Rose Mary Woods
Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s longtime personal secretary, passed away at the age of 87. Retired and living in Alliance, Ohio since leaving Nixon’s staff in 1976, she was best know for her involvement in the 18-1/2 minute gap in a crucial Watergate tape, acknowledging in court that she inadvertently wiped out four or five minutes of it. Ms. Woods was born in
during a bizarre testimony, before investigators, she said she had inadvertently kept her left foot on the pedal of a tape recorder while stretching behind her to answer a telephone call, at the same time mistakenly pushing the "record" button on the machine, and thus erased perhaps five minutes of the taped conversation. Asked to re-enact it in court, Woods reached for an imaginary phone -- lifting her left foot.