Video: 'Who Erased 18 Minutes of Nixon Watergate Tapes?'

(Saturday, September 29, 1973; during the Watergate scandal) — Rose Mary Woods, the personal secretary to U.S. President Richard Nixon, later claims that on this date she inadvertently erased 18 minutes and 30 seconds of a taped conversation between Nixon and Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman on June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in.

The gap would be made public on Nov. 21, 1973.

Woods later testified that while transcribing the secret White House recordings, she mistakenly hit the record button rather than the playback button on the Uher 5000 machine, and then held her foot on the pedal controls for five minutes while answering a telephone.

Video: 'Watergate: The 18 ½ Minute Gap and Haldeman's Notes'

Her demonstration of how this might have occurred, in which she stretched to simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the “Rose Mary Stretch”), was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures to be deliberate.

An expert analysis of the tapes conducted in January 1974 would reveal that there were four or five separate erasures. Later forensic analysis in 2003 determined that the tape had been erased in several segments—at least five, and perhaps as many as nine.

The contents of the gaps remain unknown.

Some historians believe this event actually occurred on Monday, Oct. 1, 1973.