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Tapes Don't Lie, People Do (part 3)
The “Watergate audio tapes” contained such a bounty of damaging and embarrassing conversations that they would forever define both the Nixon presidency, as well as Nixon the man . Altogether, Richard M. Nixon, 37th President of the United States, recorded 3,700 hours of conversations in a little over 2 1/2 years (see Part 2).
Citing executive privilege, Nixon initially refused to release the audio tapes to the Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox) who was investigating the alleged crimes committed by Nixon’s staff. However, in a unanimous decision in July 1974, the US Supreme Court rejected that argument and forced the president to surrender all the Watergate-related tapes.
When the “smoking gun” tape recorded on June 23, 1972, was released shortly after that Supreme Court decision (see Part 1), it proved that Nixon knew about the break-in at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 from the beginning. It also showed that he had engaged in an obstruction of justice when he told his Chief of Staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, to order the FBI “not to go any further into this case.”
The “smoking gun” tape became the proverbial straw that broke the back of the Nixon administration. Nixon resigned the presidency shortly thereafter, when impeachment became a virtual certainty.
The audio recordings not only ended the Nixon presidency, but they also revealed an often petty and sometimes bigoted private side of Nixon, which had not been evident from the public image he tried to portray. The tapes were laced with so many profanities that a new phrase was coined in the American English lexicon: “expletive deleted.”
But over 30 years later, it was not what was on the tapes but what was not on one of the tapes that remains one of the biggest unsolved mystery, once the identity of “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt) was revealed on May 31, 2005.
It was called the “18 1/2-minute gap” and it occurs during a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, less than a week after the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
The attempted Watergate break-in occurred in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars— Bernard Barker, Virgilio González, Eugenio Martínez, James W. McCord, Jr., and Frank Sturgis —were arrested after a security guard named Frank Willis notified Washington, DC, police on noticing a door that had been tampered with in the basement stairwell. The team was caught with electronic eavesdropping equipment at the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex.
After Alexander Butterfield revealed a massive White House recording system (Part 1) before the select Watergate committee, President Nixon, under pressure, agreed to release edited transcripts of some of the conversations.
In one critical conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, there was a gap of 18 1/2 minutes. The conversation took place in President Nixon’s Executive Office Building suite on June 20, 1972, just three days after the botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
The White House lawyers told U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. Sirica that a segment of this June 20th tape was blank. White House special counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt, said that “this phenomenon” had occurred during a recorded conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman.
After the press revealed to the public that one of the tapes might have been tampered with, Rose Mary Woods, who had been Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951 and was fiercely loyal to the president, stepped forward and took responsibility for inadvertently erasing what had come to be called Tape 342.
Woods said she was transcribing the tape and made a ”terrible mistake” by accidentally pressing the record button instead of the stop button as she answered a phone call, at the same time leaving her left foot on the pedal that advanced the tape. She demonstrated for the media how this might have occurred (click here). Her stretching to simultaneously press controls that were several feet apart was sarcastically termed the ”Rose Mary Stretch” for she would have had to be a contortionist to accomplish this acrobatic feat for 18 1/2 minutes. Most people were cynical and believed the erasures to be deliberate, and that the only thing Rose Mary Woods was stretching was the truth.
In 1974, Judge Sirica appointed a committee of six experts in audio technology to study what had caused the 18 1/2-minute gap.
Supervised by the United States Marshall’s office, the six experts, all members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), concluded that the erasure was deliberate.
Whoever erased the tape, they declared, had pressed the record button, stopped the tape and hit record again between five and nine times—hardly an accidental erasure and completely discrediting the Woods ”boo boo” tale. Furthermore, the tape had not been erased on the Sony TC-800B (see Part 2) recorder on which it was made, but on another recorder: a Uher 5000.
These discoveries required hundreds of hours of research and experimentation. The IEEE experts used spectrum and waveform analyses and digital signal processing equipment, in addition to visual inspection of magnetic patterns made visible by ”washing” the tapes in a fluid that contained ferrite particles, which align themselves to the patterns.
However, the panel was unable to retrieve any of the lost conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. The experts concluded that it was a deliberate erasure, leading many to suspect that the tapes contained very damaging information and that the contents of the 18 1/2-minute gap would have been quite incriminating.
Today Tape 342 is treated like the Hope Diamond, locked in a vault at the National Archives and kept at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent relative humidity. The tape has been played just a few times in the last 30 years, and only then to make copies.
The National Archives, like the IEEE, also attempted to reverse the erase, but was unsuccessful.
But with today’s digital technology, some experts believe they may be able to ascertain what was recorded after all. Recently the National Archives and Records Administration decided that perhaps with advances in digital technology, they would be able to resurrect the conversation. They invited audio experts to demonstrate whether they possessed the experience to retrieve the erased speech. The competition among experts is expected to last several years, and there’s no guarantee that any will demonstrate their ability to achieve this feat.
Before any of them get access to the original tape, they must show that they can retrieve sound from test erasures without doing damage. Those who succeed will get an opportunity to use their expertise on the original Tape 342. The fact that, as noted above, Tape 342 was recorded on one machine (Sony) and erased on another (Uher) increases the chances of an incomplete erasure. A decade ago, this wouldn’t have mattered, but with today’s digital technology, perhaps someone will be able to recreate ”something from nothing”.
However, Alexander Butterfield feels all this is unnecessary and suggests that he knows exactly what was erased.
According to Butterfield, the gap deals not with the June 17th burglary, but a previous burglary on May 28, 1972. He suggests that the June 17th escapade was to repair non-functioning bugs installed at the Democratic headquarters a month earlier. So the June 17th burglary was not the first time this kind of activity had occurred, but it was the first time they were caught.
Having this information on tape would surely have ended the presidency of Nixon as soon as it was revealed; "a good reason indeed to erase the tapes, if you ask me," Butterfield said.
Or possibly burn all of the tapes, as some suggested?
Citing executive privilege, Nixon initially refused to release the audio tapes to the Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox) who was investigating the alleged crimes committed by Nixon’s staff. However, in a unanimous decision in July 1974, the US Supreme Court rejected that argument and forced the president to surrender all the Watergate-related tapes.
When the “smoking gun” tape recorded on June 23, 1972, was released shortly after that Supreme Court decision (see Part 1), it proved that Nixon knew about the break-in at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972 from the beginning. It also showed that he had engaged in an obstruction of justice when he told his Chief of Staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, to order the FBI “not to go any further into this case.”
The “smoking gun” tape became the proverbial straw that broke the back of the Nixon administration. Nixon resigned the presidency shortly thereafter, when impeachment became a virtual certainty.
The audio recordings not only ended the Nixon presidency, but they also revealed an often petty and sometimes bigoted private side of Nixon, which had not been evident from the public image he tried to portray. The tapes were laced with so many profanities that a new phrase was coined in the American English lexicon: “expletive deleted.”
But over 30 years later, it was not what was on the tapes but what was not on one of the tapes that remains one of the biggest unsolved mystery, once the identity of “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt) was revealed on May 31, 2005.
It was called the “18 1/2-minute gap” and it occurs during a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, less than a week after the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
The attempted Watergate break-in occurred in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars— Bernard Barker, Virgilio González, Eugenio Martínez, James W. McCord, Jr., and Frank Sturgis —were arrested after a security guard named Frank Willis notified Washington, DC, police on noticing a door that had been tampered with in the basement stairwell. The team was caught with electronic eavesdropping equipment at the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex.
After Alexander Butterfield revealed a massive White House recording system (Part 1) before the select Watergate committee, President Nixon, under pressure, agreed to release edited transcripts of some of the conversations.
In one critical conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, there was a gap of 18 1/2 minutes. The conversation took place in President Nixon’s Executive Office Building suite on June 20, 1972, just three days after the botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
The White House lawyers told U.S. District Court Chief Judge John J. Sirica that a segment of this June 20th tape was blank. White House special counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt, said that “this phenomenon” had occurred during a recorded conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman.
After the press revealed to the public that one of the tapes might have been tampered with, Rose Mary Woods, who had been Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951 and was fiercely loyal to the president, stepped forward and took responsibility for inadvertently erasing what had come to be called Tape 342.
Woods said she was transcribing the tape and made a ”terrible mistake” by accidentally pressing the record button instead of the stop button as she answered a phone call, at the same time leaving her left foot on the pedal that advanced the tape. She demonstrated for the media how this might have occurred (click here). Her stretching to simultaneously press controls that were several feet apart was sarcastically termed the ”Rose Mary Stretch” for she would have had to be a contortionist to accomplish this acrobatic feat for 18 1/2 minutes. Most people were cynical and believed the erasures to be deliberate, and that the only thing Rose Mary Woods was stretching was the truth.
In 1974, Judge Sirica appointed a committee of six experts in audio technology to study what had caused the 18 1/2-minute gap.
Supervised by the United States Marshall’s office, the six experts, all members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), concluded that the erasure was deliberate.
Whoever erased the tape, they declared, had pressed the record button, stopped the tape and hit record again between five and nine times—hardly an accidental erasure and completely discrediting the Woods ”boo boo” tale. Furthermore, the tape had not been erased on the Sony TC-800B (see Part 2) recorder on which it was made, but on another recorder: a Uher 5000.
These discoveries required hundreds of hours of research and experimentation. The IEEE experts used spectrum and waveform analyses and digital signal processing equipment, in addition to visual inspection of magnetic patterns made visible by ”washing” the tapes in a fluid that contained ferrite particles, which align themselves to the patterns.
However, the panel was unable to retrieve any of the lost conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. The experts concluded that it was a deliberate erasure, leading many to suspect that the tapes contained very damaging information and that the contents of the 18 1/2-minute gap would have been quite incriminating.
Today Tape 342 is treated like the Hope Diamond, locked in a vault at the National Archives and kept at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent relative humidity. The tape has been played just a few times in the last 30 years, and only then to make copies.
The National Archives, like the IEEE, also attempted to reverse the erase, but was unsuccessful.
But with today’s digital technology, some experts believe they may be able to ascertain what was recorded after all. Recently the National Archives and Records Administration decided that perhaps with advances in digital technology, they would be able to resurrect the conversation. They invited audio experts to demonstrate whether they possessed the experience to retrieve the erased speech. The competition among experts is expected to last several years, and there’s no guarantee that any will demonstrate their ability to achieve this feat.
Before any of them get access to the original tape, they must show that they can retrieve sound from test erasures without doing damage. Those who succeed will get an opportunity to use their expertise on the original Tape 342. The fact that, as noted above, Tape 342 was recorded on one machine (Sony) and erased on another (Uher) increases the chances of an incomplete erasure. A decade ago, this wouldn’t have mattered, but with today’s digital technology, perhaps someone will be able to recreate ”something from nothing”.
However, Alexander Butterfield feels all this is unnecessary and suggests that he knows exactly what was erased.
According to Butterfield, the gap deals not with the June 17th burglary, but a previous burglary on May 28, 1972. He suggests that the June 17th escapade was to repair non-functioning bugs installed at the Democratic headquarters a month earlier. So the June 17th burglary was not the first time this kind of activity had occurred, but it was the first time they were caught.
Having this information on tape would surely have ended the presidency of Nixon as soon as it was revealed; "a good reason indeed to erase the tapes, if you ask me," Butterfield said.
Or possibly burn all of the tapes, as some suggested?
