Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History

Introduction

introduction What we said during the morning meeting will never be known completely because the tape of that conversation is the one with the 18 ½–minute gap. —richard m. nixon1 On October 12, 1973, the United States Court of Appeals ordered President Richard M. Nixon to produce White House tapes and documents that had been subpoenaed in July. Ten days later, Nixon announced his compliance. District Court Judge John J. Sirica requested, among others, tapes for June 20, 1972 (three days after the burglary at the Watergate Hotel). But there was a problem. Rose MaryWoods, Nixon’s personal secretaryof twenty-threeyears, told him that she ‘‘might have caused a small gap’’ in the recording of a conversation that took place on June 20 with H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff and one of Nixon’s closest advisors. Her story was unclear, but it seems that while transcribing, she reached for the telephone to place a call and inadvertently hit the delete button on the tape recorder. She did not notice the mistake until she finished her phone call of ‘‘about five minutes.’’ The gap actually ran for eighteen and a half minutes. Haldeman’s successor , White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, publicly disparaged Miss Woods: ‘‘Typical of a woman,’’ he said, ‘‘she did not know the difference between five minutes and one hour of talking.’’2 Although the charges of obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence were dropped, her reputation was damaged. A panel of scientific experts examined the tape and concluded that it was unlikely that the erasure was accidental. Did she deliberately erase the tapes? Was she willing to take the blame for someone else’s actions? Or was she forced to take the blame for someone else’s actions? The covert operations of Nixon and his accessories came to be known as ‘‘Watergate’’ only once the burglars were apprehended. Whatever their schemes, the actions of the conspirators were brought to a halt, and all their conspiracy narratives in roman history attention turned to covering up evidence of illegal activity. Hence someone, possibly a woman, felt it necessary to erase part of the tape. The silence of eighteen and a half minutes became the focal point for debate, conjecture, and controversy. In 1997, historian Stanley Kutler,with the help of Public Citizen, a national nonprofit public interest organization, succeeded in obtaining the release of the remaining Nixon tapes from the National Archives. Kutler edited and telescoped the conversations, eliminating what he believed to be ‘‘insignificant , trivial, or repetitious.’’3 His selection is most fascinating when it comes to his transcription of the gap. Although the tapes preserve more than an hour of conversation for the morning of June 20, Kutler chooses to transcribe only the silence: June 20, 1972: The President and Haldeman, 11:26 a.m.–12:45 p.m., Executive Office Building This is the highly publicized ‘‘18 ½–minute gap.’’ Technical and scienti fic investigations determined that the tape had been electronically erased by unknown persons some time after Alexander P. Butterfield revealed the existence of the Nixon Administration taping system in 1973. H. R. Haldeman ’s diary entry for this date talks about lengthy meetings with John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and John Dean, which concluded that it was necessary to keep the FBI from going ‘‘beyond what’s necessary in developing evidence and that we can keep a lid on that.’’ Haldeman said that he and the President talked about ‘‘our counterattack’’ and ‘‘PR offensive.’’4 Where we hear the white noise of erasure, we read the words, ‘‘This is the highly publicized ‘18 ½ minute gap.’ ’’ Notice too that Kutler’s transcription is as cryptic as the silence of the erasure. The phrases that he chooses from Haldeman’s diary to supplement the gap only highlight the secrecy. ‘‘Keep a lid on that’’ reaffirms the clandestine operations of the conspirators, while ‘‘our counterattack’’ suggests a counterconspiracy. Although over two hundred hours of taped conversations have been released to the public, eighteen and a half minutes of silence nevertheless conceal important information about one of the most elaborate cover-ups of the American presidency. On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, 268 men and women witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Twenty-two photographers, both amateur and professional, captured the event in still and moving pictures . Abraham Zapruder, with his primitive home-movie equipment, recorded the most complete film, twenty-two seconds...