Yes, I clickbaited the headline. It’s my first blog post here; I had to try something.
I got interested in Watergate Discourse as part of a long gestating and now likely abandoned project on the history of tape recording. I still have ideas about voice, transcription, and indexing that might contribute to telling the media history of the era differently. But here I just want to drop a part of that project where I found something out.
Even after 50 years, the Watergate scandal is caught between things that we absolutely know and a surprising number of things we don’t. Nixon and his gang really were going to do just about everything to hold on to power—everything short of order an attack on the Capitol and the assassination of the Vice President. There was a lot of very coup-y plotting, there was endless ratfucking and conspiring and racist and antisemitic ranting and abusing of power and and and. We know this. But there is a LOT that we don’t know. Douglas Brinkley, reviewing Gerald Graff’s solid new history, enumerates some gaps: “Nixon studies have matured in the past 50 years thanks to superb books by Rick Perlstein, John A. Farrell, Irwin F. Gellman, Margaret MacMillan and others. But neither they nor Graff’s Watergate answers some longstanding big questions. Who officially ordered the break-in? What was the aim? Were such central players as Howard Hunt and James McCord cooperating with the C.I.A. even as they orchestrated the break-in?” (My answers are: Mitchell authorized in his floppy way, Magruder pushed it; to see how much more O’Brien knew about the ITT scandal; and no.)
None of those questions, though, were The Big Questions of the era, the ones that gripped the popular imagination. Those were: 1. What did Nixon know and when did he know it? And 2. What was the deal with the 18½ minute gap in the tapes? Let’s start with 2.
Given that there were literally thousands of hours of other recordings available, and given that Nixon never had a conversation once when he could have it three times in the same day, what could possibly have been so special to warrant the intentional erasure of a tiny portion of the archive? Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, took the blame, unconvincingly. The most compelling account I’ve read of the erasure (Haldeman’s) argues that Nixon himself probably did it during his listening-back session, and then, realizing just how damn long it takes to erase specific things, he abandoned the strategy. There’s still not a good explanation for why he didn’t have the tapes burned or piled into a car and driven by a giant magnet. We can suppose all sorts of reasons, but, frankly, Mr. Master Strategist was erratic as hell and never possessed the judgment that would allow him to calibrate the damage done at different scales. This is what we learn, overwhelmingly, from the tapes: Nixon was always all over the place, unable to focus on the big picture even as he sold the world on his self-conception as a guy who always had his eye on that big picture. He is the characterological embodiment of the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, the superplanner undone by a third-rate burglary.
In any case, we’re not getting that missing material back. There are moments where people get techno-optimistic about the project but it’s just not going to work. It wasn’t erased once, but ground away over and over, as you’ll see.
So I don’t have the missing minutes. I don’t have a new explanation for their erasure. What I have is an account of what Nixon and his Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman were talking about based on the parts that weren’t erased. No one, so far as I can tell, has bothered to read that conversation in context even though Nixon took immediate action as a result. Because this is a blog post and not true crime podcast trying to fill a dozen hours, I will just spill: Based on Haldeman’s discussion of the movie The Hot Rock, I believe that they had been discussing the fact that the break-in that got everybody arrested was not the first attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee HQ at the Watergate. Haldeman had just found that out; I think Nixon had known. Which is my answer to Big Question 1: Nixon knew about the break-in and he knew in advance, which many reasonable people already believed, but which now has, I think, more support.
What follows is a very modestly revised extract from a draft chapter. Some of it is a little redundant given this intro. The Hot Rock is available on blu-ray but not to stream legally at the moment.
The most famous tape recording in American history is an erasure: the 18½ minute gap in a discussion between Richard Nixon and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman on January 20, 1972.[1] When Nixon later found out about the gap, he recalled, he almost “blew [his] stack.”[2] How had it happened? And what was erased? In the throes of the investigation, the “how” took center stage. Nixon’s loyal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, took the fall, claiming she had accidentally erased the tape while transcribing it, having pushed the wrong button, held her foot down on the pedal, and reached, improbably, to answer the phone. The “Rose Mary Stretch” was so physically challenging that it became an immediate object of ridicule (Figure 1). Haldeman’s successor Al Haig initially blamed a mysterious “sinister force,” then he found a more sexist way to blame Woods (“I've known women who think they've talked for five minutes and then have talked for an hour”[3]). Others blamed Nixon for erasing the tape, either intentionally or accidentally. Haldeman called his former boss “the least dexterous man I’ve ever known.”[4] Robert Altman, in Secret Honor (1984), turned technological ineptitude toward existential ends, with a rambling Nixon repeatedly interrupting his marathon nighttime taping session to tell his valet, Manolo, to go back and erase everything from a certain point. The technology registered the absence of the history it was supposed to capture.
Tales of accidental erasure are harder to believe when one has read the report of the Advisory Panel on White House Tapes from 1974, which concluded that the passage was erased five or more separate times. They “[drew] no inferences about such questions as whether the erasure and buzz were made accidentally or intentionally,” but did note that the characteristic “events” within the buzz implied the “keyboard operations of a normally-operating machine.”[5] (Figures 2 & 3) The more intentional the gap, the more enticing the prospect of recovering whatever was erased. The most recent efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration have been unable to find the voices behind the buzz.[6]
So what is missing? The logical explanation is that what is missing is a discussion of the Watergate break-in. Nixon had only just returned to Washington from a bachelor weekend in the Bahamas and Key Biscayne, cavorting in the surf with Bebe Rebozo and Bob Abplanalp. Haldeman’s diary indicates that “the P is not aware of all this” on the 18th, and that “I told the P about it on the plane last night” (meaning the 19th; they spoke for nearly an hour) “The more he thought about it, it obviously bothered him more, because he raised it in considerable detail today.”[7]
But the clearest indication that that particular discussion had turned to Watergate comes later in the tape, when Haldeman asks Nixon whether he has seen the movie The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, Fox, 1972). While much of the recording is unintelligible for the usual reasons that the Nixon tapes are unintelligible—inadequate equipment, improperly installed, with a voice-activated feature that is forever ga-whoozhing itself into action and obscuring key words and phrases—Haldeman’s point is clear. It’s a “pretty funny movie,” he explains. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s kinda like this [affair?]. They screw everything up. It’s a comedy of errors.” The crucial word is “this”—a reference not to the immediately preceding discussion, which was about delegate allocations at the Democratic National Convention, but to the botched robbery. And since there is no surviving discussion of the break-in in the lunchtime conversation between the two, we can reasonably conclude that Haldeman is referring to something in the gap.
The break-in was quickly turning into a comedy of errors. Not only were the burglars caught, not only had they carried unnecessarily incriminating evidence with them, but they were amateurs. Haldeman would have read the Post’s article, “Experts heap scorn on bungled ‘bug’ caper,” from the 19th. The professional ridicule was thick; pros “faulted the job at almost every point.” The article let them crack wise, at length: “This is fantastic,” said one wiretapper. “That kind of (bugging) equipment went out with high-button shoes. These guys have got to be circus bums.” “Can you imagine hiring guys from Miami? You’d get local, top talent to do the job right.” “Other experts said taping the doors so they wouldn’t look taped—and then retaping one of them after the tape had been removed by a security guard—could only happen in a Keystone Kops comedy.”[8] That same day, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler had called it “a third rate burglary.” The phrase was appropriate, and it stuck.
Beyond its “comic opera” appearance, what the break-in shared with The Hot Rock was this sense of compulsive return. While the retaping of the doors might have been enough to cue Haldeman’s analogy, the fact that the burglars were rebreaking in to the DNC headquarters brings “this” much closer to The Hot Rock. (They went back in to fix a malfunctioning tap, to install new equipment, and to take more pictures.) In the film, the burglars not only “screw everything up,” they keep going back to their “client” for more money and another shot at the theft. The bankroller is Dr. Amusa (Moses Gunn), and he gets right at the problem: “I’ve heard of the habitual criminal, of course. But I never dreamed I’d become involved with the habitual crime.” The habitual criminal is played by Robert Redford, just out of prison and looking for a new job. His partner asks him how his stint behind bars was, and Redford, with an irony Haldeman would have appreciated, replies, “Not bad. I learned plumbing.”
Haldeman’s tone seems to be that of someone returning to a previous topic, someone who has either happened upon a coincidence or who has planned to include a joke in a discussion, but has missed the chance, and now is going back to make sure it has been told. He also knew that the president would be interested. Nixon was an inveterate movie-watcher, usually screening three films a week, whether in the White House Family Theater, at Camp David, or, as on his visit to the Bahamas, at Abplanalp’s residence (they watched Paul Bogart’s The Skin Game (1971)).
The morning of the 20th, the Post had already made the jump “inside the White House,” by connecting the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA agent who had been working with President’s Special Counsel Charles Colson. Eventually, it would become clear that the break-in was part of the campaign of surveillance and disinformation that Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy christened GEMSTONE. (Haldeman knew about the plan, but likely did not know its HotRock-y, CIA-style codename.) There was every reason for the President to worry, and every reason for Haldeman to try to distract him.
Nixon and Haldeman almost immediately changed the subject, moving on to a discussion of the national mayors’ conference. But the movie recommendation must have stuck in Nixon’s mind because that Saturday (the 24th) he screened The Hot Rock at Camp David with his wife, his daughter Julie, and her husband David Eisenhower.[9] The film had opened in New York in January and arrived with no publicity in DC in March. The Post’s review was decent, as were the New York notices, but nothing like those for The Godfather, which was dominating screens that spring. Still, The Hot Rock hung around, and it appears to have been re-released onto suburban screens in June (Haldeman could have seen it in Chevy Chase). So there were easily accessible prints when Nixon made the sudden decision to view the film.
Between the 20th and the 24th—between the conversation-to-be-erased and the crime-to-be-screened, Nixon and Haldeman would have the “smoking gun” discussion, in which the president suggests using the CIA to convince the FBI to back off its investigation of the burglary. The guiding framework for the conspiracy is comedic repetition. As Nixon spitballs:
When you get in these people when you…get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.”[10]
By the end of that day, Haldeman’s characterization of the break-in as a “comedy of errors” had become the genre of the cover-up. By the end of that week, surveillance and repetition had been bound together across a host of registers—lexical, generic, and here, historical. Backstopping and complicating that merger of eavesdropping and iteration was the technology of tape. When that implicit material analogue became explicit, the Presidency shattered.
[1] The gap is part of tape 342, and is available at the end of 342b, http://nixontapes.org/chron3.html. Philip Mellinger conducted the most recent intensive investigation of the gap, and his higher resolution digital file can be found here, http://nixontapes.org/mellinger.html. Mellinger’s article, speculating that an unnamed “White House lawyer” is responsible for the central twelve minutes of the gap, appears here, http://www.forensicmag.com/articles/2011/02/cracking-watergates-infamous-18-1/2-minute-gap#.UmcaQxZzPBY
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/10/richard-nixon-transcripts-fury-tape
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/120773-1.htm
[4] Haldeman in Haynes Johnson et al., “Haldeman accuses Nixon,” Washington Post, 2/16/78, 1–3, 2. Judge John J. Sirica, believed that Nixon had intentionally erased the tape. To Set the Record Straight, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979, 198.
[5] Advisory Panel on White House Tapes, “The EOB Tape of June 20, 1972,” May 31, 1974, Summary.
[6] See the Mellinger-related materials.
[7] Haldeman diaries, 472–3.
[8] [6/19/72, A7 Ronald Kessler]
[9] Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies, appendix; President’s Daily Diary for attendance. In order to watch the film at Camp David, it would have had to be transported there. On the night of the 23rd, the day of the “smoking gun” conversation, Nixon watched Hang ’Em High. (The two films were probably brought together.) To have the films ready for screening on Friday and Saturday, he probably had to request them no later than Wednesday. [I am checking on this process]
[10] http://whitehousetapes.net/transcript/nixon/smoking-gun