[history] Richard Nixon’s Last Secret — audio archaeologists go after 18 minutes of conversation deleted (by Nixon?!) from a Watergate Tape …

‘The fact that the tape contained as many as nine separate erasures contradicts any notion that it was caused by an accidental press of the Record button. The culprit was either very anxious to protect the president or was a mechanical klutz. Both descriptions, Watergate scholars have noted, fit Richard Nixon. The 37th president was laughably inept when it came to technology. Haldeman recounts in his now out-of-print book, The Ends of Power, that Nixon struggled with the most basic functions of cassette recorders. The Army Signal Corps supplied Nixon with the simplest recorder available so that the president could dictate memos in the evening. But even then, the various buttons had to be marked so Nixon could use the machine without mixing things up. Put a man like that in front of a reel-to-reel, and it’s easy to see how a simple erasure could turn into a clumsy mess.’

[Related: Nixon Resigns]

Richard Nixon’s Last Secret

This entry was posted on Friday, June 21st, 2002 at 8:44 am and is filed under Politics, Richard Nixon, Watergate.

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