The Eighteen-and-a-Half-Minute Gap
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
White House lawyers discovered a problem with one of the subpoenaed Watergate tapes on November fourteenth, nineteen seventy-three, and informed Judge John Sirica of it on November twenty-first. The tape of President Nixon's conversation with Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, recorded on June twentieth, nineteen seventy-two, three days after the Watergate break-in, contained a gap of eighteen and a half minutes.
The White House explanation was provided by Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's personal secretary of twenty-three years. She demonstrated for photographers how she might have accidentally caused the erasure: she was reaching for a phone while her foot remained on the transcription pedal, stretching across her desk in a posture that required both arms extended at extreme angles simultaneously. The press nicknamed it the Rose Mary Stretch. The panel of technical experts later commissioned by the court found the posture physically implausible as an explanation for an erasure of that duration.
The technical analysis was more definitive about what the gap was not. The panel found that the erasure had been made in at least five separate manual operations, not one continuous accident. Someone had returned to the recording, stopped, returned, stopped again, at least five times to erase what was there.
What was on those eighteen and a half minutes has never been established. The gap falls in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff on the morning after the break-in. What they discussed is not in the public record.
The tape itself is preserved at the National Archives. The section that was erased contains a sustained buzz, the kind produced by a recording machine held in record mode over a magnetic field. Engineers who have examined it say the original audio is not recoverable.
The gap has been the subject of technical analysis, congressional hearings, documentary films, and three decades of journalistic speculation. The conversation it once contained is not going to be known.
