18 1/2

Chapters 1-3 of 34

"We act like it can't happen again, and it did allot of stuff after, there was allot of hew-hawing and passin' laws and givin' speeches but I, do you ask me, do I think we learned anything from it [Watergate]?

No. *wide grin*

James Carville quote from Documentary,

"All The President's Men Revisited", aired April 21, 2013

"Mr. Chairman, I think this; I strongly believe that the Truth always emerges. I don't know if it'll be during these Hearings, I don't know if it'll be through the processes of history, but the Truth will out some day."

John W. Dean III testimony from The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, aka the Sam Ervin Senate Watergate Hearings, July 25-28, 1973

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LateSummer 1973

The crackling of dry elm logs in a low and lingering fire, the small, oddly shaped room, stifling it was or would have been had the air conditioning not been on at full tilt. The wallpaper, a rich olive green with a tiny gold diamond pattern, adorned all four walls, making the Lincoln Sitting Room a closeted, cloistered, quasi-claustrophobic space. The soft tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock of the burled walnut fireplace mantle clock, its arms inching ever closer to midnight. Forward, Play, Reverse, Record, Forward, Play, Reverse, Record, each key hit with swollen, age-spotted, fumbling fingers, the pattern repeated on the UHER 5000 five, nine, maybe even ten times by the Commander-In-Chief, the Master of the White-House, this generation's Leader of the Free World. 3,700 hours of recordings, was the effort to Erase All worth it? The question asked only in passing as 18 1/2 minutes were quietly, yet with cunning premeditation, eradicated...forever?

~~~

Late Summer, 2018

A drizzly, damp night in Washington DC under a dark, moonless sky, one which forced lowly public servants and power politicos alike to seek protected confines, shelter from the rain, maybe, but also from the flack which surely infested the souls of that city when premeditated acts went horribly wrong, "...when things fall apart, when the centre will not hold...". A tiny piece of history on celluloid, no wider than a length of fragile ribbon, lay dormant and still in a temperature and humidity-controlled vault for some forty-five years, its fearsome power never eroding even with the washing away of time. This is but one story, the story of a gap on film, a tiny piece of audio screaming to be heard by anyone ingenious enough to listen - 18 1/2.

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"Ed! I did it! It's here. I'm not kidding! All of it! I got it...ALL!" yelled a shocked and amazed and bedazzled man donning headphones, hunched over an antiquated reel-to-reel tape-recording machine.

~~~

Ed Tooksberry's basement, Late Summer, 2018

Cinder-block foundation, no insulation, no 2x4's, no Gyp-rock, no fixtures, no nothing...save for two long, rough-hewn wooden work benches built to chair height, running side-by-side against the far wall of this massive, singular underground space. Two bare bulbs hung from the one-by-twelve ceiling joists, metal chains dangling in the air as their ever, so, low-tech mechanism.

A High-Tech atmosphere was however awash in this damp, spider-web ridden basement, housing, it did, two banks of audio equipment which sat on bracketed shelving, lined up in a sort of U-shape around all three cement walls. The set-up was impressive: