The infamous "eighteen-and-a-half-minute" gap in the presidential tape of June 20, 1972, of a conversation between President Richard M. Nixon and his chief aide H. R. "Bob" Haldeman is once again in the news. It has resurfaced because of the announcement that Woodward and Bernstein's source Deep Throat was former FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt. Some commentators feel that this may not be the whole story of Deep Throat. They point to the fact that Felt resigned from the FBI in June of 1973, six months before that tape gap was discovered and publicized. This, they feel, is evidence that Felt could not be the only Deep Throat. SILENT COUP's Chapter 22 has the first, and as far as we know, the only full-length discussion of that infamous tape gap and of the circumstances surrounding its public revelation. Author Len Colodny comments: For two decades prior to our book, whoever had written about that gap had focused only on the erasures. But in re-reading ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, I was intrigued by the fact that Deep Throat had played a major role in disclosing to Woodward and Bernstein that there were 'deliberate erasures' on the tape. There were several problems with this explanation. Among them was that Woodward and Bernstein had always claimed that Deep Throat had only been a "confirming" source, not a primary source -- that they would get information elsewhere and Throat would confirm it or deny it, or 'steer' them in the right direction. But in describing a meeting of Woodward and Deep Throat in an underground garage in the first week of November, 1973, the reporters write: "Throat's message was short and simple: one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures." Not only was this leak from Deep Throat the most damaging to President Nixon of all the leaks, it was also information that came directly to the reporters from Throat. Contrary to their statements about Deep Throat, the source was not acting here as a confirming source but as a primary, direct source of new information. With this understanding in hand, I began to investigate all the events surrounding the erasure itself in great detail. I interviewed those connected to the erasure, and relevant documents, to try stitch together all the facts. On March 5, 1989, Bob Gettlin and I interviewed Woodward for ninety minutes in the kitchen of his Georgetown home, and during the course of that interview I confronted him with the evidence that Throat was a direct, not a confirming source, for the tape gap disclosure. Woodward seemed surprised by our understanding of this. He was clearly not expecting it. Shortly, he conceded that his relationship with Throat had "evolved" over time -- meaning that he may have begun as a confirming source and eventually became an initiating source -- and how concerned Throat had been in November 1973 over recent events. The timing of the revelation of the tape gap does raise important questions about the identity and possible motives of Deep Throat, now that Felt has been identified by Woodward as that source. As suggested above, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, for Mark Felt, who left the FBI in June, to have known about the tape erasures in November of 1973. Moreover, in early November the size and importance of the gap was not yet widely known within the White House. Those who first knew of it were the president, his secretary Rose Mary Woods (who had been transcribing the tapes), presidential chief of staff Alexander Haig, Haig's deputy John C. Bennett (retired army major general and custodian of the tapes), and legal counselor J. Fred Buzhardt (former counsel in the Pentagon). As important, the gap was supposedly not understood to be on a subpoenaed tape until November 14, 1973, when attorney Sam Powers sat down with Buzhardt to catalog and listen to the seven conversations that were to be turned over to Judge Sirica. Both Buzhardt and Powers were reportedly surprised when the gap in the June 20 tape was not the five minutes that Rose Mary Woods told them she had inadvertently caused, but eighteen-and-a-half minutes. All of this is reported in detail in Chapter 22, and is set in context. For instance, Chapter 22 points out that, based on notes taken by H. R. Haldeman on June 20, 1972, and our repeated interviews with Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, with whom President Nixon had spoken in separate conversations on June 20, there could have been nothing on that tape that would be either crucial to the president's defense or that would have incriminated him in any way. Thus the tape erasure, and its disclosure to the public, served only to undermine President Nixon's failing credibility and to push him toward his eventual resignation. At the end of the day, the most important question still needs to be answered. Just who added the extra 13 & 1/2 minutes of "deliberate erasures" to the accidental five minute erasure made by Rosemary Wood and reported by her on October 1, 1973? For Chapter 22 in its entirely, the full story of the gap and its crucial role in the downfall of the Nixon presidency, click here. |