Room 3: The Investigation Unfolds (1973–74)
The “Rose Mary Stretch”
In July 1973, White House aide Alexander Butterfield told the Senate committee investigating Watergate that Nixon had set up a tape-recording system in the Oval Office to record all his conversations. This prompted the Senate and then–Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox to subpoena some of the tapes. Nixon attempted to refuse the subpoena on executive privilege grounds, and countered by offering transcripts of the tapes. (More on that later.)
In November 1973, the Nixon administration told Judge John Sirica that an 18½-minute phone call between Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman had been erased from one tape, with no initial explanation. Eventually, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed that while she was transcribing the tape, she took a phone call and accidentally pressed a foot pedal that recorded over the first five minutes of the tape. The “Rose Mary Stretch” refers to a photo depicting the position she would’ve had to have been in if she had in fact erased the tapes in the way she described. Beyond the Stretch, the story had a number of logical holes — for example, if she erased the first five minutes, how did the remaining ~13 minutes get erased? By this point, the press — and investigators — viewed any claims from White House officials with heavy skepticism, and thus viewed the White House’s official story on the 18½-minute gap as… stretching the truth. I’ll be here all week. Tip your server.
(Source: Kopel)
Nixon tells the AP: “I’m not a crook”
“I have never obstructed justice.… People have got to know whether or not their president’s a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
Nixon made these now-infamous comments at a televised press conference at Walt Disney World in Florida in November 1973. A contemporaneous report by The Washington Post described the attendees as “400 Associated Press managing editors.” The comments would be subject to mockery in the months and years to come, in formats ranging from political cartoons to internet memes. By this point, Nixon’s credibility in the media had reached a point from which it would not recover.
Elsewhere in the Q&A session, Nixon defended his former aides John Erlichmann and H.R. Haldeman as “fine public servants” and expressed his belief that “when these proceedings are completed that they will come out all right.” However, he doubted it would matter whether the grand jury indicted either man, “because unfortunately they have already been convicted in the minds of millions of Americans” as a result of the Senate’s televised Watergate committee hearings.
Nixon doesn’t blame — or even mention — the press in the latter comment. This could mean that Nixon didn’t want to be openly combative at this press conference during a tense time for his administration, or it could reflect the fact that the Senate committee — not the media — had become the main force driving the Watergate story forward, and indeed the far greater immediate threat to Nixon’s political career.
At the same event, he joked about the then-hypothetical situation of impeachment, saying that if his plane went down, “they don’t have to impeach.” It wouldn’t seem so hypothetical eight months later.
(Sources: Waugh, Kilpatrick, lecture notes)
The “smoking gun” tape
No discussion of Watergate and the credibility gap would be complete without the conversation between President Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, recorded in the Oval Office on the morning of June 23, 1972. On the tape, Haldeman expresses concern that the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in was “leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.” He suggests that they get the CIA to call the FBI to tell them to shut down the investigation. After a minute of back-and-forth, Nixon says “All right, fine,” thus giving his approval to the cover-up attempt.
Both houses of Congress and the special prosecutor’s office had subpoenaed dozens of Nixon’s White House tapes at various points in their investigations. In April 1974, the White House released thousands of pages of edited transcripts of the tapes, alongside a summary of the transcripts, which read like a legal brief defending Nixon. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski was unsatisfied, and he asked the Supreme Court to intervene. On July 24, the Court ruled 8–0 (with 1 recusal) that Nixon had to turn over the 64 tapes that Jaworski had subpoenaed, including the June 23 conversation with Haldeman.
On August 5, Nixon turned over the final subpoenaed tapes, including the smoking gun. After its release, Nixon’s remaining support among congressional Republicans evaporated. Like the Pentagon Papers had done for the Vietnam War, the smoking gun tape provided indisputable evidence that Nixon had been lying to the public and the press when he denied involvement in any cover-up of Watergate. On August 8, Nixon announced his resignation.
(Sources: the artifact itself, lecture notes, Johnson, MacKenzie)