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According to President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, a fe months later, on Sept. 29, 1973, she was reviewing tapes of the June 20, 1972 oval office recordings, tape 342, that had been recorded just 3 days after 5 men with ties to President Nixon's re-election campaign had been arrested while trying to bug the phones in the offices of the Democratic Party's National Committee at the Watergate hotel in Washington DC. Ms. Woods said Nixon came in and was "pushing the buttons back and forth." She denied that she had accidentally erased the tape. On November 8, 1973, she testified before the Watergate Committee "I don't think I'm so stupid as to erase what's on a tape." But later she changed her testimony to acknowledge that it was not only possible, but probable that she had erased the tape.
Woods testified she had made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. She said that on October 1, 1973 while playing the tape, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she testified that she mistakenly hit the button next to it — the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about five minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be re-recorded. She insisted she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz.
Woods was asked to replicate the position she took to cause that accident: seated at a desk, reaching far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applies constant pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her extremely awkward posture during the demonstration -— dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch" -- resulted in many political commentators questioning the validity of the explanation.
The recording was of a conversation between President Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that the topic was the aforementioned arrests at the Watergate Hotel.
White House lawyers said they first heard the now infamous 18½-minute gap on the evening of Nov. 14, 1973. Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until Nov. 21, after the President's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer for the missing recording.
The National Archives now owns the tape, and has tried several times to recover the missing minutes, most recently in 2003. None of the Archive's attempts have been successful. The tapes are now preserved in a climate-controlled vault in case a future technological development allows for restoration of the missing audio.