On June 17th, 1972, five men are arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic National
Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC. President Nixon is in the
Bahamas. White House chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, is in Key Biscayne. June
20th, 1972, three days later, was the first time that President Nixon and Haldeman talked
about Watergate around the microphones. Mr. Haldeman took copious notes of his meetings
with the president. In the Nixon materials, Nixon Library, there are probably 300 boxes
of his notes on yellow paper. You can follow Haldeman’s notes. The president is talking
about a letter he wants to send to the governor of South Dakota. And then suddenly the conversation
shifts from South Dakota to Watergate. You can see that in the notes, and the gap begins.
Since there is a gap in the tape the notes would then be the backup to that. However
there is very little in the notes about the meeting itself. I’m Phil Mellinger. I’m
an amateur historian that’s been doing some Watergate research for the past five or six
years. I knew there were two pages of notes from the meeting. And I talked to the archivist
and he was very kind and pulled out the notes and showed them to me. And when I looked at
them it immediately hit me that this couldn’t have been the complete set of notes from the
meeting. In a typical Oval or Executive Office Building meeting for an hour and a half there
could be as many as five or six pages of notes, more than, obviously, than two pages. And
I knew from reading Haldeman’s diaries that Nixon’s inner core had gone through their
files and made sure they were clean. One thing people notice right away with these, these
two pages is the multiple staple holes here which indicate obviously staple removed, staple
removed, staple removed. It occurred to me we could actually do impression analysis on
the remaining pages. Mr. Mellinger brought forth the idea that modern forensic technology
might be able to produce, be able to reveal indented writing here on page two that would
have been what was on any intervening pages. For the forensic work done on the notes we
first went to the Library of Congress where images were taken of the two pages of notes,
front and back, under varying spectrums of light. We then went to the inspector general,
Internal Revenue, Treasury Department’s lab. The paper is applied to a vacuum table
and a very thin sheet of plastic is placed over it and the vacuum sucks the plastic in
such a way that it adheres to every indentation in the paper. Then an electrostatic charge
is put to the plastic. Material very similar to toner from an ink cartridge is put over
that and then another sheet of plastic is put over there. An image then adheres to the
second sheet of plastic which can get peeled off, which should reveal any indented writing
on that sheet of plastic. I don’t have any expectations. My hope is that the forensics
will show the topics that were discussed in the meeting. After our testing with the methods
suggested by Mr. Mellinger we determined that there was indented writing on page two. But
it looks like a signature and it’s illegible. A suprising finding was, at the upper left
of page one is a date written, and on the upper left of page two is a number “2.”
These two bits of information were written in a different ink from the main body of the
notes. Future historians will have to determine the significance of the ink differences.
We were unable to recover any additional information regarding the content of the meeting between
Mr. Nixon and Mr. Haldeman.