Published: January 23, 2005 Filed at 3:57 p.m. ET
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Rose Mary Woods, the devoted secretary to President Nixon who said she inadvertently erased part of a crucial Watergate tape, has died. She was 87.
Woods died Saturday night at a nursing home in Alliance, Roger Ruzek, owner of a funeral home in Sebring, said Sunday. He did not know the cause of death.
The 18 1/2-minute gap in the tape of a June 20, 1972, conversation between Richard Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman was critical to the question of what Nixon knew about the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex three days earlier -- and when he knew it....
Woods, the granddaughter of an Irish stowaway, was born in Sebring, 20 miles southwest of Youngstown, on Dec. 26, 1917, and was raised in a strict Roman Catholic family.
She worked as a pottery company secretary in Sebring, then moved to Washington to become a typist on Capitol Hill, where she caught the eye of a rising Republican star, Congressman Richard Nixon of California.
Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken said the two hit it off immediately. Nixon, elected to the Senate in 1950, hired Woods as his secretary.
``She was intelligent, literate, clamlike in her discretion. Technically superb, she possessed the high-speed skills of shorthand and typing necessary to keep up with her boss's often frantic and always demanding schedule,'' Aitken wrote.
``One of the reasons why Woods struck up such a good rapport with her boss was that their characters were similar. Disciplined in her emotions yet passionate in her convictions, Woods was intuitive, protective and obsessive about privacy.'' ...
Carl