,” illustrated the near impossibility of her being able to keep her foot on the recorder’s advance pedal when reaching for the telephone. That picture, carried nationwide to triumphant ridicule, severely undercut Nixon’s credibility on the whole tape issue.
What was missing from those articles — and has never been mentioned in any retelling over the past 50 years — is that the reenactment was done in the wrong place. Rose never used her ceremonial office, just outside the Oval Office, when doing tape transcriptions. In fact, she had discovered the initial gap in September, when transcribing subpoenaed tapes at Camp David. That was where her admitted accident had occurred and where they had been when she first informed the president. The office she used at Camp David was much smaller than her ceremonial one. Had the re-creation been staged at Camp David, where the actual accident had occurred, there would have been no ludicrous picture of the Rose Mary Stretch.
Regardless, Rose pitched a hissy-fit following her testimony, raising the possibility in Buzhardt’s mind that perhaps she was telling the truth — and was not the one responsible for the remainder of the erasures. He and an audio specialist from the National Security Agency went into the closet-sized office assigned to Rose’s assistant, Marge Acker, to test the Uher 5000 tape recorder being used for the transcriptions. There, they were able to re-create the buzz, suggesting it was the tape recorder that was responsible for the gap. They now had a plausible explanation, but the NSA official was not in a position to testify publicly at Sirica’s evidentiary hearing. (READ MORE from Geoff Shepard: Watergate as Tragedy)
This is where I came in. Al Haig had phoned me at home no less than four times on Thanksgiving Day, bemoaning the avalanche of bad publicity we were getting from the Saturday night massacre, the 18½ minute gap, and the Rose Mary Stretch. He directed me to gather whomever I could locate from our defense team and have them report for work the next day (Black Friday, when everyone else was off for the Thanksgiving weekend).
The next morning, Buzhardt briefed me on his discoveries involving the tape recorder and tasked me with finding an outside tape expert who could be our witness in court. Even though it was a holiday weekend, I did locate someone from Westinghouse Corporation, which was rather renowned for its work with audio recordings. My effort involved assuring its general counsel that their expert would be working only with copies of the subpoenaed tapes, so nothing could go wrong. Their expert flew to D.C. on Saturday, and I accompanied him to Marge Acker’s West Wing office. The office was so small that I stood in the doorway while he fiddled with the machine. Unfortunately, he was unable to re-create the buzz at that point, so he took the instruction booklet back to his hotel room for further study, in preparation for returning on Sunday morning.
Fortune smiled on me at this point. I had another assignment on Sunday, so another attorney accompanied him — but he was still unable to re-create the buzz. No harm, no foul — at least until the special prosecutors also became curious about the tape recorder and decided it was evidence. They quickly became inordinately interested in knowing just who had been fooling with it. I remained in the clear. I had never entered Marge’s office nor ever touched the machine itself. The Westinghouse expert was not so fortunate and spent days on the stand during Sirica’s evidentiary hearing trying to recall his actions over that Thanksgiving weekend.
Sirica was exceptionally frustrated when he was unable to ascertain the gap’s origins, even after 78 days of testimony. In the end, he referred the matter to the grand jury — where it should have been sent at the outset. The damage to Nixon was immense, with prosecutors later claiming that the evidentiary hearing was key to their destroying Nixon’s credibility on the entire scandal.
No grand jury indictments ever materialized, nor have the gap’s mysteries been resolved. The panel of tape experts assembled to conduct an investigation concluded that there were five to nine deliberate erasures but were unable to ascertain the culprit. The record shows that three people had access to that tape: Nixon, who listened to it; Rose Woods, who transcribed it; and Steve Bull, Nixon’s assistant, who cued up that conversation on its four-inch reel so that the others could hear it.
One reason no indictment was forthcoming may be because the government itself had destroyed key evidence necessary for any prosecution. As I have pieced it together, there was a short in the wall outlet in Marge’s office, where both the tape recorder and a Tensor light were plugged in. Tensors acted something like small spotlights but also consumed immense amounts of amperage. In addition, the tape recorder had a broken part, a faulty bridge rectifier, which apparently would occasionally short out, but only when the Tensor light was on. The tape panel, upon learning of the faulty bridge rectifier, had sent the recorder out to a local Hi-Fi shop for repairs. There, the technician replaced the bridge rectifier, tossed out the broken part, and cleaned the machine. Upon its return, the buzz could no longer be re-created – and, of course, having been tampered with, the recorder could no longer be admitted into evidence. Of course, prosecutors chose not to admit this; they were content just to let the issue fade from the headlines. (READ MORE: Fake Watergate Heroes: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein)
There matters have stood for the past 50 years, with only two notable developments. In Appendix B to his 2014 book The Nixon Defense, John Dean devotes seven pages to reviewing the gap issue before dismissing whatever they discussed or might have been erased as “historically insignificant.” As Dean points out, Nixon’s conversation with Haldeman occurred but three days after the break-in arrests and well before the White House or anyone else had a firm grasp on how the burglary had come about or who was responsible. Dean also points out that there is not the barest mention of anything of note in diary entries for the day of their conversation by either Nixon or Haldeman. He goes on to ponder, rather disingenuously, why and how the gap had become such a cause célèbre in the media, almost as though it were some sort of inadvertent error rather than part of a full-out media war against Nixon.
The other notable event occurred in September of 1974, but I only learned of it recently. Way back on Sept. 22, 1974, the Orange County Register published a front-page story detailing how a telephonic transcribing service, using the same Uher 5000 as Rose Woods, kept experiencing unexplained random erasures. Only after extensive analysis by the telephone company, as well as the recorder’s manufacturer, was it discovered that alterations to the machine’s features could result in a situation where the machine erased content during the rewind function, even where the delete function had not been activated.
Here could be the innocent explanation sought by Buzhardt so long ago. Just imagine, a possible rationale that was available at the time but was deliberately not pursued by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The full story is detailed in my letter of March 22, 2022, to the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice. It is well worth reading in full, since it sets forth a plausible explanation for an historic enigma.
For its part, OPR responded some five months later, declining even to review the matter and claiming (rather factiously) that Watergate Special Prosecution Force attorneys did not function under the authority of the Department of Justice, so their actions were not subject to OPR’s review.
Geoff Shepard came to Washington in 1969 as a White House fellow, after graduating from Harvard Law School. He served on President Richard Nixon’s White House staff for five years, including a year as deputy counsel on the president’s Watergate defense team. He has written three books about the internal prosecutorial documents he’s uncovered, many of which are posted on his website, www.shepardonwatergate.com.
