Rose Mary Woods offered that rarest and most prized of Washington talents to her boss of 23 years: unwavering loyalty.
The former Nixon White House secretary, who died Saturday at age 87 in an Alliance, Ohio, nursing home, claimed to have accidentally erased five minutes of the infamous 18½-minute gap in Oval Office recordings on June 20, 1972 – part of a conversation between the president and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. The missing segment might have revealed what Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier. Woods was, according to one Nixon biographer, "clamlike in her discretion."
Well, almost. What everyone has overlooked in the life of Rose Mary Woods is perhaps the most important Watergate-era secret she kept. There is something about her that is more important – more revealing – than the tapes. And that is
since been leveled and is now a Cosi sandwich restaurant, he said. Woodward declined to comment, as did a spokesman from the American Academy of Otolaryngology.
