"Next to a man's wife, his secretary is the most important person in his career. She has to understand every detail of his job; to have unquestioning loyalty and absolute discretion. On every count Rose measures up. I'm a lucky man."
—Richard Nixon, in a press interview, 1957
"The buttons said on and off, forward and backward. I caught on to that fairly fast. I don't think I'm so stupid as to erase what's on a tape."
—Rose Mary Woods, in court testimony, Nov. 8,1973
Precisely because her loyalty to her boss has never been questioned and she never makes stupid errors, Rose Mary Woods was deeply enmeshed last week in the Watergate toils that have touched the lives of so many who tied their careers to Richard Nixon's political fate. The President's personal and personable secretary sat uncomfortably in a Washington federal courtroom and told a confused and tangled story of how she had, after all, made "a terrible mistake." Contrary to her testimony of Nov. 8, she said that she apparently had pushed the wrong button on a recorder and erased a potentially crucial portion of one of Nixon's Watergate-related tape recordings.
By raising new doubts and suspicions, Miss Woods' testimony sharply nipped any budding success of the President's ongoing Operation Candor, which is aimed at explaining away his multiple Watergate woes. Her statements posed a new threat to Nixon's survival in office. For if Miss Woods' story is shown to be untrue, the inescapable conclusion would be that at least one of the subpoenaed Nixon tapes has been deliberately and criminally altered. Since the President has sworn that those recordings were in "my sole personal control," he presumably would be legally responsible for any such destruction of evidence.
Scientific Scrutiny. As the President's attorneys finally delivered some of those subpoenaed tapes to Federal Judge John J. Sirica, a new phase began in the legal controversy over whether Nixon was innocent of any knowledge of the wiretapping of Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972, and of the many efforts of his closest aides to conceal the higher origins of that crime. Now the critical question of whether a cover-up might even still be in progress can be subjected to scientific scrutiny. Technical experts disagree on their proficiency at detecting tape alterations. But they very likely can determine whether the mysterious tone that obliterated a crucial conversation on one of those tapes came about precisely as Miss Woods said it did.
In Judge Sirica's court last week, Miss Woods testified that she must have been responsible for at least 4½ minutes of a raspy, overriding hum on the tape of a talk between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, then his Chief of Staff, on June 20, 1972, just three days after the Watergate burglary. Archibald Cox, the fired Watergate special prosecutor, had asked for the tape last July 23, contending that "the inference is almost irresistible" that Haldeman and former Domestic Affairs Adviser John Ehrlichman had reported to Nixon on that day whatever they knew about the Watergate wiretapping operation. Further, said Cox, Haldeman and Ehrlichman "may well have received instructions" from the President on how to handle the