Word: pedaled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...returned to her office in the White House the following Monday, Oct. 1, to complete work on the tape. Now she had a West German Uher 5000 recorder. It was equipped with a foot pedal, which can advance the tape?but only when constant pressure is applied. A foot-operated switch on the side of the pedal also permits a rapid rewinding of the tape for replaying a portion. She had completed transcribing the Ehrlichman conversation, she said, when the tape ran on into Haldeman's talk with the President?a portion, she testified, that Haig had told...
...reached back for the phone, cradled it under her chin and talked to the caller?although she could not remember who it was. She estimated the length of the call variously from 4½ to 6 minutes. Throughout, she said at first, she kept her left foot on the pedal. She agreed with Mrs. Volner that she could have stopped the recorder by merely lifting her foot. "Then why did you push the button?" asked Mrs. Volner. "Because I've done it both ways," Miss Woods replied. In any event, when both the record button and the pedal are depressed...
...Volner asked Miss Woods to re-enact her motions as the "mistake" was made. The secretary quickly demonstrated how she had turned slightly away from her typewriter, made a long stretch, and reached for the phone. Looking down, Mrs. Volner said dryly: "You took your foot off the pedal, didn't you?" Indeed she had lifted her foot. Flustered, Miss Woods declared: "Yes, that's just because I'm here and not doing anything else...
Later, Miss Woods began to qualify her explanation. She was no longer entirely sure that she had kept her foot on the pedal ("People keep telling me I must have"). At worst, she would take responsibility for only the first five minutes or so of the overriding noise, the period while she was speaking on the phone. She did not know where the other 13 minutes of disturbance came from. She bristled when Mrs. Volner termed the interval "an erasure." "You may call it an erasure?I call it a gap," protested Miss Woods. Later she testified...
...could make such a mistake." Pearl Neier, a Manhattan legal secretary, echoed the view of many other experienced secretaries: "I can't conceive of how she could have erased that tape without doing it deliberately?I don't care if it was a button or a pedal that she had to push." Asked if he believed the Woods account, a former high official of the Republican National Committee scoffed: "Does anybody...