The Watergate tapes' infamous 18.5-minute gap and Nixon's secretary's unusual explanation for it
Rose Mary Woods testified she recorded over some of the tape by mistake.
The prosecution was interested in tapes of a discussion between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, that were captured by the president's secret White House recording system in the days immediately following the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
But those tapes contain a mysterious 18.5-minute gap -- a patch of buzzes and clicks of missing audio -- in the middle of a recording made June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in.
Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s loyal private secretary, was tasked with transcribing the tapes before they were turned over to prosecutors. Woods testified in front of a federal grand jury in 1974 that she was using a dictaphone, which had a pedal that would pause the recording when she lifted her foot off it, and she claimed she had erased part of the tape by mistake.
“Her explanation was that she was listening to the tape and … the telephone rang,” said Wine-Banks. “So she kept her foot on a pedal, pushed the wrong button. She pushed record instead of off and reached for the phone.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/watergate-tapes-infamous-185-minute-gap-nixons-secretarys/story?id=47926329
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