Rose Mary Woods

Rose Mary Woods (December 26, 1917 – January 22, 2005) was Richard Nixon's secretary. When Nixon, then a young California Senator, needed a secretary, he had an agency send one over; it was Woods. The two clicked, and from 1951 through the Watergate scandal and until the end of his political career, Woods served as Nixon's secretary. Before H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman became the operators of the presidential campaign, Miss Woods was Nixon's gatekeeper. [citation|url=http://nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/25woods.html|title=Nixon's Real Enforcer|first=Francis|last=Wilkinson|date=2005-12-25|publisher=New York Times|accessdate=2008-10-08]

Rose Mary Woods was born in northeastern Ohio in the small pottery town of Sebring on the day after Christmas, 1917. This was part of blue-collar America and as most households were, her family was strongly Democratic. Following graduation from McKinley High School, she went to work for Royal China Inc., the city's largest employer. Woods had been engaged to marry but her fiance died during the war and in 1943 to escape all the memories of her hometown, she moved to Washington, D.C., working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid and captured his attention for her neatness and efficiency.citation|url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30678-2005Jan23.html|first=Patricia|last=Sullivan|title=Rose Mary Woods Dies; Loyal Nixon Secretary|date=2005-01-24|publisher=Washington Post|accessdate=2008-10-08]

Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to 5 minutes of the 18 1/2 minute gap in one of the Nixon audio tapes (specifically, the one from June 20, 1972) that were central to the scandal. Her demonstration of how this might have occurred - which depended upon her stretching 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, from whatever source, to be deliberate. Later investigators identified five to nine separate erasures. The contents of the gap remain a mystery. [citation|url=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/politics/24woods.html|first=Philip|last=Shenon|title=Rose Mary Woods, 87, Nixon Loyalist for Decades, Dies|publisher=New York Times|date=2005-01-24|accessdate=2008-10-08]

Woods died on January 22, 2005, at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio.

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