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Her kitchen is equipped with three ovens, though a frequent escort, Washington Advertising Executive Robert Gray, observes, "She doesn't cook, but she's good with ice cubes." Continues Gray: "Rose is a great girl, but she's a lousy date." One-third of an evening with her, he complains amiably, is pre-empted by interlopers who want to get messages through to the President. Though Rose politely takes them, says Gray, "she would rather dance than anything." When no dancing partner is available, the auburn-haired, matronly secretary has been known to take to the dance floor by herself, dancing solo to an orchestra's fiery tango rhythm. At home she often listens to music, using what a frequent visitor describes as "a really good tape system."
Though her usually sunny disposition makes her probably the most universally well-liked and respected person in the Nixon inner staff, she has a temper. She has flashed it in Judge Sirica's courtroom, and against politicians and journalists who criticized Nixon. During a recent Nixon press conference that she watched on television in her apartment, she sprang out of her chair and shouted epithets at the on-screen newsmen whose questions she considered impertinent. As the Watergate drama unfolds, a major question is just what might be the limits of the secretary's loyalty to her boss of nearly a quarter-century.
Last week's testimony before Judge Sirica raised bothersome questions. If White House Attorney Buzhardt learned of the trouble with the Haldeman tape in early or mid-October, why did he at first claim in court that the problem had only been discovered on Nov. 14? If Nixon knew about it on Oct. 1, why did he assure a conference of Republican Governors on Nov. 20 that all of the remaining tapes were "audible"? And why did no one from the White House inform the court much earlier?
A still more urgent question was whether the crucial 18 minutes of humming on the Haldeman tape could have been caused by what some Washington cynics have dubbed "Rose Mary's boo-boo." Apart from the fact that she would only take the blame for part of that gap, could her actions with the recorder have created such a noise at all?
Ample Time. Buzhardt said that, without informing Miss Woods, he had used her recorder and re-created the overriding noise. On blank tape, one hum level was created, he said, when the secretary's electric typewriter and her Tensor lamp were both turned on; a different hum resulted when only the lamp burned. The recorder's internal circuitry was apparently capable of picking up the electrical "noise" from current flowing through the lamp and typewriter. Other experimenters claim to have duplicated a similar noise on tape when using similar equipment.
For the White House, however, the biggest problem with Miss Woods' testimony is that she insists that she could not have caused the full 18-minute noise. Thus someone else might have deliberately completed the obliteration of the Haldeman conversation. There certainly would have been ample time for any such tampering between