If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.

Art Buchwald’s quip riffs on the Watergate scandal, especially the notorious 18½‑minute gap in a White House tape that President Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods, claimed resulted from an accidental erasure while transcribing. In the early 1970s, the missing audio became a symbol of obstruction and the fragility (or manipulation) of official records. Buchwald, a syndicated political humorist, uses the episode as a cultural reference point: by imagining Woods as Moses’ secretary, he satirically suggests that even foundational moral law could be “lost” through bureaucratic mishap—or convenient deletion—if entrusted to the same kind of record‑keeping that characterized Watergate.

The joke hinges on incongruity: the Ten Commandments represent immutable moral authority, while the Watergate tape gap represents missing, compromised evidence. By proposing that two commandments would vanish under Rosemary Woods’ secretarial care, Buchwald implies that political power can distort or erase accountability, even in matters that should be beyond tampering. The humor also targets the public’s skepticism toward official explanations—“accidental” loss reads as a cover story. More broadly, the line critiques how institutions entrusted with preserving truth can instead become agents of omission, turning history and ethics into something editable.

1) “If Rose Mary Woods had been Moses’ secretary, there’d only be eight commandments.”
2) “If Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had been Moses’ secretary, we’d have only eight commandments.”
3) “If Rosemary Woods had been Moses’ secretary, there would only be eight commandments.”