Posted on 01/24/2005 4:30:30 PM PST by RKB-AFG
Rose Mary Woods, 87, Nixon Loyalist for Decades, Dies
By PHILIP SHENON January 24, 2005
WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - Rose Mary Woods, the devoted secretary to President Richard M. Nixon who was at the center of one of the great mysteries of Watergate after 18½ minutes of a crucial White House tape were erased, died Saturday near her hometown in northeastern Ohio. She was 87.
A spokesman for a local funeral home said Ms. Woods died at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio.
Ms. Woods, who worked for Mr. Nixon for decades and joined him in exile in California after his 1974 resignation as president, took part of the blame for the missing portion of a taped conversation between President Nixon and the White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington.
In one of the most memorable photographs of the era, Ms. Woods is shown trying to re-create the chain of events in which, she said, she could have accidentally erased part of the tape as she was transcribing it on Mr. Nixon's orders in 1973, after the scandal broke. The photograph shows Ms. Woods at a desk, reaching far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot hits a pedal controlling the transcription machine.
"I am most dreadfully sorry," she said in court testimony in November 1973 in explaining that through some "terrible mistake," she had pressed the wrong button on the pedal and recorded over the tape. She said that she had immediately notified Mr. Nixon of the erasure and that he had assured her that "there's no problem because that's not one of the subpoenaed tapes."
Still, Ms. Woods testified that her error might explain only about five minutes of the gap, not the full 18½ minutes. In 2003, the National Archives said a panel of audio specialists had analyzed the tape and been unable to recapture the lost conversation.
News that so much of the tape had been deleted eroded Mr. Nixon's credibility on Capitol Hill and with the Watergate special prosecutor's office at a time when his presidency was beginning to unravel. The gap consisted of a buzzing sound that obliterated part of a conversation in which Mr. Nixon was instructing Mr. Haldeman to take "public relations" moves to divert attention from the break-in at the Watergate office complex.
Ms. Woods was often described in news accounts during the Nixon presidency as the most doggedly loyal and tight-lipped of the president's inner circle. She dated her association with Mr. Nixon to 1947, when she was a secretary on a select House foreign affairs committee and became impressed by the neatness and accuracy of expense statements submitted to the panel by Mr. Nixon, then a House freshman from California.
After Mr. Nixon was elected to the Senate, Ms. Woods joined his staff, remaining with him after his election as vice president, through his later failed bids for the presidency against John F. Kennedy and for governor of California, and in his New York law practice in the 1960's. She returned to Washington and the White House after Mr. Nixon's election as president in 1968.
Mr. Nixon described Ms. Woods as being as close "as family" and said in his memoirs that he asked her in August 1974 to tell his wife, Pat, and his two daughters that he had decided to resign. "My decision was irrevocable, and I asked her to suggest that we not talk about it anymore when I went over for dinner," Mr. Nixon wrote.
One of five children in a tightly knit Irish Catholic home, Ms. Woods was brought up in Sebring, a small town in northeastern Ohio. At 17, she went to work at her father's pottery company.
She was engaged at the time to a man who died before their wedding. She never married, later telling reporters that she was pleased to dedicate herself to a career alongside Mr. Nixon that had provided her with a "stimulating and interesting life."
Roger Ruzek, the funeral director in Sebring who confirmed news of Ms. Woods's death, said she was survived by two sisters. Mr. Ruzek said he had no other information on her family.
I guess she took the secret with her to her grave.
RIP
We should all have such loyal friends. I am sure that President Nixon trusted her completely. May she rest in peace.
The loyalty to her dead fiance is what impresses me. Death did them part, but she stayed a spinster.
May she rest in peace.
Loyalty was obviously her best attribute.
All is quiet from Washington Post, guess this is not 'DeepThroat'.
I agree.
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