18½ minute gap
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During the Watergate scandal, it was discovered that President Nixon had tape recorded several key meetings and conversations. These tapes were subpoenaed by the investigating court, but one was found to have an 18½-minute gap, which consisted of a faint buzzing sound during a conversation between President Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, his Chief of Staff. The buzzing was widely believed to be the result of a deliberate erasing of whatever was on the tape.
The tape was recorded on a Sony model 800B, but was erased on a Uher 5000. Both models were relatively modest reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders. They were owned by Nixon or his staff. The Uher 5000 was normally operated by Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary. Woods later testified that she had made a 'terrible mistake', erasing the tape by accidentally pressing down the record pedal, whilst answering a phone call. The credibility of that claim was seriously undermined when she was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident. The result was Woods had to stretch out in her chair almost to an extreme length to reach both the record pedal and the telephone. Added to the fact that Woods would have had to hold that unnatural position for 18 1/2 minutes to erase the recording, her statements came out as an absurd lie.
Arlo Guthrie has jokingly suggested that the gap had something to do with his protest song "Alice's Restaurant," which, coincidentally, was also roughly 18½-minutes long. At the 1977 Presidential Inaugural Chip Carter - son of incoming President Jimmy Carter - told Guthrie that he had found a copy of the record in Nixon's library. In the 1999 movie Dick, a variation on this is the fanciful explanation used to explain the gap, as two young female fans of Nixon's sneak into his office and record the Olivia Newton-John song "I Honestly Love You" on his recorder, which he then erases, embarrassed.
The National Archives now owns the tape, and has tried several times to recover the missing minutes, most recently in 2003. [1] None of the Archive's attempts have been successful. The tapes are now preserved in a climate-controlled vault in case a future technological development allows for restoration of the missing audio.
[edit] Variants
- 16 words, in reference to George W. Bush's state of the union address and the September Dossier.
- 12 hour gap, in reference to the Plame affair.
