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Other possibilities may yet be turned up by investigators or put forward by the White House, but no innocent ex planation for the erasure itself seems at all likely. The missing words involve a conversation between Nixon and Hal deman on June 20, 1972, just three days after the original Watergate arrests. The tape was among those subpoenaed by Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor whom Nixon fired last October. It was later turned over to Judge Sirica. Cox had drawn the "irresistible inference" that Haldeman had reported to the President that day whatever he knew about the origins of the Watergate conspiracy.
Nixon, claimed Cox, might well have advised Haldeman how to handle the cover-up of the affair in its earliest stages. Haldeman's own notes of the conversation describe it as a discussion of a "PR [public relations] offensive to top" the effects of the break-in on the 1972 presidential campaign.
For Nixon, the new blow came at a most inopportune time. He had closed down Operation Candor, designed to answer most of the suspicion about his role in Watergate and other disputes and about his personal finances and taxes. So far as events would allow, according to White House spokesmen, he would now turn to other matters of national concern, while his aides and supporters took a new hard line on Watergate, accusing his critics of badgering him for partisan and selfish purposes.
Indeed, only hours before the tape report was made public, Vice President Gerald Ford had launched that line in a strident, almost Agnewesque speech to the American Farm Bureau Federation in Atlantic City. He lashed out at "a few extreme partisans" who were determined to "crush the President and his philosophy" so they could "dominate the Congress, and through it, the nation." It was an ill-considered and surprising turnabout for Ford. Until then he had seemed fully aware of his delicate role as a possible successor who would be called upon to play a healing and conciliating role if Nixon left office.
After some hesitation, White House spokesmen admitted that Nixon's speechwriters had drafted the Ford remarks. Apart from the surprising non sequitur that Nixon's resignation and Ford's ascendancy to the Oval Office would destroy Nixonian policies, the speech was an indication that Ford may have been sandbagged by the White House. Some White House aides had been told of the impending tape report, while Ford apparently had not. Yet he later gamely contended that he still believed what he had said. He lamely dismissed the tape revelation as "a technical and confusing matter."
There was no way, however, to read the technical report as the work of political or philosophical enemies of Nixon. Nationally known experts in their field, the six scientists had been mutually accepted by both the special prosecutors and the White House. Four had been readily proposed by both sides; each of the other two had been suggested by one party, then checked out and accepted by the other. Sirica finally appointed the panel. The fact that the six, representing various specialties bearing on the detection of tape alterations, had agreed unanimously—a