Your Honor, the portion of the tape obliterated is the portion related to Watergate. Nothing prior to the Watergate discussion or subsequently was erased from the tape.

Born May 5, 1943, Jill Susan Wine was the eldest daughter of Bert and Sylvia Wine. She has a younger sister, Robin, and younger brother Stevie

She grew up in Chicago, Illinois near Buena Park. Her Grandfather Max lived with her family, and her aunts and uncles lived within walking distance of her. Jill attended Graeme Stewart Elementary, attended synagogue on the high holidays, and held Seders for Passover and had huge celebrations for Hanukkah.

Jill tried her hand (or feet) at ballet and piano, but ultimately didn’t find passion in those as a young person. 

Jill eventually attended Niles Township High School after her family moved to Skokie, IL.

Eventually Jill is accepted to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and began working on a Bachelors in Journalism, joining the Iota Alpha Pi sorority, and even became engaged to a study abroad student, but the engagement didn’t last.

After receiving her bachelors, Jill began wondering what her next step would be, and thought that law degree might be helpful for a career in journalism since she was interested in political stories. She attends Columbia Law School and receives her Juris Doctor, a degree that allows her to practice law in 1968. She marries Ian Volner, and begins working as a trail lawyer working for the United States Department of Justice, becoming one of the first female lawyers to cover the organized crime division.

On May 25, 1973, 312 days after the men were caught at the Watergate Hotel, and after months of articles from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had made headlines, Jill meets with Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor for the investigation into the Watergate scandal

Jill was part of one of the five arms looking into the Watergate scandal, her section looking into the cover up of Watergate, and if there was obstruction of justice (spoiler alert… there is)

Jill works closely with Richard Ben-Veniste, (known as Rick), James Neal (Jim), George Frampton, Gerald Goldman (Jerry), and Lawrence Iason (Larry), as well as Phil Lacovara, Carl Feldbaum, and Henry Ruth.

The White House (for some reason) had apparently stuck their nose into the Watergate scandal pretty early on, saying that the scandal was “a third-rate burglary.” Considering that four of the five men that had been arrested had previously been employed at the CIA there was way more to the break-in than met the eye. 

Suspicions rose even higher that the White House was in on the situation when the last man, James W. McCord Jr. was identified after the arrest of the original 5. An ex-CIA operative, McCord was an electronics expert with a contract with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (shorted to CREEP)

The arrests of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, two more White House/CREEP men tightens the noose of suspicion, along with the ongoing journalistic investigation by Woodward and Bernstein

Even with all of this going on, Nixon still wins his second term is a landslide, taking 49 of 50 states, and ten days after Nixon’s 2^nd inauguration in January of 1973, McCord and Liddy are both convicted of conspiracy and wiretapping charges. McCord later goes on record saying that he, along with the other men were bought off, the silence in exchange for money for their families. This was later proven to have truth, when Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Nixon man Howard Hunt, was discovered to have $10,000 cash on her after her body is recovered after a plane crash. It is suggested that this money was going to one of the families of the incarcerated men.

As the evidence mounts, the Senate creates the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, but this name quickly morphs into the Senate Watergate Committee.

On her first day on the prosecutorial team, Jill meets White House and CREEP official Jeb Stuart Magruder. Magruder tells Jill that not only had he been present on Jan. 27, 1972 when Gordon Liddy presented the plan to bug the DNC, but that John M. Mitchell and John W. Dean  was present at the meeting too.

Mitchell had not only run Nixon’s 1968 election campaign, but had been made the head of CREEP full time, and Dean served as White House counsel from July 1970-April 1973.

Liddy had at the time presented his “Gemstone” plan, with different aspects of the plan that included more and more ludicrous ideas that would supposedly help Nixon get re-elected (these included kidnapping anti-Vietnam protesters and holding them hostage in Mexico until after the election, and luring DNC delegates onto a yacht full of strippers and prostitutes while the convention met in Miami and taking obscene photos for the purposes of blackmail). Mitchel ultimately vetoes the Gemstone plan, but not because of the mounting levels of Monty Python level antics, but because the price tag of 1 million dollars is too much for Mitchell to swallow.

Mitchell instead okay’s the $250,000 plan Liddy puts forward to bug the DNC, and photograph and blackmail DNC delegates. The Gemstone file is instructed by Mitchell to be destroyed after the men are caught at the Watergate.

Macgruder seems to be sitting pretty and looks like he will get away with his part in the Watergate scandal until James McCord decided to come forward. Looking at four years in prison and seeing Macgruder getting away from prosecution, McCord decides to tell the whole truth about Macgruder’s real involvement in the cover up, along with Mitchell and Liddy’s involvement

Everything that has been told to Jill and her team though is for the most part he-said, he-said… that is until Alexander Butterfield drops the incredible bomb that Nixon has been recording everything that goes on in the White House. With the realization that there are tapes of phone calls and conversations with Nixon and his henchmen, the team carefully reviews the timestamps they have for when the president would have been meeting with the men and consenting to the plan to bug the DNC.

Using journals and diaries from the men involved and checking visitor logs, the team puts forward a formal request for nine tapes that they believe will illuminate what had been undertaken. They ask the White House nicely to fork the tapes over, but of course, Nixon does not comply, and on July 23, 1974 Jill and her team submit a subpoena for the tapes. Nixon refuses to answer the subpoena, even after Judge Sirica who is overseeing the Watergate case and another different judge both order Nixon to hand them over.

After the subpoena and secondary order, Nixon’s VP at the time Spiro Agnew resigns due to other illegal things he had partook in. Jill and her team continue to diligently work on the case, trying to see how far they can push witnesses like John Dean. At the same time, Nixon is trying his best to get out of handing over the tapes, and suggests an absurd compromise, saying that he will hand over the tapes to a Senator by the name of John Stennis. Stennis is like… really old, practically deaf, and had recently been the victim of a mugging that left him healing from a gunshot wound. 

Jill and her team absolutely refuse this compromise, and later that same week a Time magazine article captions a picture of Stennis with his hand cup around his ear to hear “Technical Assistance Needed”. The American people would never accept this proposal. 

On October 20, Nixon orders the firing of Archie Cox and the office of the special prosecutor is raided by the FBI. This becomes known as the Saturday Night Massacre

During this time, the entire team was incredibly suspicious that something terribly would happen, and had been storing documents within their homes. Jill had a huge box of paperwork in her attic with many important files, and so while the firing of Cox and the raiding of their offices was a setback, the Nixon administration had not been able to steal everything. This action clearly upsets the American people with the New York Times writing that Nixon was a dictator “who considers himself sole judge of the law and who uses the power of his office to purge independence from the executive branch and to supersede the mandate of the courts by arbitrary exercise of his will.” At this time, there are also protests on college campuses, and this reinvigorates Jill who had done some protesting herself when she was in college.

While it’s not clear if dip in the president’s ratings, the overall backlash from media or the American people, or the ongoing protests pushed Nixon to finally give in, but he does finally say (through his lawyers) that he will hand over the tapes.

When the tapes finally arrive, though, Jill and Rick discover that 2 tapes are missing, and when Jill and Rick move to question how the tapes could be either missing, they meet with an audio technician who initially says that there really shouldn’t have been an issue with the tapes, but later when he is put on the stand, says there is ample reason for the missing tapes, which tells Jill that there was clearly witness tampering going on. Rick and Jill proceed with a week of questioning everyone they can think of from Secret Service to White House aides.

It was near the end of this questioning that Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary, is brought up. She becomes the number one person of interest into the missing tapes.

Jill comes in contact with Rose Mary Woods for the first time on Nov 8, 1973. One of the tapes that the prosecuting team had been told didn’t exist, actually did, since Rose Mary Woods said she had worked to transcribe the audio of the tape. She had brought it with her to Camp David, and had worked diligently day and night to transcribe the audio which was a difficult task, but she had a lot of practice and considered herself quite good at it.

In Jill’s initial questioning of Rose Mary Woods, their spar went a little like this:

“Were there any precautions taken to assure you would not accidentally hit the erase button?

“Everybody said be terribly careful. I don’t believe that I am so stupid that they had to go over it and over it. I was told if you push that button it will erase, and I think I used every possible precaution to not do that.”

What precautions specifically did you take to avoid recording over it, thereby getting rid of that was already there?

“What precautions? I used my head. It is the only one I had to use.”

By November, a new special prosecutor had been appointed, Leon Jaworski. He took a liking to Jill and always made a point of introducing her to his colleagues and friends as the “lady lawyer” which rightly rubbed Jill the wrong way. She knew he wasn’t being mean to her, but these were the kinds of comments she had always come up against. From instances of sexism when it came to how she dressed, (even in bone cold Alaska she was required to wear a skirt and hoes during trial), to how people addressed her, “the lady lawyer” and the “mini skirted lawyer”, to micro aggressions from other lawyers on the opposing side loudly announcing “what a nice perfume you are wearing” done purposely to belittle her in front of juries. She even had one lawyer that wouldn’t even address her as herself, calling her “Mr. Volner” from when she had her previous husband’s name, or “the gentleman.” 

It was during this time that the second shoe would drop with the 9 Nixon tapes: the missing tapes had startlingly been found, but the crucial one, the one that would lay the trap to ensnare Nixon, had 18 and half minutes of humming space overwritten.

This gap was blamed on Rose Mary Woods, after all according to her testimony, she had been the one handling the tapes as she transcribed them, and Jill was ready to get Rose Mary Woods to talk

November 26, 1973, Rose Mary Woods arrives to give her testimony about the tape with the missing recording. Jill has poured over her notes, transcripts, and every other bit of information she could get her hands on in preparation. 

Jill wasn’t sure what Rose’s testimony would be. If Rose was the one to erase the tapes, then she would have to either use her Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate herself, or risk perjuring herself if she lied. If she had erased the 18.5 minutes from the tape, what she directed to do so, and by whom? If she was responsible but did so without direction, why did she do it? And lastly, if she did erase it but it was an accident, how did the accident occur?

Rose begins her story by first saying she had nothing to do with the tape, but of course, her previous testimony proved that to be false. She then pivots and says, actually she had been asked to transcribe the tape that held over 6 hours of conversation, with specific attention being paid to the conversation in question that the prosecutorial team thought contained information on Watergate based on previous notes that had been given to them from John Dean.

Rose explains that the tapes are of such poor quality that she consistently had to rewind the tapes to catch every word as she transcribed, with one paragraph taking her hours and hours to do. She also brought up that her headset that she used was too large for her, and she had to constantly adjust it. According to Rose’s recollection, after 29 hours working on the June 20^th tape, she had only been able to write up an hour’s worth of conversation. Rose complains about the poor equipment she uses to replay the tapes, and she is given a new system shortly after her return from Camp David.

According to Rose, while using this new system and writing up her transcription, her phone rang and she reached to answer it. According to her that must have been when the tape was taped over.

Jill senses that there is more to the story though, and asks Rose Mary Woods to show her, Judge Sirica and the jury how exactly this scenario happened. Rose begins to reenact exactly how she might have accidentally erased the tape, with a little set up in the courtroom. Sitting in front of the recording device, she donned her overlarge headphones and demonstrated how she used the Uher 5000. She then explains how easily she could have had the foot pedal down that would have overwrote the tap. But in her demonstration of even removing her headphones, Rose’s foot lifts from the pedal. Jill and the rest of the court notices, and Jill pounces on this, asking Rose to show the court what the day in question must have looked like when Rose says she must have accidentally erased the tape when she answered a phone call. Reaching back to where her phone was generally positioned in the office, it was plain to see that there was no way that Rose could have maintained the position for 18 and half minutes. 

Jill proceeded to continue questioning Rose:

Jill begins, “What did you tell the president you had done?”

“That I made a mistake.”

“What was your mistake, Miss Woods?”

“Having the record button down.”

“What would the effect be of having the record button down?”

“There would be no effect, if I also didn’t have my foot on the pedal.”

“You then realized immediately you might have erased part of the tape?”

“I realized there was a gap in the tape.”

“And that you might have caused it?”

“I might have, but I wasn’t sure then, and I’m not sure now.”

It seemed to Jill that in questioning Rose that the reality of what was happening dawned on her. The Nixon administration, and her beloved boss, was throwing her under the bus. They wanted Rose to take all the blame.

Jill asks the court reporter to repeat Rose’s words back to her from her previous testimony and her retort that “I used my head. It was the only one I had to use,” comes back to haunt her.

Rose is still indignant at this point in the questioning though, and insists that within the confines of her actual office she could prove how easily the tape could have been erased. So the court heads to Rose Mary Woods’ office, and there, in front of court reporters, White House reporters, and the court itself, demonstrates what will become the Rose Mary Stretch, her body extended in a way that couldn’t be held for an extended period of time, especially not for the 18 and half minutes that was missing.

This demonstration and ultimately the ridicule that Rose Mary suffered after the fact was something the Jill not only felt a bit responsible for, but reflected on as something she and all women had a tendency to suffer from. Jill herself had been dismissed and belittled in her profession from multiple sources, and even though Nixon and his henchmen were ultimately responsible for all the actions of Watergate, Rose Mary Woods was the one that possible suffered the most ridicule and contempt. 

While most of the men of Nixon’s inner circle had sympathetic article written about them, with many bemoaning the fact that the “young men” had had their futures taken away because of Nixon’s influence, Rose Mary Woods was painted in a way that made her seem stupid, and sometimes even villainous, when in reality she was probably the most loyal of all Nixon’s men. Jill even notes that in another time, Rose Mary Woods would have been Nixon’s Chief of Staff, a position that was filled by Haldeman, who was just a toxic bird in Nixon’s ear. 

Jill herself was constantly on the receiving end of sexist comments herself, with even Judge Sirica saying at one point in the questioning of Rose Mary Woods that he wasn’t interested in “two ladies fighting.” In the papers after Jill’s questioning of Rose, the papers made the questioning out to be like a cat fight, rather than two women in high positions doing their jobs. The newspapers even belittled Jill as simply Rick’s protégé, even though they were of the same age and at the same level in their careers. Later in life, Jill would try to make amends with Rose Mary Woods’ family, but her attempts were turned down.

Since the tapes had clearly been tampered with and it was also clear the White House seemed intent on framing Rose Mary Woods for making the mistake, the team decided to see if there was any way to conclusively say who might have been the culprit. The paper trail of the tapes that had been subpoenaed offered little clues, as the chain of custody was shaky at best. At the same time, newspapers were blasting the Nixon administration as corrupt, helmed by a paranoid dictator. 

Nixon still gets to choose his new VP after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and chooses Gerald Ford, the house minority leader who hailed from Michigan on Dec 6^th, 1973, but there was still much to uncover in the Watergate scandal.

There were the other tapes that they had yet to listen to, the other ones that they had asked for but had not (seemingly) been tampered with. In early December of 1973, Jill and the rest of her team gathered to listen, picking the tape from March 21, 1973, a tape that John Dean had noted in his testimony was particularly damaging to the president.

On this tape, Dean could be heard saying to Nixon that the Watergate cover-up had “caused a cancer on the presidency” (to be fair, he wasn’t wrong!), and that their efforts to keep the burglars quiet would cost Nixon $1 million over the next 2 years.

Nixon replies, “We could get that, and maybe we could get it in cash.” With this damning evidence, the team finally had everything they needed to prove that Nixon had participated in the obstruction of justice which is a federal crime.

Jill and her team began to craft the necessary paperwork that would serve as a road map for Congress to impeach Nixon, and as more and more information was gathered it seemed impossible that the vote to remove Nixon from office would fail. Their carefully crafted road map was given to the jury that had been serving on the Watergate case on March 1, 1974, and they all voted unanimously that there was more than enough evidence for an indictment of the seven men that had participated in the conspiracy to cover-up the Watergate scandal. To Jill and the rest of the team’s chagrin, Leon Jaworski who had taken over as the head of the prosecutorial team had refused to move forward with indicting Nixon because he was a sitting president. 

Jill’s life at this time began to change in small but drastic ways. Her high school sweet heart had reached out to her, and having been stuck for most of her adult life in a terribly emotionally and mental abusive marriage, this rekindled friendship was a breath of fresh air. Before the trial had even begun, Jill had sought comfort outside of her marriage, and with the trial’s conclusion looking like it was coming to an end, she knew that she had to do what was best for her. The idea of seeking counselling for her marriage began to take seed, and after an issue of The Incredible Hulk created a Marvel version of Jill and Rick as tough cracking lawyers fighting a corrupt government, Jill began to think that maybe she ought to be her own hero.

Throughout the summer, it became apparent that the Senate would move to impeach Nixon when given the chance. His former allies in the House and Senate broke ranks from him, and many were quoted in papers as saying their position was to oust the criminal president, so before they could take action, on August 9, 1974, Nixon formally resigns from the Presidency, with Gerald Ford taking his place.

With the Watergate 7, (eventually the Watergate 5 due to two of the men taking plea deals) wrapping up and with the resignation of Nixon, Jill and her team were basically free to go their separate ways. 

Jill took a job working under President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and became the General Counsel of the US Army. On her list of items that needed changing, Jill insisted on changing uniforms and equipment to better suit a woman’s body. These changes would make women in the armed forces safer, and as more women were allowed into different arms of the army, she would make a point of bringing to notice how well women teams worked together in ways that were far more efficient then large groups of army men. She worked to abolish the Women’s Army Corp, the only arm that women could apply to in favor of opening all positions to women.

Jill also traveled the world at this time too under the Carter administration, and Jill took this opportunity to see if she could fix her failed marriage, but instead chose happiness and left Ian Volner. She eventually reconnects truly with Michael Banks, her high school sweetheart, and marries him on Jan 12, 1980 after moving to Chicago to live with him, and taking a job at the Chicago law firm, Jenner and Block, but 

It’s here that she experiences a fair amount of sexism at this firm, with women given harsh labels and given less cases to work. She eventually moved positions to become the state of Illinois’s first solicitor general, and was then promoted to become the state’s first female deputy attorney general.

Jill went on to become the executive director of the American Bar Association, becoming the first woman to hold the position, and growing the outreach of the ABA to include governmental lawyers. Jill and her husband briefly relocated to Miami Florida, but decided not to stay, and Jill took up a position at Motorola, traveling all over the world. Later she would become VP of Maytag for a time, and then switching positions to become the CEO of Winnipeg Workplaces, a nonprofit. She then went on to become the chief officer of career and technical education at the Chicago Public Schools and was able to help create the DeVry University Advantage Academy High School, and worked with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, publishing a textbook.

She eventually retired, but has since worked as a legal analyst on MSNBC.

Please follow this link to find the Source Material for these show notes!