The CSI Team Will Solve Watergate

The “smoking gun” that killed Richard Nixon’s presidency will fire its last bullet to help solve the case that has been tormenting American history for 30 years – Watergate’s last mystery. The 18-minute silence in Nixon’s tape recordings – the tapes that made the presidency collapse, recorded by bugs hidden at the White House – could finally be cleared up by using “CSI” techniques on a page of the diary left by the only eyewitness of those hours, the Head of Cabinet and Nixon’s favorite confessor, Bob Haldeman.

Legal investigation specialists, hired by the American State archives, will try to find out what was in the 18 minutes and 30 seconds of conversation canceled from the tapes that, in 1974, America considered proof, the “smoking gun,” of Nixon’s guilt. However, there is an unexpressed fear that they could lead to an even worse secret: the truth about John F. Kennedy’s homicide. The diary kept by Nixon’s most beloved and discreet collaborator, his head of cabinet, Robert Haldeman – named “Berlin’s wall” for being impenetrable – is the tool to try to break that silence. Since the day of Haldeman’s death, that diary has been kept air-conditioned and humidity-proof in the vaults of the National Archives in Washington.

Haldeman, whom the president is said to have loved like a son, was Nixon’s only soldier present on 20 June 1972, when the boss commented on that “banal fact of crime news” – as it was initially referred to – which happened three days before, on 17 June. That day, five men, among whom were former CIA agents, forced open and broke into the headquarters of the Democratic party and the office of the candidate who would run against Nixon; five “thieves” who happened to be close to the White House. In the tapes, Nixon’s voice says: “Oh, my God, but break into McGovern’s offices is not worth it . . . This will be our version for the public.” Then silence.

Another of Nixon’s faithful collaborators, Secretary Rose Mary Woods, took responsibility for it. She swore she accidentally pushed the recorder’s cancellation pedal while reaching for the phone, in a stretching exercise that fomented comedians’ jokes and satirical cartoons for weeks. No one has ever recovered what the secretary’s acrobatic foot or, more likely, a finger, canceled. The silence was interpreted as proof that the president and his men had a guilty conscience.

But Haldeman, the German, kept a maniacally accurate diary and obviously wrote about that fatal day. In the other pages published after his death, which occurred in 1993, due to a cancer he refused to cure so as not to betray his faith in the Church of Scientology, were clues that he and the president had actually plotted together to keep the FBI away from the investigations, a very serious constitutional violation that obliged Nixon to become the first outgoing, or fired, president in history.

Now the page of that fatal day, 20 June, will be re-read with the help of self-detection trace instruments to verify whether or not the paper was tampered with or copies were made, whether there are signs that other pages were written, and to detect any sign of interference that can confirm Haldeman, himself, intervened to adulterate the diary, as well as the magnetic tape. If he confessed on that page to attempt to modify the scene of the crime, it would be more proof that the president and his men had something huge to hide, like Nixon’s responsibility for Watergate.

But maybe it contains something worse, something even more terrible, like the secret of John F. Kennedy’s death, with which Nixon was obsessed. In private, he claimed he knew and wanted to defend the secret, because the consequences of the truth would have been devastating. In another recording, Nixon said the entire affair about the Bahia de Cochinos affair could come out, alluding to Kennedy and his mortal, long-distance duel with Castro. That’s why he allegedly covered with silence the secret that will never be revealed – who really used the puppet, Lee Harvey Oswald, in Dallas – a secret for which Nixon, Kennedy’s ultimate enemy, would have sacrificed himself. When asked if he knew who killed Kennedy, he would answer: “You’d better not know.” There might be more than a metaphorical “smoking gun” under that silence.