Jan 24, 2005 12:58 PM
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WASHINGTON—Rose Mary Woods, the devoted White House secretary to Richard M. Nixon who found herself at the centre of one of the great mysteries of Watergate after 18 1/2 minutes of a crucial White House tape were erased, died Saturday near her hometown in northeastern Ohio. She was 87. A spokesman for a local funeral home said Woods died at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio. Woods, who worked for Nixon for more than two decades and joined him in exile in California after his 1974 resignation as U.S. president, took part of the blame for the missing portion of a taped conversation between Nixon and the White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, on June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington. In one of the most memorable photographs of the era, Woods is shown attempting to re-create the scenario in which, she said, she could have accidentally erased part of the tape as she was transcribing it on Nixon's orders in 1973, after the scandal broke. The photo shows Woods at a desk, reaching far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot hits a pedal controlling the transcription machine. "I am most dreadfully sorry," she said in court testimony in November 1973 while explaining that through some "terrible mistake," she had pressed the wrong button on the pedal and recorded over the tape. She said she had immediately notified Nixon of the erasure and he had assured her "there's no problem because that's not one of the subpoenaed tapes." Still, Woods testified her error might explain only about five minutes of the gap, not the full 18 1/2 minutes. News that so much of the tape had been deleted eroded Nixon's credibility on Capitol Hill and with the Watergate special prosecutor's office at a time when his presidency was beginning to unravel. The gap consisted of a buzzing sound that obliterated part of a conversation in which Nixon was instructing Haldeman to take "public relations" moves to divert attention from the break-in at the Watergate office complex. Woods, often described during the Nixon presidency as the most doggedly loyal and tight-lipped of his inner circle, dated her association with Nixon to 1947, when she was a secretary on a U.S. congressional committee and became impressed by the neatness and accuracy of expense statements submitted by Nixon, then a freshman representative from California. After Nixon was elected to the U.S. Senate, Woods joined his staff, remaining with him after his election as vice-president, through his later failed bids for the presidency against John F. Kennedy and for governor of California, and in his New York law practice in the 1960s. She returned to Washington and the White House after Nixon's election as president in 1968. Nixon described Woods as being as close "as family" and said in his memoirs he asked her to break the news in August 1974 to his wife, Pat, and his two daughters that he had decided to resign. One of five children in a tightly knit Irish Catholic home, Woods was brought up in Sebring, a small town in northeastern Ohio. She never married, later telling reporters she was pleased to dedicate herself to a career alongside Nixon that had provided her with a "stimulating and interesting life."The funeral director who confirmed Woods' death said she was survived by two sisters.
