Sebring Ohio Historical Society
126 North 15th Street
Sebring, Ohio 44672
330-938-6920  
(December 26, 1917 – January 22, 2005) was Richard Nixon's secretary. When Nixon,
then a  young California Senator, needed a secretary, he had an agency send one over; it
was Woods.  The   two clicked, and from 1951 through the Watergate scandal and until
the end of his political career, Woods served as Nixon's secretary. Before H.R.
Haldeman and John Ehrlichman became the operators of the presidential campaign, Miss
Woods was Nixon's gatekeeper.
Rose Mary Woods was born in northeastern Ohio in the small pottery town of Sebring on
the day after Christmas, 1917. This was part of blue-collar America and as most
households were, her family  was  strongly Democratic. Following graduation from
Sebring McKinley High School, she went to work for Royal China Inc., the city's largest
employer. Woods had been engaged to marry but her fiancé died during the war and in
1943 to escape all the memories of her hometown, she moved to Washington, D.C.,
working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to
the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid and captured his attention for her neatness
and efficiency.
Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in 1974 grand jury testimony for
inadvertently erasing up to 5 minutes of the 18 1/2 minute gap in one of the Nixon audio
tapes (specifically, the one from June 20, 1972) that were central to the scandal. Her
demonstration of how this might have occurred - which depended upon her stretching to
simultaneously press controls several feet apart (what the press dubbed the "Rose Mary
Stretch") was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever
source, to be deliberate. Later investigators identified five to nine separate erasures. The
contents of the gap remain a mystery after her death.
Rose Mary Woods