Now a White House Inaudibility Gap

The confident White House lawyers had expected to clear up all doubts in about three hours of testimony. But as the second week of the unusual fact-finding hearings in Federal Judge John J. Sirica's Washington courtroom ended, the astonishing White House claim that two of the President's subpoenaed tapes had never existed remained a matter of controversy. Each time the battery of White House lawyers closed one testimonial gap, a new one opened.

The extraordinary drama pitted an experienced team of White House attorneys against two aggressive 30-year-olds from the special prosecutor's staff. Most of the tough questions were posed by Richard Ben-Veniste, a brash, curly haired lawyer with an imposing recall of past Watergate-related testimony. Last week, when the President's feisty personal secretary Rose Mary Woods (see box following page) was called, the questions were asked by Jill Vollner, an attractive miniskirted attorney whose queries were delivered with a gentle touch.

The testimony demonstrated again that President Nixon was speaking most loosely when he assured the Senate Watergate committee last July that the tapes are "under my sole personal control." Miss Woods had listened to some of the recordings at the White House, at Camp David and at Key Biscayne. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's former chief of staff, received a bundle of tapes at an aide's home in Maryland and took them to his Georgetown residence. Once described by a White House official as being stored in the residential section of the White House, the tapes were now said to be kept in the Executive Office Building under the supervision of John C. Bennett, an assistant to Nixon's chief of staff, General Alexander Haig.

Bennett, a retired major general who took over custody of the tapes from the Secret Service after the existence of the recording system was revealed last July, sounded militarily meticulous in testimony about his tape-guarding role. He placed notes of tape withdrawals in envelopes in his office safe and sealed them in such a way that "I would know if they had been opened." He also placed "two keys" to another safe that held the tapes in similar envelopes. Bennett seemed incredulous when Ben-Veniste recalled that Secret Service men had claimed that there were three keys. Asked if he could be entirely certain that all tapes returned were identical to those that had been withdrawn, Bennett replied candidly: "Nope. No way."

Haldeman added a new puzzle. He said that he had requested a single recording on April 25 (of the March 21 talk between Nixon and John Dean), but Ben-Veniste noted that White House records indicated that he was given 22 tapes. Haldeman agreed with the record and said that the number of tapes he got was not surprising, although he could not explain it. (At least 25 times in the course of his three-hour testimony, he used the phrase "I do not remember" or "I do not recall.") He said that he returned all of the tapes on April 27 or 28, and was "very surprised" to learn that the Secret Service did not log them as returned until May 2. Haldeman also indicated that he thought his former White House colleague John Ehrlichman knew about the President's recording setup well before it was mentioned in public testimony; Ehrlichman had testified flatly at the Watergate hearings that he did not know.

The most disturbing testimony, however, centered on the possibility that the tapes that do exist may prove to be of such poor quality that key portions may be inaudible. No less than seven microphones, for example, had been hid den in the President's Oval Office, and noises near any one of them apparently could obscure spoken words. When a china coffee cup was placed on Nixon's desk, said Haldeman, it became "an ear-splitting problem for anyone listening to the tapes." Smiling, he turned to Judge Sirica, who is expected eventually to hear seven of the tapes, and said, "I warn you in advance." Sirica smiled too.

Very Dull. Miss Woods, answering calmly but testily, said that she had labored for more than 31 hours to type a transcript of the contents of a single 90-minute recording ("A very dull tape, frankly," she said). At first she had no foot pedal to start and stop the play back machine. "I don't think anyone knows what a hard job this is," she said. Overall, she claimed, the "quality was very poor." When the President put his feet on his desk, it sounded "like a bomb hitting you in the face. Boom!" Some times Nixon whistled, sometimes four people talked at once. She said that it was impossible for her to catch every word, "and I don't believe anyone else could either."

That was the first hint that the tapes might prove unreliable. Alexander Butterfield, the former White House aide who had first revealed the system's existence, had told the Senate Watergate committee that the microphones picked up conversations in Nixon's two main offices with great clarity; even "low tones," he said, were audible.

As last week's sessions proceeded, Judge Sirica warned that no inferences should be drawn until technical experts analyze the various claims about the tapes. "This may well be the most important and conclusive part of these hearings," he said. Both sides are now preparing for technical testimony.

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