On October 26, Nixon held a tense news conference of his own during which he unleashed a broadside against the media, saying he had "never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious reporting in twenty-seven years of public life." He added: "When people are pounded night after night with that kind of frantic, hysterical reporting, it naturally shakes their confidence. And yet I should point out that even in this week when many thought that the president was shell-shocked, unable to act, the president acted decisively in the interest of peace, in the interest of the country, and I can assure you that whatever shocks gentlemen of the press may have or others, political people, these shocks will not affect me in doing my job."

Whether or not he was fully in control of foreign policy, Nixon had now lost control of the evidence that would eventually damn him at home. In conceding on October 26 that a new special prosecutor would be appointed, he stated with bravado, "I do not anticipate that we will come to the time when he would consider it necessary to take the president to court." But his nightmare was worse even than that. Even before Leon Jaworski got properly into the job, much of Nixon's White House top echelon was dragged into court. The reason was that in agreeing to hand over the nine subpoenaed tapes, the president had omitted to point out that two of them did not exist. Now the court had to be told.

First a crestfallen Buzhardt found out what Nixon, his aide Steve Bull, Rose Mary Woods, and Haig had known since at least September 29: that apparently neither the June 20, 1972, telephone call with Mitchell nor the late-night meeting with Dean on April 15, 1973, had been recorded. On October 30, only a week after the judge had said how happy he was that Nixon was complying with his order, Sirica was told the bad news by Buzhardt in chambers. Buzhardt said that, as regards April 15, a timer had malfunctioned and the reel had run out. Jaworski's prosecutors wanted an open court hearing, but Buzhardt tried to fend them off by offering for interview the Secret Service agents in charge of the taping system.

When the Secret Service expert stated he had never heard of any malfunction, the prosecutors persuaded the judge to hold public hearings to subject the White House witnesses to cross-examination. What followed was the first courtroom confrontation between lawyers from the White House staff and the prosecutors they detested. There was no jury because it was not a trial, just an investigation. But, in fact, Nixon's last vestiges of credibility were on trial, with the press present in force to report the testimony.

This initial session had Buzhardt fumbling and altering his explanations. The reason the April 15 meeting had not been recorded now had nothing to do with a malfunction, but was because there were so many meetings that Sunday that the six-hour tape had been used up long before Dean arrived after 9 P.M. It also emerged that the custody of the tapes was something less than impressive. The Secret Service logs looked like fragments of brown paper bags. They disclosed that someone like Haldeman could take away original tapes with no documentation showing what was done with them before they were returned.

Steve Bull was given a tough time. He told about the transcribing sessions with Rose Mary Woods at Camp David and added a new detail - that the tapes had been taken to Florida as well. He also revealed that he and Nixon had spent up to twelve hours listening to tapes the previous June, before Butterfield disclosed the existence of the system. The White House instantly refused to make available this June tape of Nixon listening to tapes, the so-called tape of tapes. It now became horribly clear that Nixon, at the time he proposed the Stennis compromise, was well aware the full complement of tapes no longer existed and that he had intended pushing through Buzhardt's written summaries without revealing this fact.

Each spool of tape lasted for six hours, and sometimes on weekends a reel ran out and was not immediately replaced. That, evidently, was what had happened to the April 15 recording; the tape had run out when Nixon and Dean met at 9:17 P.M., and since that happened to have been a Sunday night, there had been no Secret Service agent on duty to change the reel. As for the June 20 call, Buzhardt explained to the court that it had been made from a telephone in the residence quarters of the White House that had not been connected to the recording system.

Steve Bull disclosed to the court on November 2 that he had learned that the April 15 tape did not exist a month earlier, on September 29, when he had looked for it in order to give it to Rose Mary Woods to transcribe at Camp David. Bull also testified that he had obtained twenty-six of the tapes for Nixon in early June, and that the president had reviewed some of them in preparation for Dean's Senate testimony. On June 25, Nixon had even ordered one of the tapes to be flown to him in San Clemente; when no courier flight was available, Bull testified, Buzhardt had listened to it at Haig's request.

These revelations became the headlines of Saturday, November 3, just two days after the announcement of the selection of Jaworski to be the new Special Prosecutor.

It was November of 1973. A year earlier, Nixon had won reelection in a landslide, carrying every state except Massachusetts as well as more than 60 percent of the popular vote. Now, polls showed that 60 percent of the American people felt he was not capably handling the presidency. Nixon escaped the headlines by sailing with his friends Abplanalp and Rebozo aboard Rebozo's yacht. Back on land, The New York Times, Time magazine, and even the longtime Nixon loyalist Detroit News ran editorials urging that, as a public service, Nixon resign. "That weekend in Florida," Nixon later wrote, "was a new low point for me personally."

A strange thing happened that weekend. Buzhardt and Garment flew down to Florida, checked into a hotel near the president's estate, and went to see the boss. Nixon was firming his resolve and looking for ways to rehabilitate his image. The two lawyers had another notion in mind.

The Final Days opens with a scene of Buzhardt and Garment flying to Key Biscayne, convinced that after six months of losing battles with the Congress, the courts, and the Special Prosecutor, Nixon must resign, and they must advise him to do just that. Woodward and Bernstein write that this trip was one Al Haig did not endorse...

This, then, was the setting for one of the more curious episodes in the history of Watergate, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a taped conversation. The gap has usually been attributed to a mistake on the part of Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods, and/or to a deliberate attempt by a mechanically clumsy president to erase information detrimental to him. But there was a more sinister aspect to the affair than has previously been understood, and it involves Haig and Buzhardt and an especially well-timed and dramatic revelation by Deep Throat.

Back on September 28, anticipating that the appellate court would rule that the tapes must be turned over, Nixon had asked Haig to arrange for Rose Mary Woods to go to Camp David and transcribe the subpoenaed conversations. Woods was a particularly good choice for this task because she knew intimately the president's patterns of speech, and also knew most of the voices on the recordings-those of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and other counselors. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, she could be counted on to delete the expletives and the scatological characterizations that sometimes dotted their chatter, not to be shocked by the conversations, and to keep silent about their contents. To help with the technical arrangements, Haig turned to John Bennett, the deputy presidential assistant whom Haig had appointed custodian of the recordings in July.

The next day, Woods and Steve Bull drove to Camp David carrying eight tapes and three Sony tape recorders provided by Bennett. In the privacy of rustic Dogwood Cabin, Woods began what she soon discovered would be a long and painstaking weekend of listening and typing. She spent twenty-nine hours just on the first item listed on the Special Prosecutor's subpoena, the June 20, 1972, meeting in the president's EOB office attended at various times by Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman, a meeting that lasted from 10:30 A.M. to nearly noon. As pointed out earlier, the quality of the recordings taken from the EOB office was less satisfactory than those recorded in the Oval Office.

The president was at Camp David that weekend and came in to check on his secretary's progress. She told him it was slow going because she had to replay sections of the tape over and over to get an accurate account. Nixon himself put on the headphones and listened for about five minutes. "At first all I could hear was a complete jumble," he recalled in his memoir. "Gradually I could make out a few words, but at times the rattling of a cup or the thump of a hand on the desk would obliterate whole passages." The Oval Office tapes that he had personally listened to back in June had been much easier to understand, he told Woods, and then left the cabin after sympathizing about her arduous task.

Bull had a problem, too, that weekend. He was to locate the conversations called for in Cox's subpoena on the correct six-hour tape reels, and cue them to the proper beginning spots to ready them for Woods. He found the June 20 EOB tape, but could not match up the conversation on the reel with the subpoena list. The list asked for one conversation among the participants, and there had been two on the morning of June 20, one between Nixon and Ehrlichman, and a second immediately thereafter between Nixon and Haldeman.

Haig phoned the cabin on the morning of September 29 to see how the work was going, and Bull told him he simply could not find the one long conversation referred to on the subpoena. Haig called Buzhardt, who had remained in Washington, and explained the situation. Buzhardt made a judgment, which Haig then passed to Woods, who typed a note that she gave to Bull. The note later became part of the documentary evidence assembled by the House Judiciary Committee. It reads, in full: "Cox was a little bit confused in his request re the meeting on June 20th. It says Ehrlichman Haldeman meeting-what he wants is the segment on June 20 from 10:25 to 11:20 with John Ehrlichman alone. Al Haig."

Bull promptly went back to his search, and it was then that he discovered that two of the other subpoenaed conversations were missing; he passed the information to Haig.

According to Time magazine, only a handful people in the White House were privy at this early date to the existence of the tape gaps. They were Richard Nixon, Rose Mary Woods, Alexander Haig, Charles Colson, Stephen Bull (Alexander Butterfield's assistant) and three of the President's attorneys: Fred Buzhardt, Leonard Garment and Samuel Powers.

If Time is correct, and if Woodward and Bernstein have told the truth, then four of these eight must have been Bernstein's sources. Declaring Nixon and Woods "nonstarters," Time eliminated attorney Samuel Powers from consideration, saying that his tenure at the White House was too brief. Stephen Bull was then ruled out because he did not match Woodward's description of Throat. There, however, the magazine balked, unwilling to go any further. But of the four candidates with whom its readers were left, three could be eliminated at once. Colson, for example. The idea that Colson might be Deep Throat is as comical as it is surreal. Not only had he planned to "shove it to the Post, " but he would hardly have told Woodward-as Throat did-that he, Charles Colson, was the official to whom Howard Hunt was reporting about his undercover operations. Colson, in any case, can be eliminated as a candidate for Throat on the grounds that his government career ended in the midst of the Watergate affair, whereas Woodward tells us that Throat continued in federal service for years afterward. This same reason rules out Leonard Garment, and as for Fred Buzhardt, he cannot have been Deep Throat because, according to Woodward, "If [Throat] were to die, I would feel obliged to reveal his identity." Since Buzhardt is dead and we still do not know who Throat is, we must conclude that he is someone else.

Which is to say Haig, since only he is left among Time's eight candidates. But who is to say that the magazine was correct when it asserted that only eight people knew of the tape gaps during the first week in November i973? The White House was full of tremulous whispers in the fall of that year, and no one can say for certain just who knew what or when they learned it.

Nixon told his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, that having reached the low point he was now prepared for the ascent. It was going to be "a turning point for our approach to dealing with Watergate," he later wrote. "`We will take some desperate and strong measure,' I told Ziegler, `and this time there is no margin for error.' " He planned a televised speech for November 7, precisely one year after he'd been reelected, to launch Operation Candor. He would display not the wounded president but the man who had come back from many previous political defeats and who would once more rise from the ashes. The speech would be followed by ten days of "bridge-building" breakfast meetings and private chats with hundreds of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and a swing through the South to trumpet the message that the president was still on the job and fighting for the country.

This, then, was the setting for one of the more curious episodes in the history of Watergate, the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a taped conversation. The gap has usually been attributed to a mistake on the part of Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods, and/or to a deliberate attempt by a mechanically clumsy president to erase information detrimental to him. But there was a more sinister aspect to the affair than has previously been understood, and it involves Haig and Buzhardt and an especially well-timed and dramatic revelation by Deep Throat.

Back on September 28, anticipating that the appellate court would rule that the tapes must be turned over, Nixon had asked Haig to arrange for Rose Mary Woods to go to Camp David and transcribe the subpoenaed conversations. Woods was a particularly good choice for this task because she knew intimately the president's patterns of speech, and also knew most of the voices on the recordings-those of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and other counselors. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, she could be counted on to delete the expletives and the scatological characterizations that sometimes dotted their chatter, not to be shocked by the conversations, and to keep silent about their contents. To help with the technical arrangements, Haig turned to John Bennett, the deputy presidential assistant whom Haig had appointed custodian of the recordings in July.

The next day, Woods and Steve Bull drove to Camp David carrying eight tapes and three Sony tape recorders provided by Bennett. In the privacy of rustic Dogwood Cabin, Woods began what she soon discovered would be a long and painstaking weekend of listening and typing. She spent twenty-nine hours just on the first item listed on the Special Prosecutor's subpoena, the June 20, 1972, meeting in the president's EOB office attended at various times by Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman, a meeting that lasted from 10:30 A.M. to nearly noon. As pointed out earlier, the quality of the recordings taken from the EOB office was less satisfactory than those recorded in the Oval Office.

The president was at Camp David that weekend and came in to check on his secretary's progress. She told him it was slow going because she had to replay sections of the tape over and over to get an accurate account. Nixon himself put on the headphones and listened for about five minutes. "At first all I could hear was a complete jumble," he recalled in his memoir. "Gradually I could make out a few words, but at times the rattling of a cup or the thump of a hand on the desk would obliterate whole passages." The Oval Office tapes that he had personally listened to back in June had been much easier to understand, he told Woods, and then left the cabin after sympathizing about her arduous task.

Bull had a problem, too, that weekend. He was to locate the conversations called for in Cox's subpoena on the correct six-hour tape reels, and cue them to the proper beginning spots to ready them for Woods. He found the June 20 EOB tape, but could not match up the conversation on the reel with the subpoena list. The list asked for one conversation among the participants, and there had been two on the morning of June 20, one between Nixon and Ehrlichman, and a second immediately thereafter between Nixon and Haldeman.

Haig phoned the cabin on the morning of September 29 to see how the work was going, and Bull told him he simply could not find the one long conversation referred to on the subpoena. Haig called Buzhardt, who had remained in Washington, and explained the situation. Buzhardt made a judgment, which Haig then passed to Woods, who typed a note that she gave to Bull. The note later became part of the documentary evidence assembled by the House Judiciary Committee. It reads, in full: "Cox was a little bit confused in his request re the meeting on June 20th. It says Ehrlichman Haldeman meeting-what he wants is the segment on June 20 from 10:25 to 11:20 with John Ehrlichman alone. Al Haig."

Bull promptly went back to his search, and it was then that he discovered that two of the other subpoenaed conversations were missing; he passed the information to Haig.

The entire crew returned to the White House on Monday, October 1. Woods had still not finished transcribing the first conversation, but back at her White House office she now had a more convenient mechanical setup. The Secret Service had supplied her with a Uher 5000 recorder that included a foot pedal for easy operation.

Just after two that afternoon, she rushed into Nixon's EOB office, visibly upset and saying, "I have made a terrible mistake." After completing her work on the Ehrlichman conversation, she told Nixon, she had forwarded the tape to make sure that she had indeed transcribed all of that section. As she was doing so, a call came in on her office phone and she had a conversation of four or five minutes. When she hung up and went back to work on the tape, she was rudely greeted by a shrill buzzing sound. A section of the Haldeman conversation had been wiped out.

Later, Woods would reconstruct her mistake for a court hearing. She stated that she must have pushed the "record" button on the machine rather than the "stop" button, while unintentionally resting her foot on the pedal throughout her phone call, an action that kept the machine running and, in effect, recording noise over the previously recorded conversation.

Nixon calmed Woods and told her the mistake was not of consequence because Buzhardt had told him that the Haldeman portion was not among the subpoenaed tapes. Haig called Buzhardt, who reconfirmed that the Haldeman conversation was not on Cox's list, and Nixon was relieved.

He should not have rested easy, because Buzhardt was at the very least plain wrong. The counsel had been in continuous touch with Cox since the subpoena had been served, and was in possession of a memo from Cox, dated August 13, that clarified the grand jury subpoena and made it plain that what he expected was Nixon's conversation with "John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman in his Old Executive Office Building [OEOB] office on June 20, 1972 from 10:30 a.m. until approximately 12:45 p.m." Any lingering doubt that both conversations were sought was removed by the additional statement in Cox's memo that "Ehrlichman and then Haldeman went to see the President" that morning (italics added for emphasis). Moreover, Buzhardt had also had his alarm bells rung on the matter of the subpoenaed tapes by the news from Steve Bull that two of the conversations couldn't be located. That he reassured Nixon a second time as to the Haldeman conversation's irrelevance suggests that Buzhardt either didn't look at Cox's explanatory August 13 memo, or that he deliberately ignored it. Error of omission or commission?

When Bennett took the stand in Sirica's courtroom on November 6 and described his custodianship of the recordings, his role in providing the tapes to Bull for the trip to Camp David, and so on, the issue was the missing two conversations. The next day, November 7, when Bennett returned to the stand, he told the court that he'd had a talk the previous evening with Rose Mary Woods during which she complained of an unexpected "gap" in one of the tapes she was reviewing for the president.

But this wasn't the gap in the June 20 conversation that she had inadvertently caused. It was a different tape, which as it would turn out had no gap. Woods hadn't mentioned the gap in the June 20 tape to Bennett, but had told Bennett that she'd been reviewing a tape that hadn't even been subpoenaed, an April 16, 1973, Nixon-Dean meeting. "I think she was puzzled," Bennett testified. "The tape was on the machine. She said, `I've got a gap in this.' " Two days earlier, Bennett told the court, he'd given Woods a new batch of six tapes and had said that the president wanted her to listen to that particular Nixon-Dean conversation and that it was among those reels somewhere.

Rose Mary Woods was called to the stand the next day. She said she had checked the tape and had been mistaken and that there was no gap in that tape. When cross-examined, she made clear that all she had meant by the word "gap" was a missing conversation. With that, the inquiry into this particular gap was settled, and the hearing went on to consider other matters. But by raising the specter of one gap, Bennett had opened up the possibility that the still-secret four-to-five-minute erasure on the June 20 Haldeman tape would shortly be uncovered in the court hearing. That, of course, would be damaging both to Woods and to Nixon.

Meanwhile, Bennett's testimony was the occasion for some curious doings at the Washington Post.

There were two stories on the front page of the Post on November 8, 1973, the day on which Woods testified. Under the headline TAPES HAVE PUZZLING "GAP" were two articles. One, under the subhead NIXON AIDE TESTIFIES, was the straight news account of Bennett's court testimony on the previous day, in which he had quoted Rose Mary Woods about a gap that puzzled her.

The second, situated next to the first, was under the subhead PARTS "INAUDIBLE." This second story was written by Bernstein and Woodward, and said that "portions of the seven White House tapes" that Nixon was to turn over to Sirica "are `inaudible' and thus will probably fail to definitively answer questions about Mr. Nixon's role" in Watergate. Quoting "White House sources" to whom the reporters had talked over the past three days, the story said the tapes were marred by "`gaps in conversations,' 'unevenness,' 'excessive background noise,' 'periods of silence,' and 'cut-ins and cut-outs during conversation.' " The article stated flatly that "there is serious concern among the President's aides and advisers that the latest problems regarding the tapes will further strain the credibility of the White House." For instance, the reporters quoted a "high-ranking presidential adviser" as saying, "This town is in such a state that everybody will say, 'They've doctored the tapes.' " This same official had "made clear he rejected that notion."

Two paragraphs down, the reporters quoted a source who clearly did anything but reject the doctoring notion:

"Of five sources who confirmed that difficulties have risen concerning the quality of the tapes, one said the problems "are of a suspicious nature" and "could lead someone to conclude that the tapes have been tampered with." According to this source, conversation on some of the tapes appears to have been erased - either inadvertently or otherwise - or obliterated by the injection of background noise. Such background noise could be the result of either poorly functioning equipment, erasure or purposeful injection, the same source said. The four other sources disputed that there is anything suspicious about the deficiencies and insisted the tapes are marred only by technical problems that can be satisfactorily explained in court."

Who was the one source who believed that an effort might be under way to destroy evidence? Later, in All the President's Men, the authors of the article revealed that it was Deep Throat. Sometime in the first week of November 1973, Woodward initiated a meeting with his source in the underground garage, and received startling information: "Deep Throat's message was short and simple: One or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."