WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY :

Watergate Mystique : Will More Watergate Secrets Be Revealed? (Claire Shipman, June 17, 2001, ABC News)

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the infamous break-in, the mysteries surrounding the event that led to the resignation of an American president are every bit as tantalizing.

After all the hearings, all the headlines and all the cover-up, we still don't know whether Nixon actually knew about the break-in in advance.

But another mystery might be cracked much sooner: that 18½-minute gap in one of Nixon's infamous tape recordings at the White House

"We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered," said Karl Weissenbach, a Nixon tape archivist at the National Archives. The tapes were last examined in 1974. But since then, the technology used to decipher recordings has improved dramatically.

The 18½ minutes in question is part of Nixon tape 342, recorded on June 20, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in. On the tape, Nixon discussed the incident for the first time with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. It is unknown whether the tape was deliberately or inadvertently erased for those 18½ minutes.

Do we have to wait thirty years before someone finally declares that Clinton wrote the Talking Points memo? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2002 7:09 PM