As president, Richard Nixon wanted everything recorded for posterity—even the stuff he’d rather not anyone ever find out about. It ultimately led to his political downfall; as the Watergate scandal made headlines in 1973, the existence of his extensive recording system became public knowledge. Thousands of hours of conversations had been memorialized on tape, and there wasn’t much anyone in the administration could do to prevent the public from finding out what secrets they held. But one tape is best known for what’s missing—there’s an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the recording. Instead of words, there are clicks, buzzes, and static.
And it’s treated like a national treasure.
Tape 342—that’s what the archivist community calls it—contains this eighteen-plus minutes of erased information. However, because of its potential historical significance, we haven’t given up hope yet of recovering whatever was said. The recording was originally made on July 20, 1972, three days after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Instead of conversation—most likely between Nixon and his then chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman—there’s what appears to be static. No one knows what conversations were on those tapes—Nixon, if he knew and could remember, took that information to his grave—and the explanations for the erasures by the Nixon administration have fallen flat. In general, few scholars today assume that the erased portion of the tape contains explicit evidence of anything nefarious, but our natural human curiosity makes this mystery too juicy to ignore.
So we’re not.
After Nixon left the White House, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) took possession of the tapes, including Tape 342. Today, it’s stored in conditions that Wired magazine noted are typically reserved for documents and recordings that actually have comprehensible words contained within them:
Stroll into the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and ask to check out Tape 342, and the archivists will look at you as if you’ve asked to wipe your feet on the Declaration of Independence. Tape 342 is treated like a priceless heirloom, locked in a vault kept at precisely 65 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 percent relative humidity. The tape has been played just half a dozen times in the last three decades, and only then to make copies.
The reason? There’s an ongoing hope that the information once recorded there will somehow be recovered. In August 2001, NARA began that rescue process in earnest, believing that advances in technology may be able to translate those buzzing noises into intelligible speech. The NARA experts began to make test tapes available to anyone with a theory as to how to translate the buzzes and noises into Nixon’s words.
NARA didn’t offer to pay anyone, but plenty of researchers took the bait—being the one to solve this mystery would be a reward in its own right (and probably lead to all sorts of new business opportunities). But about two years later, NARA again admitted defeat. Archivist John Carlin told the AP that he was “fully satisfied that we have explored all of the avenues to attempt to recover the sound on this tape” without success. But NARA wasn’t giving up. He assured the press that NARA “will continue to preserve the tape in the hopes that later generations can try again to recover this vital piece of our history.”
In 1960, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy faced off in the first-ever televised presidential debate. The debate appeared to go poorly for Nixon, who, unlike JFK, refused to wear makeup, an error amplified by the fact that he was suffering from flu-like symptoms and appeared very pale and lethargic. How much did this matter? According to History.com, a clear majority of those who watched the debate on TV thought JFK came out ahead. On the other hand, of those who listened on the radio, most thought that the result was a draw or that Nixon bested Kennedy.