Rose Mary Woods
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Rose Mary Woods (December 26, 1917 – January 22, 2005) was Richard Nixon's secretary. When Nixon, then a young California Senator, needed a secretary, he had an agency send one over; it was Woods. The two clicked, and from 1951 through the Watergate scandal and until the end of his political career, Woods served as Nixon's secretary. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to 5 minutes of the 18 1/2 minute gap in one of the Nixon audio tapes (specifically, the one from June 20, 1972) that were central to the scandal. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred - which depended upon her stretching to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch") was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. Later investigators identified five to nine separate erasures. The contents of the gap remain a mystery.
Woods died on January 22, 2005, at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio.
[edit] External links
- http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/watergate.htm
- "Rose Mary Woods Dies; Loyal Nixon Secretary", The Washington Post, January 24, 2005.
- Woods demonstrating how the erasure might have occurred
- "Rose Mary Woods, 87, Nixon Loyalist for Decades, Dies", The New York Times, January 24, 2005.
- "Nixon's Real Enforcer", The New York Times, December 25, 2005.
