Experts Discuss Missing Portion of Nixon Tapes

Sept. 21 -- Can today’s technology help extract the sounds of silence from the famous 18 ½-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes?

The inconclusive conclusion reached today by the National Archives is no — at least not yet.

“We called in a number of experts to give us some advice on whether there is technology out there today that might help us recapture the sound on this 18 ½-minute gap,” said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives.

Public and private sector audio experts gave presentations to the National Archives and Records Administration Advisory Committee of Preservation on the current state of audio restoration technology.

A Bit of Hiss-story

The meeting’s focus was the infamous 18 ½-minute patch of buzzes and clicks in the middle of a recording made June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

“It’s just blank,” said Christoher Beam, former National Archives staffer who was one of the first to hear the tapes nearly two decades ago. “There’s a kind of fuzzy sound — a kind of light static-y sound, and that’s it. … Then all of a sudden it plops right in the middle when Nixon is meeting with [H.R.] Haldeman.”

Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified in court that she must have pushed the wrong button on a recorder while transcribing the tapes, accidentally recording over at least part of the original conversation. A panel set up in the 1970s by federal Judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate criminal trials, concluded the erasures were done in at least five separate and contiguous segments.

The group of audio experts revisited the infamous erasure, discussing modern restoration techniques, which are far superior to what existed in the ’70s, to see if they might help fill in the long gap. Or not. Experts not at the meeting said a lot of the technical viability of retrieval depends on the actual tape in question.