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The Eighteen-And-A-Half-Minute Gap 361 22 THE EIGHTEEN·AND· A·HALF·MINUTE GAP AS Haig called Jaworski on October 30, his associate Fred Buzhardt appeared in Judge Sirica's chambers, together with lawyers from the Special Prosecutor's office who were now working directly for Justice. The court meeting was to establish procedures for the transfer of the tapes. Buzhardt informed Sirica and the prosecutors that two of the nine subpoenaed recordings did not exist. One was a four-minute telephone call between Nixon and Mitchell that took place on the evening of June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in. The second was Nixon's fifty-five-minute meeting with John Dean on Sunday night, April 15, 1973, that took place just after Nixon had learned that Dean was talking to federal prosecutors. Sirica scheduled a meeting in open court for the next day to deal with this alarming matter. In testimony from a series of witnesses over the next several days, the inquiry revealed that the taping system had been run in a cavalier fashion. It was not clear when certain tapes had been removed and then returned to storage; a Secret Service agent, asked on the stand how the recordings were logged, produced a brown piece of paper seemingly torn from a paper bag, with markings on it. 360 The Eighteen-and-a-Half-Minute Gap 361 Each spool of tape lasted for six hours, and sometimes on weekends a reel ran out and was not immediately replaced. That, evidently, was what had happened to the April 15 recording; the tape had run out when Nixon and Dean met at 9:17 P.M., and since that happened to have been a Sunday night, there had been no Secret Service agent on duty to change the reel. As for the June 20 call, Buzhardt explained to the court that it had been made from a telephone in the residence quarters of the White House that had not been connected to the recording system. Steve Bull disclosed to the court on November 2 that he had learned that the April 15 tape did not exist a month earlier, on September 29, when he had looked for it in order to give it to Rose Mary Woods to transcribe at Camp David. Bull also testified that he had obtained twenty-six of the tapes for Nixon in early June, and that the president had reviewed some of them in preparation for Dean's Senate testimony. On June 25, Nixon had even ordered one of the tapes to be flown to him in San Clemente; when no courier flight was available, Bull testified, Buzhardt had listened to it at Haig's request. These revelations became the headlines of Saturday, November 3, just two days after the announcement of the selection of Jaworski to be the new Special Prosecutor. It was November of 1973. A year earlier, Nixon had won reelection in a landslide, carrying every state except Massachusetts as well as more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Now, polls showed that 60 percent of the American people felt he was not capably handling the presidency. Nixon escaped the headlines by sailing with his friends Abplanalp and Rebozo aboard Rebozo's yacht. Back on land, The New York Times, Time magazine, and even the longtime Nixon loyalist Detroit News ran editorials urging that, as a public service, Nixon resign. "That weekend in Florida," Nixon later wrote, "was a new low point for me persona II y . " A strange thing happened that weekend. Buzhardt and Garment flew down to Florida, checked into a hotel near the president'S estate, and went to see the boss. Nixon was firming his resolve and looking for ways to rehabilitate his image. The two lawyers had another notion in mind. The Final Days opens with a scene of Buzhardt and Garment flying to Key Biscayne, convinced that after six months of losing battles with. the Congress, the courts, and the Special Prosecutor, Nixon must resign, and they must advise him to do just that. Woodward and Bernstein write that this trip was one Al Haig did not endorse. There is a factual error in the Woodward and Bernstein account, 362 EXIT THE PRESIDENT but beyond that, the issue is the motivation of Buzhardt and Garment. Since May, the two lawyers had cleared their every move with Haig, and it defies logic that they would have made this trip without his permission or cognizance. In the Woodward-Bernstein version, the lawyers arrived and made their recommendation to a stunned Haig. Fighting his friends tooth and nail, Haig insisted that Nixon couldn't quit because Gerald Ford hadn't yet been confirmed. And Haig wouldn't even let the lawyers see the president in person, because, according to Woodward and Bernstein, he "knew that Nixon would reject the suggestion out of hand." Rather, on Sunday, he told Nixon only that the lawyers had come to Florida and why they wanted to see them. "He reassured the President that the lawyers were not doubting his innocence-only his chances to survive," and he assured Nixon that the recommendation belonged to Buzhardt and Garment, that he himself did not concur in it, and "did not wish his own position to be misunderstood." Then Haig conveyed to the lawyers that Nixon would not see them at all. The factual error in this account is an assertion that Buzhardt had not yet listened to any of the tapes. Two witnesses, Bull and a Secret Service agent, had just recently testified in court that at Haig's request Buzhardt on June 25 had listened to the tape that no courier plane could be found to transport to San Clemente, and in a week, Buzhardt would verify that to the court. But the Woodward-Bernstein account is written in such a way as to insist that Buzhardt didn't hear any of the tapes until a much later date. We will see later in the chapter the reason for making this appear to be so. Nixon told his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, "that having reached the low point he was now prepared for the ascent. It was going to be "a turning point for our approach to dealing with Watergate," he later wrote. "'We will take some desperate and strong measure,' I told Ziegler, 'and this time there is no margin for error.' " He planned a televised speech for November 7, precisely one year after he'd been reelected, to launch Operation Candor. He would display not the wounded president but the man who had come back from many previous political defeats and who would once more rise from the ashes. The speech would be followed by ten days of "bridge-building" breakfast meetings and private chats with hundreds of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and a swing through the South to trumpet the message that the president was still on the job and fighting for the country. * * * The Eighteen-and-a-Half-Minute Gap 363 This, then, was the setting for one of the more curious episodes in the history of Watergate, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a taped conversation. The gap has usually been attributed to a mistake on the part of Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods, and/or to a deliberate attempt by a mechanically clumsy president to erase infor- mation detrimental to him. But there was a more sinister aspect to the affair than has previously been understood, and it involves Haig and Buzhardt and an especially well-timed and dramatic revelation by Deep Throat. Back on September 28, anticipating that the appellate court would rule that the tapes must be turned over, Nixon had asked Haig to arrange for Rose Mary Woods to go to Camp David and transcribe the subpoenaed conversations. Woods was a particularly good choice for this task because she knew intimately the president's patterns of speech, and also knew most of the voices on the recordings-those of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and other counselors. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, she could be counted on to delete the expletives and the scatological characterizations that sometimes dotted their chatter, not to be shocked by the conversations, and to keep silent about their contents. To help with the technical arrangements, Haig turned to John Bennett, the deputy presidential assistant whom Haig had appointed custodian of the recordings in July. The next day, Woods and Steve Bull drove to Camp David carrying eight tapes and three Sony tape recorders provided by Bennett. In the privacy of rustic Dogwood Cabin, Woods began what she soon discov- ered would be a long and painstaking weekend of listening and typing. She spent twenty-nine hours just on the first item listed on the Special Prosecutor's subpoena, the June 20, 1972, meeting in the president's EOB office attended at various times by Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman, a meeting that lasted from 10:30 A.M. to nearly noon. As pointed out earlier, the quality of the recordings taken from the EOB office was less satisfactory than those recorded in the Oval Office. The president was at Camp David that weekend and came in to check on his secretary's progress. She told him it was slow going because she had to replay sections of the tape over and over to get an accurate account. Nixon himself put on the headphones and listened for about five minutes. "At first all I could hear was a complete jumble," he recalled in his memoir. "Gradually I could make out a few words, but at times the rattling of a cup or the thump of a hand on the desk would obliterate whole passages." The Oval Office tapes that he had personally listened to back inJune had been much easier to understand, 364 EXIT THE PRESIDENT he told Woods, and then left the cabin after sympathizing about her arduous task.
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