The Department of Truth #29, by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds, looks at the legacy of President Richard Nixon in conspiracy theory culture, including the 18.5 minute gap in the so-called Nixon Tapes. The missing recording has played a role in the myriad of John F. Kennedy-related conspiracy theories that clutter the infosphere. Gaps are seen as anomalies, but they’re also seen as opportunities; they can offer up a buffet of conspiratorial options. And with Nixon, that buffet is all-you-can-eat.
When Nixon was in office, he had multiple recording devices set up around the White House in order to preserve records and details of his conversations — he was quite paranoid and suspicious.
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After members of his re-election campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in 1972, those recordings took on a whole new importance. As ABC New says:
The prosecution was interested in tapes of a discussion between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman, that were captured by the president’s secret White House recording system in the days immediately following the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
But those tapes contain a mysterious 18.5-minute gap — a patch of buzzes and clicks of missing audio — in the middle of a recording made June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in.
When investigators discovered the gap, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed it was her fault. She said that while transcribing the tapes, she tried to answer a phone call but hit the record button instead of the stop button. By her recollection, however, her error should only account for four missing minutes.
White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig believed that the rest of the gap was likely due to Nixon’s lack of mechanical efficiency, but couldn’t say for sure whether it was intentional or just plain incompetency. Others have speculated that the erasure was done as a legal maneuver at the behest of lawyers.
Recorded on the tapes, one of Nixon’s instructions to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, is speculated to be linked to the gap:
“Say, ‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that, ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”
Many have speculated – Haldeman included – that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was in reference to JFK’s assassination, an ominous clue that the CIA had orchestrated it. The missing 18.5 minutes, some claim, unravel and expand upon this. According to Jefferson Morely for Politico:
“Haldeman suggested that Nixon used the phrase, ‘the whole Bay of Pigs thing,’ as a coded reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. It was, he wrote, ‘the president’s way of reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro, a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.’”
The fact that those who worked directly with Nixon believed in JFK conspiracy theories, at least to some extent, should not necessarily be seen as evidence of an actual conspiracy, but rather evidence of the paranoia that was a cornerstone of Nixon’s administration.
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What’s missing from those tapes probably isn’t as important as the fact they’re missing at all. Any gap — be it one minute or 18 and a half — can be filled in with one’s own imagination and what we want to be true. Even if those lost minutes were recovered, a large portion of the population would assuredly decry them as being “fake.” Often when demanded evidence is actually supplied, it’s rejected if it doesn’t fit in with the person’s preconceived ideas.
Special thanks to Mike Rains (AKA Poker & Politics) for his assistance with this article. We will be hosting a 24-hour livestream to raise funds for his expenses due to a hit-and-run accident. Our stream will be starting at 6 pm (Eastern) on Saturday, May 31, and will include speakers and topics relevant to politics and conspiracy theory debunking.
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