Nixon White House tapes

President Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, for two reasons: first, that the Constitutional principle of executive privilege extends to the tapes and citing the separation of powers and checks and balances within the Constitution, and second, claiming they were vital to national security.[14] On October 19, 1973, he offered a compromise; Nixon proposed that U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for accuracy and report his findings to the special prosecutor's office.[15] Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox.[15] Richardson refused and resigned instead, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to fire Cox but refused and was subsequently fired. Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork fired Cox.[16] Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski special counsel on November 1, 1973.[15]

According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972, recordings[17] when she 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 rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to ​18 ¹⁄₂ minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.

The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, three days after the Watergate break in.[18] Nixon claimed not to know the topic or topics discussed during the gap.[19] Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard of the gap on the evening of November 14, 1973, and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until November 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer.[20]

Rose Mary Woods attempting to demonstrate how she may have inadvertently created the gap

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.[21]

In a grand jury interview in 1975, Nixon said that he initially believed that only four minutes of the tape were missing. He said that when he later heard that 18 minutes were missing, "I practically blew my stack."[19]

Nixon's counsel, John Dean, in his 2014 book The Nixon Defense, suggests that the full collection of recordings now available "largely answer the questions regarding what was known by the White House about the reasons for the break-in and bugging at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as what was erased during the infamous 18 minute and 30 second gap during the June 20, 1972, conversation and why."[22]

A variety of suggestions have been made as to who could have erased the tape. 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 1973, Haig had speculated aloud that the erasure was caused by an unidentified "sinister force".[23] Others have suggested that Haig was involved in deliberately erasing the tapes with Nixon's involvement, or that the erasure was conducted by a White House lawyer.[24][25]

Nixon himself launched the first investigation into how the tapes were erased. He claimed that it was an intensive investigation but came up empty.[19]

On November 21, 1973, Sirica appointed a panel of persons nominated jointly by the White House and the Special Prosecution Force. The panel was supplied with the Evidence Tape, the seven tape recorders from the Oval Office and Executive Office Building, and the two Uher 5000 recorders. One Uher 5000 was marked "Secret Service". The other was accompanied by a foot pedal, respectively labeled Government Exhibit 60 and 60B. The panel determined that the buzz was of no consequence, and that the gap was due to erasure[26] performed on the Exhibit 60 Uher.[27] The panel also determined that the erasure/buzz recording consisted of at least five separate segments, possibly as many as nine,[28] and that at least five segments required hand operation; that is, they could not have been performed using the foot pedal.[29] The panel was subsequently asked by the court to consider alternative explanations that had emerged during the hearings. The final report, dated May 31, 1974, found these other explanations did not contradict the original findings.[30]

The National Archives now owns the tape, and has tried several times to recover the missing minutes—most recently in 2003—but without success.[18] The tapes are now preserved in a climate-controlled vault in case a future technological development allows for restoration of the missing audio.[31] Corporate security expert Phil Mellinger undertook a project to restore Haldeman's handwritten notes describing the missing ​18 ¹⁄₂ minutes,[32] though that effort also failed to produce any new information.[33]

Nixon releasing the transcripts

On April 11, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations.[34] Later that month, Nixon released more than 1,200 pages of edited transcripts of the subpoenaed tapes, but refused to turn over the actual tapes, claiming executive privilege once more.[35] The Judiciary Committee, however, rejected Nixon's edited transcripts, saying that they did not comply with the subpoena.[36]

Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the tapes of 64 presidential conversations to use as evidence in the criminal cases against indicted former Nixon administration officials. Nixon refused, and Jaworski appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to force Nixon to turn over the tapes. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the tapes.[37] The 8–0 ruling (Justice William Rehnquist recused himself owing to having worked for Attorney General John Mitchell) in United States v. Nixon found that President Nixon was wrong in arguing that courts are compelled to honor, without question, any presidential claim of executive privilege.[37]

The White House released the subpoenaed tapes on August 5. One tape, later known as the "smoking gun" tape, documented the initial stages of the Watergate coverup. On it, Nixon and H. R. Haldeman are heard formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved. This demonstrated both that Nixon had been told of the White House connection to the Watergate burglaries soon after they took place, and that he had approved plans to thwart the investigation. In a statement accompanying the release of the tape, Nixon accepted blame for misleading the country about when he had been told of White House involvement, stating that he had a lapse of memory.[38][39]

Once the "smoking gun" transcript was made public, Nixon's political support practically vanished. The ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor. He lacked substantial support in the Senate as well; Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott estimated no more than 15 Senators were willing to even consider acquittal. Facing certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction in the Senate, Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 1974, effective as of noon the next day.[40]