PERFORMANCE TRANSCRIBING FOR 18½ MINUTES

I profusely apologise for forgetting to note the 40^th anniversary of the break in at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. For those under 45 or perhaps 50, the ensuing debacle became known as the Watergate scandal which eventually lead to the arrest and trial of a number of President Nixon’s aides and adviser as well as Nixon’s own resignation.

Shortly after 1 am on 17^th June, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the latch on several doors in the complex (allowing the doors to close but remain unlocked). He removed the tape, and thought nothing of it. He returned an hour later, and having discovered that someone had retaped the locks, Wills called the police. Five men were discovered and arrested inside the DNC's office. The five men were Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, who were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. On 15^th September a grand jury indicted them, as well as E. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws. The five burglars who broke into the office were tried by Judge John Sirica and convicted on 30^th January 1973.

Watergate from the air

What brings this to mind again is that on the 20^th June 1972 a conversation, between Richard Nixon, then President of the United States, and his Chief of Staff H.R.Haldeman, was possibly recorded by the White House taping system installed at the time. This conversation would have taken place only three days after the event.   The following year the tape was being transcribed.

According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on 29^th September 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the 20^th June 1972 recordings when she said she had made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about 5 minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be re-recorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to 18½ minutes and later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.

The contents missing from the recording remain unknown to this day. It is widely believed that the tapes recorded a conversation between Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. Nixon said that he never heard the conversation and did not know the topics of the missing tapes. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion was the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard the now infamous 18½ minute gap on the evening of 14^th November  1973 and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until 21^st November, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer.

Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her posture during the demonstration, dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch," resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.

Years later, former White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig speculated that the erasures may conceivably have been caused by Nixon himself. According to Haig, the President was spectacularly inept at understanding and operating mechanical devices, and in the course of reviewing the tape in question, he may have caused the erasures by fumbling with the recorder's controls; whether inadvertently or intentionally, Haig could not say.

In a grand jury interview in 1975, Nixon noted that he initially believed that only four minutes of the tape was missing. When he later heard that 18 minutes was missing, he said, "I practically blew my stack."

The above picture of of Rose Mary Woods demonstrating how she may have erased tape recordings. An example of performance transcribing?