Some Sinister Force…

Some Sinister Force… At some point during the evening of June 20 1972 a conversation between two men was secretly taped on a SONY TC-800B reel-to-reel voice recorder. An innocuous machine that uses 0.5-mm tape and was set to run at the irregular speed of 15/16 IPS—or half the rate of a standard tape recorder. In keeping with this low-fidelity recording mode, the tiny lavalier microphones that picked up this particular conversation were cheap and poorly distributed throughout the space. The result was a tape of degraded sound quality produced under deficient recording conditions. Tape 342, as it is officially referred to, is but one of a sprawling archive of approximately 3,700 hours of audio recordings taped surreptitiously by the late American President Richard Nixon over a period of several years. Known as the “Nixon White House Tapes” these recordings detail conversations between the President, his staff, and visitors to the White House and Camp David. Of the many thousands of audiotapes confiscated from the Oval Office, Tape 342 remains by far the most infamous. Not because of the damaging or volatile nature of the information it contains, but precisely because of its 1 absence: a gap in the tape of 18-1/2 minutes. A residual silence that is haunted by the spectre of a man who refused to speak on the grounds that such testimony might be self- incriminatory. In pleading executive privilege Nixon refused to fill in the gap that would return the voice to the machinic silence of the tape and enable the playback of history. The location of the gap within the tape occurs during a conversation between Nixon and HR Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, three days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The date of their conversation and the proximity of the tape-gap to the timeline of criminal events at the Watergate Hotel have lead many to speculate that the tape must have contained highly damaging evidence. The American Bill of Rights, under the aegis of the Fifth Amendment, gives one the right not to speak on the grounds that such speech may implicate oneself in activities that are punishable by law, it does not, however, allow one to take back or “erase” something already spoken. The absent recording had, in effect, converted non- evidence into such compelling and incriminatory material proof of willful destruction of evidence that moves towards Presidential impeachment were in part, activated. Knowledge of the White House taping system, installed by the Secret Service in 1971, first came to public’s attention during the testimony of former presidential aide Alexander Butterfield before the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973. Less than a week after Butterfield’s revelation, Nixon ordered an end to White House taping although the actual recording equipment was not removed until after he resigned in August 1974. Upon learning about the existence of the White House taping system, the Senate committee, Special Prosecutor Cox, and Judge Sirica ordered all tapes considered relevant to Watergate to be turned over. Nixon refused, claiming executive privilege. By August the matter was in court. Nixon addressed the nation on August 15, 1973, explaining to the people why confidential conversations between the president and his advisors should not be made a matter of public record. Lawyers for the Watergate Committee and Special Prosecutor’s office argued that conversations dealing with matters of potential illegality should not be suppressed by claims of executive privilege. 2 Changing definitions of silence were central to shaping both the public perception of Watergate and the ways in which the prosecution developed their arguments. During the initial stages of the Watergate investigation, the existence of the White House taping system was not known and therefore Nixon’s refusal to speak on the grounds that his testimony might incriminate him marked his body as the initial locus of silence. When the discovery of the White House taping system was made public and with it the existence the vast tape archive, the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that Nixon must turn over the tapes to presiding Judge Sirica. Nixon countered with an offer to provide edited transcripts of the tapes, which were woefully inadequate. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, transcribed all the White House recordings whether made under full disclosure and consent using the Secret Service equipment or covertly by the jerry-rigged concealed microphones and Sony 800B. In Nixon’s follow-up (January 30th) State of the Union address, he insisted that “the prosecutor has been given all the materials that he needs”. However the reluctant cooperation of the Executive Office did not result in the handover any of materials relating to the dates in question around the Watergate break-in. As public criticism mounted, including calls for his impeachment, Nixon eventually relented and agreed to surrender most of the missing tapes. Although the White House always claimed that certain tapes subject to the subpoena did not actually exist. Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of the Watergate tapes, April 29, 1974. 3 As the Grand Jury proceedings unfolded, silence consequently shifted from the aphasiatic body of the President to the absence of the subpoenaed tapes and upon their recovery to the 18-1/2 minute gap in Tape 342 itself. Through this sequence of juridical displacements, silence was reconfigured as the very means by which material artefacts could begin to speak for themselves. Although Nixon would continue to maintain his resolute silence, the tapes, including the gap, could now testify in his place. Once evidentiary silence was relocated to the tapes, Nixon’s live testimony became largely irrelevant, as he was already literally on-the-record. Moreover, the series of clicking noises distributed throughout the 18-1/2 minute tape-gap offered circumstantial evidence that a process of clumsy erasure had occurred raising the possibility that this machined silence was the consequence of a deliberate act. Controlling the discourse around silence proved to be a decisive strategy in turning the tide against Nixon in favour of the opposition. “Next to a man's wife, his secretary is the most important person in his career. She has to understand every detail of his job; to have unquestioning loyalty and absolute discretion. On every count Rose measures up. I'm a lucky man.”1—Richard Nixon, 1957 When news of the tape’s potential tampering was made public, Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods (now deceased) made two rather contradictory public statements. In her court testimony of November 8 1973 she asserted her secretarial competency, flatly denying ever making any stupid transcription errors when handling the tape recorder. “The buttons said on and off, forward and backward. I caught on to that fairly fast. I don't think I'm so stupid as to erase what's on a tape.”2 However a month later, under cross-examination in a federal courtroom, she told a rather confused story of how she might after all have made “a terrible mistake” and been partially responsible for the glitch. Woods claimed that while she had been transcribing the tape on her UHER 5000, the telephone suddenly rang causing her foot to press the wrong pedal thus producing the erasure. Summoned by the imperative ringing of the phone, summoned to speak in court, to testify, Rose Mary Woods had been called to action, both to explain her actions and ultimately the actions of her boss. When audio experts later examined the tape they concluded that the RECORD/STOP/RECORD button had actually been pressed 5 to 9 times. The materials themselves told a different story thus refuting the loyal secretary’s attempted admission of guilt. 1 Richard Nixon, in a press interview, 1957. Anon., "The Secretary and the Tapes Tangle," Time Monday December 10 1973. P. 1. 2 Anon., "The Secretary and the Tapes Tangle." 4 Rose Mary Woods re-enacting how she may have erased the tape while stretching to answer the phone. Etymologically speaking the secretary is the “keeper of secrets”. In providing the space for the unspooling of machinic speech she becomes the de facto repository for masculine discourse: speech acts performed [recorded] in the specialised domains proper to the masculine subject—the inner sanctum of the Oval Office, outside of her own feminine jurisdiction—the secretarial pool. The lack that Woods claimed to have inscribed within the tape appears to be an extension of her own subordination within the patriarchal operations of the White House. Is she as Plato and Socrates condemn a mere conduit for the voices of others—a device for channelling the audio dispatches that would broadcast Nixon into history? Is she unable to answer for herself as an embodied subject in the world, only ever able to repeat the texts that she transcribes, the orders that she follows? Like the imitative arts of painting and writing, the secretary when called to testify before the tribunal of history finds that her hands are literally tied to the typewriter and her ears plugged by the tape recorder. “[A]s the presumed representatives of a spoken word, as agents capable of speech, as depositories or even fences for the words the court is trying to force out of them. If they should turn out not to be up to testifying in this hearing, if they turn out to be impotent to represent a live word properly, to act as its interpreter or spokesman, to sustain the conversation, to respond to oral questions, then bam! They are good for nothing.

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