Constitutional principle of executive privilege extends to the tapes and citing the separation of powers and checks and balances within the Constitution, and second, claiming they were vital to national security. On October 19, 1973, he offered a compromise; Nixon proposed that Democratic U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for accuracy and report his findings to the special prosecutor's office. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to fire Cox but also refused and resigned. Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork fired Cox. Nixon appointed Leon Jaworski special counsel on November 1, 1973. 18½-minute gap According to President Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods, on September 29, 1973, she was reviewing a tape of the June 20, 1972 recordings, when she made "a terrible mistake" during transcription. While playing the tape on a Uher 5000, she answered a phone call. Reaching for the Uher 5000 stop button, she said that she mistakenly hit the button next to it, the record button. For the duration of the phone call, about five minutes, she kept her foot on the device's pedal, causing a five-minute portion of the tape to be rerecorded. When she listened to the tape, the gap had grown to minutes. She later insisted that she was not responsible for the remaining 13 minutes of buzz. The contents missing from the recording remain unknown, though the gap occurs during a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman three days after the Watergate break-in. Nixon claimed not to know the topics discussed during the gap. Haldeman's notes from the meeting show that among the topics of discussion were the arrests at the Watergate Hotel. White House lawyers first heard of the gap on the evening of November 14, 1973, and Judge Sirica, who had issued the subpoenas for the tapes, was not told until November 21, after the president's attorneys had decided that there was "no innocent explanation" they could offer. Woods was asked to demonstrate the position in which she was sitting when the accident occurred. Seated at a desk, she reached far back over her left shoulder for a telephone as her foot applied pressure to the pedal controlling the transcription machine. Her