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[[image:woodtime.jpg|thumb|250px|Rose Mary Woods on the cover of [[Time]] magazine [[December 10]], [[1973]].]]
'''Rose Mary Woods''' ([[December 26]], [[1917]] – [[January 22]], [[2005]]) was [[Richard Nixon]]'s secretary from 1951, through the [[Watergate scandal]] and until the end of his political career. 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.

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

==External links==
* http://www.dorsai.org/~walts/rwoods.html
* http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/watergate.htm
* [http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I31573-2005Jan23L Woods demonstrating how the erasure might have occurred]

== Copyright ==
"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 22, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rose_Mary_Woods&action=history Here]."

[[Category:Watergate figures|Woods, Rose Mary]]