What did Nixon say?

Remember the infamous missing 18 minutes on the Nixon tapes? They're commonly presumed to have contained recordings of Nixon ordering the cover-up of the Watergate break in, and to have been erased deliberately. Of course, no one can prove that.

But a researcher (and former NSA analyst) thinks we can now find out the gist of the conversation. It seems that H.R. Haldeman's notes from that conversation are uncharacteristically light, and there's physical evidence to suggest that they were unstapled and restapled - perhaps to remove some pages? Hmmm?

So the idea is that maybe, just maybe, Haldeman pressed hard enough with his pen to leave very faint impressions on the papers beneath the one he was writing on, and perhaps we now have the technology to read those impressions? Then we would at least have Haldeman's (presumed) missing notes, if not the actual words.

Stay tuned.

[via the archives listserv]