(3 of 4)
The White House aides thus claimed that the first reel had simply run out because the President had been unusually busy on that Saturday. White House Archivist John Nesbitt, who logs every Nixon meeting, produced records accounting for more than five hours of Nixon conversations on that Saturday. His testimony was marred, however, by his admission that he had reconstructed parts of that day's log some three months later—on July 26, three days after Cox had announced he would subpoena the nine tapes. Buzhardt said that he had ordered the revision of the log because of conflicting statements about who had consumed the President's time that day.
Also baffling was the fact that the carton in which the Saturday-Sunday tape apparently had been kept was marked Part I, suggesting strongly that there had been a Part II. White House Aide Stephen Bull, who had supervised the recording operation, said that he had made the Part I notation on the assumption that "there had to be another reel." The carton was also marked "full removed," while other tapes that had run out before the completion of conversation, it was explained, were marked "tape ran out." That discrepancy, too, has not yet been adequately explained.
As mysterious as the nonexistence of the two tapes is the White House failure to admit long ago that they did not exist, thus avoiding at least part of the latest crisis of credibility. Buzhardt said that he had only positively determined the absence of the tapes on Oct. 27, as he prepared the material for Sirica's inspection. Yet Bull testified that Nixon himself had noted the omissions as he listened to recordings on Sept. 29, before he had decided to yield the tapes.
Investigators were incredulous that the discovery had not been made much earlier. The amazingly sloppy Secret Service record of how the tapes had been handled—some notations of withdrawals were scribbled on scraps of brown wrapping paper, and the returns never noted at all—indicated that Bull had withdrawn 26 reels of tapes on June 4, 1973—the day that Nixon spent nearly twelve hours listening to them. The critical April 15 date was covered by these withdrawals, and it would be astonishing if Nixon spent all of that listening time without trying to hear that vital conversation.
The Watergate investigators intend to subpoena Nixon's tapes for June 4—on the ingenious theory that as he listened to the various tapes in his Executive Office Building hideaway his automatically activated recording system may have picked up the playing of the other tapes. Only if Nixon had listened through headphones would these early recordings be inaudible on the June 4 tape. Buzhardt said in court that the June 4 tape would not be surrendered because "it's not relevant."