Rose Mary Woods, Nixon secretary, dies at 87

Rose Mary Woods, 87, the Nixon White House secretary whose improbable stretch was supposed to account for part of an 18½-minute gap in a crucial Watergate tape, died Saturday at a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio, where she lived. No cause of death was reported.

Miss Woods, the president's private secretary, was transcribing secretly recorded audiotapes of Oval Office conversations in 1973. She was working on a June 20, 1972, tape of a conversation between President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier.

While she was performing her duties, she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape.

A photograph taken of Miss Woods re-creating the event, nearly sprawling to do both simultaneously, made her gesture look like a gymnastic feat. Some wags, according to a Washington Post article at the time, dubbed it "the Rose Mary Stretch."

Miss Woods testified to a federal grand jury in 1974 that she might have caused a four- or five-minute gap in the tape, but no more. Subsequent investigations concluded that there were five to nine separate erasures, but no one has ever determined what was erased. She had complained earlier to the grand jury that some of the tapes were of such bad quality that she doubted that exact transcripts could ever be made.

Miss Woods moved back to northeastern Ohio after leaving the federal government in 1976 and rarely spoke to the media. She was fiercely loyal to Nixon throughout his checkered political career and was with the family when Nixon prepared to leave the White House for the last time.

She had worked for Nixon since 1951 and was so close to the family that Tricia and Julie Nixon called her "Aunt Rose," and she swapped clothes with first lady Pat Nixon. Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he asked his secretary to tell his wife and daughters that he planned to resign Aug. 9, 1974.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Tricia Nixon Cox said in a statement yesterday that Woods will be remembered for her devotion to the country and their family.

"She was a cherished friend to us and to all who knew her. None of us will forget how she served her country with unswerving loyalty and dedication throughout her entire career," it read.

"Rose would die for (Nixon)," Beatrice Lucille Miller, her first boss, told The Washington Post in 1974. "Rose would just lay down her life and die for him."

She remained loyal even after he left office, keeping a sort of shrine to Nixon in his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building until the Ford administration made her vacate it, according to an item in McCall's magazine in 1975. "Rose left his half-smoked cigar in the ashtray, his glasses on his desk and his wastebasket half-filled," the article said.

Miss Woods, the granddaughter of an Irish stowaway, was born in Sebring, Ohio, on Dec. 26, 1917, and grew up in a Democratic household. After high school, she went to work at Royal China, a pottery company in her hometown.

The man she planned to marry died before the wedding, and she moved to Washington in 1943, working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid. Reportedly impressed by his neatness and the precision of his expense accounts, she accepted his job offer in 1951. Miss Woods remained his secretary for the rest of his political career.

In his autobiography, "Six Crises" (1962), Nixon said Miss Woods had "that rare and unique characteristic that marks the difference between a good secretary and great one — she is always at her best when the pressures are greatest."

Jonathan Aitkin, a Nixon biographer, said that one of the reasons the president and his secretary had such a long-lasting relationship was that their characters were similar. "She was intelligent, literate, clamlike in her discretion," he said.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.