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The two tapes in question were of potentially great importance. One was a brief telephone conversation between Former Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon on June 20, 1972, apparently the first communication between the two intimate associates after the arrests at Democratic national headquarters three days earlier. Prosecutor Cox had especially wanted to hear this tape because Mitchell had apparently just been briefed about the participation in the Watergate espionage of G. Gordon Liddy, counsel to Nixon's re-election finance committee. Mitchell claimed that he did not tell Nixon about Liddy—who at that point had not yet been arrested—much less about his own role and that of other high officials in Liddy's wiretap plans. To many investigators, that seemed most unlikely.
Buzhardt told Sirica that the Mitchell conversation was not recorded because Nixon had made the call on a telephone not connected to the extensive secret White House recording system. The White House claims that the President used a hall telephone in his residential quarters.
The Sirica hearings centered mainly on the other missing tape,* one that was believed to have been made of a conversation on April 15, 1973 between Nixon and his fired former counsel, John Dean. In that talk, Dean has testified, Nixon admitted he had been "foolish" in discussing Executive clemency for E. Howard Hunt in exchange for his silence. He had also said, according to Dean, that his previous assurance that it would be easy to raise $1,000,000 for silence money for the arrested men was intended only as a joke. That, as Dean saw it, meant that Nixon was trying to cover up that earlier discussion; it contradicted Nixon's later claim that he had actually told Dean that it would be wrong to raise and pay such bribe money. Ironically, it was Nixon's behavior at that session, Dean related, that first led him to suspect their conversations were being taped.
Dead Interval. The 55-minute talk, the White House claimed, was never recorded. Buzhardt at first said that the recording was not made because of "a malfunction or a basic inadequacy of the system." Raymond Zumwalt, a Secret Service technician who had supervised the installation of the system, then theorized that a timing device that was supposed to switch automatically from one recording machine to another when a tape ran out had failed to work.
Later, he suggested that since normally there was a half-hour delay while the timer activated the back-up recorder, Dean's conversation might have taken place in that dead interval. When the length of the conversation was pointed out, Zumwalt suddenly recalled that the changeover timer was set to operate only six days a week, since a single six-hour reel could normally handle the relatively limited weekend conversations. That meant no back-up recorder takeover on Sunday if the tape ran out.