How is it possible that I’ve never told you this story?
At family dinner a few weeks ago, my younger nephew casually mentioned that he’d been assigned to do his end-of-term AP U.S. History project on Nixon. He was too surprised to even roll his eyes when his mother and I both yelped with excitement.
“You know your grandfather helped bring Nixon down, right?” we squealed in unison.
“Uh. No?”
We told the tale together, tossing it back and forth like we’d been practicing. Which we had, because it’s one we’ve known since earliest childhood.
It begins with Alexander Butterfield. Who? you ask. And you’re right, because he’s nobody. A deputy assistant, called to testify to Congress in the midst of its Watergate inquiry. He has this quaint idea that he should tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So he lets slip that the President is secretly tape-recording every. single. conversation. that happens in the Oval Office.
“WUT?” says Congress. And Butterfield tells them:
Out of paranoia, megalomania, or just plain old presidential hubris, Nixon got the Secret Service to hide voice-activated microphones throughout the Oval and wire them to a giant machine that slowly spooled magnetic tape from one big plastic reel onto another.
Congress, hoping for the best, asks politely. “Oh hi, Mr. President, can we hear the tapes, please?”
“No,” says Nixon. “Because executive privilege. So there.”
“We see your privilege and raise you a subpoena,” says no-more-Mr.-Nice-Congress.
What happens next has gone down in history as the Saturday Night Massacre: Nixon fires the Attorney General and then the next-in-line Deputy AG because they won’t fire Congress’s investigator. Third-in-line is Robert Bork — yes, that Robert Bork, my fellow Gen-Xers — and he’s just fine with firing the investigator, so aren’t you glad that he didn’t get approved to be on the Supreme Court back in 1987?
But the firings backfire, so to speak, and a new investigator gets appointed.
“Go ahead. Make my day,” is basically what the new investigator says.
“OK,” the administration finally huffs. “You can have these redacted transcripts.”
They hand over hundreds and hundreds of pages. Which, shocker, contain nothing at all incriminating. They do contain thousands of typographically bleeped-out words that are clearly the President using a wide and colorful variety of curses and racial slurs. This does not help his cause. (Times were simpler then, kids.)
“Nice try,” says Congress. “We’ll take our tapes NOW please okay thank you very much.”
The Supreme Court agrees. Unanimously, they rule that the President must obey the “fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice.” The good old days, amirite?
And voilà, Nixon hands over the tapes! So Congress pops some popcorn, puts on its collective headphones, and prepares to listen.
Blah blah blah China. Blah blah blah OPEC. Blah blah blah wait a minute, is that the President’s chief of staff coming into the Oval Office and saying something about the Watergate break-in? He is! Omg this is gonna be the evidence Congress has been looking for, the proof that Nixon knew about the cover-up, it’s…
Suddenly silence. Only the hisssssss of a tape that’s been wiped clean. For eighteen and a half minutes. When the sound comes back, the conversation is over.
But the battle with Congress isn’t.
Congress is understandably rather upset with this turn of events. They demand answers. And they get this:
“It’s my fault,” claims the President’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods. “I made a mistake while I was typing all those transcripts. Oopsie!”
The thing is, secretarial transcription setups of that era – I used one myself, early in my career when I was a paralegal for a hot second – had foot pedals so you could run the tape forward, back, faster, slower, whatever you wanted without taking your fingers off your typewriter keys. Sometimes, they had a pedal for “record,” too.
And therein lies the problem. Rose Mary claims that she was diligently type type typing away at her West Wing desk, when suddenly the phone rang. She answered it and had a whole conversation without ever noticing that she somehow accidentally kept her foot firmly planted on the record pedal the whole time.
“Ohhhhhhkay,” says Congress. “Suuuuuure. Show us.”
Which is how we come to have an actual photograph of what came to be known as the Rose Mary Stretch. Because her phone is several feet away from her typewriter, and she can barely keep the tip of her toe on the pedal while reaching awkwardly across the back of her own chair to pick up the phone.
Congress remains unconvinced by Rose Mary’s sac fly. They look around for experts in audiotape analysis. And what they find is Nurn.
He’s working at BBN, a very early tech firm with deep ties to the government; a few years before this, BBN had basically invented the internet (for reals) as part of a contract with the Defense Department. You may also remember a piece I wrote long ago about how Nurn’s BBN team had already used tape analysis to prove that a bunch of New York cops were dirty.
Congress decides that this all sounds like some pretty good cred. So a half-dozen fully armed US Marshals pile into a van carrying our nation’s constitutional checks and balances in the shape of a stack of tape reels, plus the original hidden tape recorder and Rose Mary’s transcription setup. They race up I-95 to a low-rise brick office building overlooking Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA.
I have faint memories of visiting BBN’s mainframe computer room as a tiny child. In those days, long before computers lived on desks (much less in pockets), these were coffin-sized monsters that ruled their own cold and cavernous space. Giants, warted over with flashing lights and bakelite buttons and not a screen among them; they spoke to us humans only via green-and-white horizontally striped paper printouts, the kind with perforations between the continuous sheets and detachable strips of sprocket-guides down the sides.
Nurn and his colleagues got to work. They hooked up the tape to the finest computers in the world and wrote computer programs that tried to reconstruct the recorded-over sound from the tiny dribs and drabs of data that remained on the tape. All they heard was a whole lotta nothing. That conversation was gone gone gone.
But the tape itself had a tale to tell.
Tape recordings work by arranging magnetic particles in particular patterns. The whole point is that a device called a “recording head” touches the tape in specific ways as it winds past, leaving behind magnetically readable marks. What BBN discovered was the fact that, like the individually identifiable tracks that a gun leaves on the bullets fired through its barrel, each tape recorder’s head leaves its own unique mark.
So, they studied each of the recording devices down to the level of microscopic magnetic particles. Whenever a voice had activated the original Oval Office machine, they could recognize that device’s characteristic mark. They also recognized where Rose Mary’s transcription machine had left its own particular fingerprint.
Literally. Because they could see that its fingerprint was very slightly different from its toeprint.
The way that the recording head touched down onto the tape changed depending on whether you used the foot pedal or you pressed the button on the main device console.
Rose Mary’s story wasn’t a stretch. It was a lie.
The tape wasn’t done truth-telling yet, though.
The magnetic particles showed that someone’s finger had pressed the button and held it down for several minutes: the head made its “touchdown” mark here, followed by its “liftoff” mark away down there.
But. Just before that “liftoff,” there was another “touchdown”. That one’s matching “liftoff” came another few minutes downstream. And there was another overlapping pair of marks offset there, too. These pairings continued until the final “liftoff” at 18 1/2 minutes, whereupon the recording of a totally different conversation was in progress.
The BBN team analyzed the magnetic patterns using what was then the world’s most advanced computational power. They were confident in what they were seeing. But what could it mean?
There was really only one possible explanation:
Someone’s finger held the button down for awhile. Then they stopped, ran the tape back for a few seconds, and held the button down awhile more. They did this several times.
They were listening to hear if they’d recorded over the whole conversation yet.
The 18 1/2 minute gap was a deliberate erasure.
That wasn’t the whole ballgame, of course. Nixon — not unlike a later disgraceful President — tried to brazen it out. But Congress — very much unlike a later disgraceful Congress — sent a bipartisan delegation to tell him that he should resign, because he was about to be impeached and removed.
As much as our family still misses Nurn, we often say that we’re glad he was spared seeing what’s become of the nation he loved so much.
He was a deeply patriotic man who did his best to protect all of us — and the office of the Presidency itself — from a vengeful autocrat who was trying to meddle with our democratic elections and place himself above the law.
I started writing this for Father’s Day, but it got a bit bigger than I expected. It’s still timely, though, isn’t it? Alas for our country.
Happy 250th Fourth of July to all. May we honor what’s honorable in our history, while we also remember how we’ve fought to overcome our failings.
❤️🤍💙