The report was coldly scientific, its source unassailably objective, its grave import unmistakably clear: at least as late as last October, an effort to conceal evidence in the Watergate scandal was still in operation in the innermost reaches of Richard Nixon's White House.
No such direct conclusion was explicitly drawn, of course, by the six professional sound, recording, and electronics experts who had exhaustively examined a presidential tape recording containing a mysterious 18-minute deletion of a Watergate conversation between Nixon and his intimate aide, H.R. Haldeman. It would have exceeded both their purview and their competence. But in reporting to Federal Judge John J. Sirica that the conversation had been erased by pushing buttons on a tape recorder at least five—and probably nine —times, they had found, in effect, that this destruction of evidence necessarily had to be deliberate. Until someone within the White House steps forward to admit that his or her fingers pushed those keys to wipe out the conversation, the cover-up cannot, indeed, be considered to have ended.
An FBI Quiz. In a statement, the White House pleaded with "the American people" to realize that the erasure did not prove that the lost conversation had contained any incriminating evidence. But that legally valid distinction defied logic and, perhaps more important to Nixon's survival as President, plain ordinary common sense. Only the White Queen in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as conservative Columnist George F. Will observed, was capable of believing "six impossible things before breakfast."
In the wake of the court-appointed panel's devastating findings, the nation once again experienced the dismay of knowing that FBI agents were back in the White House, quizzing Nixon's closest associates in a search for those who had committed a criminal act. This time the inquiry had the official sanction of Sirica, who ordered that all evidence be turned over to a federal grand jury for possible indictment. Unlike an earlier foray into the White House—shortly after the wiretap-burglary of Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate in June of 1972—the FBI agents this time had an imposing prime suspect: the President himself.
In four days of testimony in Sirica's second-floor courtroom following submission of the experts' report, the evidence increasingly constricted the period during which the taped conversation had been erased. Since the erasure apparently required the confluence of a specific tape machine and one specific tape, the suspects were also severely limited. If the White House's own records are accurate—an uncertain proposition —only three persons are known to have had access to both the tape and the recorder in the suspect period. They are Stephen Bull, Special Assistant to the President; Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary for 22 years; and Nixon.
Whether either subordinate would dare do such a deed without the President's knowledge seems doubtful, though not impossible. Either way, Nixon's case does not improve much. Surely neither Miss Woods nor Bull would have acted alone unless to protect the President from his words on the tape. Indeed, the theory most helpful to Nixon is that Bull might have acted to shield his old boss, Haldeman.