Watergate Scandal - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com Google Watergate: The Break-In The origins of the Watergate break-in lay in the hostile politics of the 1960s. By 1972, when Republican President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was running for reelection, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and deeply divided internally. In such a harsh political climate, a forceful presidential campaign seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones. Did You Know? Young Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein deserve a good deal of the credit for uncovering the details of the Watergate scandal.

Their reporting won them a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for their best-selling book “All the President’s Men.” Much of their information came from an anonymous whistleblower they called Deep Throat, who in 2005 was revealed to be W. Mark Felt, a former associate director of the FBI. The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 the group returned to the Watergate building. As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed that they had taped the building’s locks. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch the spies red-handed. It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November the president was reelected in a landslide. Watergate: The Cover-Up It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful.

A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then, he and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. This was a more serious crime than the break-in: It was an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, seven conspirators were indicted on charges related to the Watergate affair. At the urging of Nixon’s aides, five pleaded guilty and avoided trial; the other two were convicted in January 1973. By that time, a growing handful of people—including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. Some of Nixon’s aides, including White House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president’s crimes; they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office.

If prosecutors could get their hands on those tapes, they would have proof of the president’s guilt. Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president’s executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself, but Sirica, the Senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them. When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on October 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes. Early in 1974, the cover-up began to fall apart. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an “unindicted co-conspirator.” In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes.

While the president dragged his feet, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution. Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of certain impeachment by the Senate, the president resigned on August 8. Six weeks after the new president Gerald Ford (1913-2006) was sworn in, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office. Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They were convicted of very serious offenses and sent to federal prison. Nixon himself never admitted to any criminal wrongdoing, though he did acknowledge using poor judgment. His abuse of presidential power had a negative effect on American political life, creating an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust. While many Americans had been deeply dismayed by the outcomes of the Vietnam War, Watergate added further disappointment in a national climate already soured by the difficulties and losses of the past decade.

Tags To Understand a Scandal: Watergate beyond Nixon | The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History To Understand a Scandal: Watergate beyond Nixon by David Sarias In the early hours of June 17, 1972, police officers arrested five men suspected of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate office building. This building would lend its name to the subsequent political scandal that led, just over two years later, to Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. To date, Nixon is the only president of the United States to have resigned from office. He did so as a direct consequence of his involvement in the attempted cover-up of the links between the arrested men, the White House, and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (officially named CRP, it became aptly known as CREEP) during the 1972 presidential elections. In the process, more than forty members of Nixon’s administration, including some of his top advisors and a former US attorney general, were investigated and nineteen of them were indicted.

The Watergate imbroglio was marked by the tremendously polarizing figure of Nixon himself; the high drama of widely watched congressional hearings; tales of abuses of power allegedly involving various branches of the nation’s secret services; reports of colorful language emanating from the oval office; and the much publicized exploits of heroic journalists determined to track down the real story. It mesmerized Americans at the time, and ever since it has remained a fixture in the nation’s collective psyche. Even today, four decades after the events, it still symbolizes all that is, and might be, wrong with the workings of the federal government, elected officials and, ultimately, with the political system itself. Yet, we cannot understand Watergate and its consequences in isolation from the historical context in which they unfolded. These included powerful political and cultural forces such as the movements against the Vietnam War and in favor of civil rights for the nation’s minorities; the counterculture; and the expanding “credibility gap” separating high national politics and politicians from the electorate. As Richard Nixon and his supporters often claimed in their own defense, such abuses were anything but oddities in American politics.

In a particularly incensed fashion, Nixon’s most loyal defenders have sought to exonerate the disgraced ex-president by emphasizing that all the great Democratic-progressive administrations, including those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, had indulged in similar under-handed tactics to gain and retain office. Nevertheless, by the early 1970s, neither a significant part of the press nor the great majority of the American public were prepared to accept that kind of behavior in public life. An overview of the events that surrounded the Watergate scandal is followed by an examination of the key elements that help explain why a president endowed with considerable intellectual talent and an ample electoral mandate was politically destroyed by—or, more accurately, self-destructed through—the fallout from what Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, labeled a “third-rate burglary.” In fact, “break-in” is a more appropriate description, since the objective of the “burglars” was to plant listening devices in the hope of gaining information useful to Nixon’s electoral campaign, and nothing was stolen from the DNC offices.

How a “Third-Rate Burglary” Led a President to “Twist Slowly, Slowly, in the Wind” On June 20, 1972, three days after the arrest of the five men who had illegally broken into the DNC offices, Bob Woodward reported in the pages of the Washington Post that the FBI had found the name of E. Howard Hunt in the agendas of Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, two of the alleged burglars. A former CIA operative, Hunt had been hired as a security assistant by the White House on the recommendation of presidential counsel Charles Colson in 1971, and had subsequently moved on to work for CRP. Woodward, we now know, had been tipped off by Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI. The Bureau had itself become involved in the investigation of a mere burglary because once the police found wiretapping equipment, the investigation fell under its remit. A few months later, in September, harried by the press and despite the best efforts of the White House, the FBI arrested both Hunt and G.

Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who had become CRP’s general counsel first and its finance committee’s counsel later thanks to the support of White House counsel John Dean. [1] Yet, despite the tantalizing reports in the Post and the arrests of relatively senior CRP personnel, the rest of the press corps believed the White House’s vigorous denials of any involvement in or knowledge of the issue, and failed to pick up the story. While the attention of the Washington press corps and the public at large remained fixed on the unfolding presidential campaign, Richard Nixon and senior White House personnel including Chief-of-Staff Bob Haldeman and domestic policy tsar John Ehrlichman devised a strategy to block the investigation. This began to unfold as early as June 23, a mere three days after the break-in.

That day, Haldeman proposed to Nixon to “have [Vernon] Walters [deputy director of the CIA] call Pat Gray [director of the FBI] and just say ‘stay the h*ll out of this’ on grounds of ‘national interest.’” [2] Unbeknownst to most of his staffers, Nixon had installed an audio-activated recording system in the Oval Office that was intended, he subsequently claimed, to prevent journalists and historians from distorting the legacy of his presidency. Two years later, however, the recording of that conversation between Nixon and Haldeman devising a plan to obstruct the FBI investigation saw the light, became known as the “smoking-gun tape,” and sealed the fate of the President. During late 1972 and early 1973 the White House seemed to have succeeded in stalling the FBI investigation. The official story put forth by the President’s men, however, began to fall apart on February 28, 1973, when L.

Patrick Gray, the then-acting FBI director, admitted he believed that John Dean had “probably” lied to the agents investigating the break-in, and also confessed to having followed Dean’s orders to keep the White House informed about the evolution of the investigation. Gray’s slip moved John Ehrlichman to pronounce his famous dictum: the White House should leave Gray to “twist slowly, slowly, in the wind.” This they did until about a month later, on April 27, when Gray was forced to resign after owning up to having destroyed secret documents removed from Howard Hunt’s safe, again under the orders of John Dean and ostensibly on national security grounds. By the time Gray fell into disgrace, James McCord—former CRP security chief and, amazingly, one of the five men already serving prison sentences—broke down and sent a letter to judge John Sirica admitting to having committed perjury during his trial and withdrawing the testimony in which he had blamed the CIA for the break-in. Immediately afterwards, McCord led investigators into the White House, John Dean gave in too and, from April 1973 onwards, began to cooperate with the prosecution in exchange for leniency.

Once the dam of lies cracked, it quickly collapsed under the increasing flow of revelations that would eventually drown the presidency. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and US Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned on the same day (April 30) that Dean was sacked. Shortly thereafter, the White House was forced to appoint Archibald Cox as special prosecutor to investigate the President’s own conduct. Even worse from Nixon’s perspective, by then the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (variously known as the Watergate Committee or the Ervin Committee, after its president, Sam Ervin) had begun its nationally televised hearings. By that point, therefore, the whole affair was being investigated by the Senate committee, Special Prosecutor Cox, and Judge John Sirica, not to mention Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post and an increasing number of journalists from other major national newspapers. The penultimate act of the Watergate drama unfolded—delivered live to the homes of the American public—on July 13, when Nixon’s appointments secretary, Alexander Butterfield, let slip that the President had installed the soon-to-be-famous recording system.

Instantly both Cox and Ervin demanded the tapes, which Nixon flatly refused to hand over, claiming executive privilege—that is, the right of the president to withhold information from Congress or the tribunals on national security grounds. The President’s refusal, which led to his ordering Cox’s dismissal and accepting the indignant resignations of both Elliot Richardson (who had replaced Kleindienst as attorney general) and Richardson’s deputy, William Rucklehaus, in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” did nothing to improve his public standing. Moreover, it served as further evidence of Nixon’s tendency to abuse the power of his office. What was still a (certainly growing) suspicion became a certainty when, after the Supreme Court in United States v. Richard Nixon ordered the President to hand over the tapes, the smoking-gun conversation became public on August 5, 1974. There is little evidence of Nixon approving of, or even having any prior knowledge of the break-in, which had been authorized by CRP senior staffers John Mitchell, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and Robert Mardian.

[3] Nixon, in fact, can be heard in the tapes wondering aloud about who could have approved such a foolish action (although, on the other hand, he knew he was being recorded), and it is abundantly clear he was lied to by his subordinates. Yet, even if he had little to do with organizing the break-in, the tape abundantly demonstrated how, in the course of the subsequent cover-up, the President’s conduct fell within all three articles of impeachment passed by the House Judiciary Committee: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. After a group of senior Republican senators led by Barry Goldwater let him know that they could not guarantee his tenure, Richard Nixon became the first president of the United States to resign from office, on August 8, 1974. The Watergate scandal drew to a close when, to the considerable frustration of many segments of the American public, Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, granted the disgraced ex-president a full pardon, which put an end to all further investigations into his conduct in office.

Ford’s stated intent for issuing the pardon was to end the agony that Nixon had inflicted upon the nation, and to protect whatever was left of the prestige accorded to highest office in the land. As it was, Ford’s decision significantly contributed—as he knew it would—to his losing the 1976 election. Nevertheless, this sacrifice possibly contributed to bringing about much-needed national healing earlier than would otherwise have been possible, and it almost certainly saved the entire political class some considerable embarrassment. Alas, it also fueled the subsequent, and persistent, perception of Watergate as unfinished business. The absence of a Nixon trial has fostered both a sense of injustice and the feeling that not everything (perhaps not even the most important details) is yet known about Watergate. [4] Understanding Watergate: “A Greek Tragedy” or the Last Imperial Presidency One of the most consistently repeated and difficult-to-answer questions regarding Watergate is: “Why?” With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Richard Nixon went on to win the 1972 election by the largest margin in postwar history and that the wiretaps that the President’s men had installed at the DNC did not produce any information useful to the campaign.

The break-in was such an improbable, apparently absurd act that both journalists and politicians were actually deterred from following Bernstein and Woodward’s investigative lead at the time. After the passage of decades, even professional historians have strived to figure out rational explanations for an apparently bizarre and ultimately self-destructive decision. [5] Whatever the details of the break-in itself, the known facts point to a complex and diffuse explanation for the events that led to Nixon’s downfall. The one chief cause of the Watergate scandal was doubtlessly Nixon himself. He had felt increasingly resentful since his narrow loss in the 1960 presidential election—which he believed had been stolen through electoral rigging by the likes of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago—or even since the 1952 election, when he had suffered personal (and ungrounded) accusations of corruption. By 1968 Nixon had grown into a near-paranoid, embattled politician who believed himself at war with the bulk of America’s intelligentsia, including the mainstream media and academia.

[6] Throughout his entire first term, as the memoirs left by former White House officials such as speechwriter William Safire and head of the research and writing staff James Keogh show, Nixon’s sense of victimization and instinctive aggressiveness toward his critics permeated the whole administration. This, in turn, created a “siege mentality,” dominated by a collective sense of “fear and suspicion” that propelled his advisors to advocate, justify, and sometimes carry out extreme measures—which, perversely, also fueled the fear of the administration on the part of the press. [7] Charles Colson’s suggestion that the Brookings Institution, a progressive-leaning think-tank, ought to be “firebombed” still stands out as a particularly atrocious anecdote. Yet the more serious efforts to limit civil liberties and expand the federal government’s surveillance capacities embodied in the infamous Huston Plan were clear signals of a more serious and pervasive malady—one so acute that it alarmed no less than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no shrinking violet when it came to treating the civil rights of US citizens with some flexibility.

Similarly, Nixon’s obsession with secrecy and disdain for public opinion when it came to foreign policy went far toward explaining the descent into the abyss that led to Watergate. Thus, as early as 1969 and throughout 1970 Nixon, egged on by the then equally aggressive and paranoid Henry Kissinger, had the FBI wiretap some members of the National Security Council after leaks of the air bombings of Cambodia appeared in the pages of the New York Times—which in turn had revealed to the public an operation so secret and illegal that the official flight logs had been tampered with and the pilots themselves were misled into believing they were bombing Vietnam. [8] For many, including a significant number of his foes, Nixon’s story is one of Shakespearean tragedy, one in which a president’s inner demons frustrated the promises held by his undeniable intellectual talents and capacity for hard work after he had achieved (twice) his lifetime objective: to lead the nation.

[9] Henry Kissinger, not known as a man prone to sentimentality, once famously wondered how great a man Richard Nixon would have been if someone had “shown him some love.” [10] And yet, Richard Nixon and his staff’s paranoid sense of embattlement was not only the product of overheated imaginations. Discomfiting leaks, after all, certainly existed. Not least that of the “Pentagon Papers,” an examination of US policy in Indo-China collected by the Department of Defense, which acknowledged that four consecutive administrations—from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon Johnson—had consistently lied to and misled the American public about US policy in Vietnam, that was leaked to the New York Times by former defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Although the Nixon administration was not covered in the analysis, the President and his advisors correctly believed that its release would reignite already feverish anti-war sentiment and hamper their own initiatives in Southeast Asia. Nixon’s men reacted by sending the same team of operatives who later broke into the Watergate building (called “the plumbers” after their mission to stop leaks) to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, so as to discredit the leak.

[11] At around the same time, as a historian and journalist has graphically reminded us, the White House could be found “literally laagered by a ring of dozens of silver Metro buses” so as to protect it from a horde of “half-naked students” quite willing to, for instance, carry around “the bleeding head of a lamb,” not to mention throwing abuse at federal employees passing by in protest against the war. [12] More dramatically, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest officially recorded a staggering 8000 student-perpetrated bombings between January 1969 and April 1970. To these must be added the race riots experienced in locations as varied as Harlem (1964); Watts, LA (1965); and Newark (1967), not to mention the disturbances, seen in more than a hundred cities after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., that burned across the inner cities of Washington DC, Baltimore, and Chicago.

By the time Nixon took office, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1968 dictum that the nation was exhibiting “the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown” seemed rather appropriate. [13] The explosive social and cultural tensions that engulfed the nation as Nixon entered the White House magnified the dark side of the President’s character and the baleful effects of his inner demons. The poisonous inheritance of previous administrations’ policies in Indochina had crystallized in a growing “credibility gap” between official lies or half-truths and reality, at a time when civil rights struggles reached their apex and university students were rejecting accepted norms of behavior in areas ranging from family relations to accepted hierarchies. [14] Nixon was singularly ill-suited to lead the nation at this transitional moment, during which government excesses on behalf of national security and low political “dirty tricks” were becoming no more acceptable than Jim Crow or women’s submission to their husbands. It may indeed be true enough that the CRP did nothing on behalf of Richard Nixon that had not been done before by Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, or Lyndon B. Johnson.

It is also reasonable to note that the frenzied attack against the administration as Watergate unraveled was fueled by an instinctive, growing dislike of the President (which Nixon took good care to feed) on the part of a significant sector of the press and the intellectual classes. Yet the fact remains that the President’s actions, and those of his subordinates, were both wrong and criminal. Watergate, in truth, is a testament to the enduring resilience of liberal democracy in the United States. The Watergate investigations were doubtlessly influenced by political partisanship and the pursuit of self-aggrandizement on the part of some of the President’s adversaries. Despite this, and indeed perhaps because of it, it remains a prime example of the capacity of American institutions to adjust and evolve in response to demands for greater individual freedom and stricter standards of conduct on the part of government officials and public representatives. After Watergate, presidents cloak themselves in imperial robes and take freedom of the press and the separation of powers lightly at their own peril. [1] Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 170–171.

[2] As quoted in John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 346. [3] Magruder, An American Life, 195. [4] See for instance David Greenberg, “The Unsolved Mysteries of Watergate,” The New York Times, June 5, 2005. [5] See for instance Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered, 301–346. [6] After the leak of the Pentagon Papers, for instance, Nixon believed Daniel Ellsberg was part of a “conspiracy” going back to the days of the Hiss case. H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: Berkley Books, 1995), 368, 377, 381.

[7] Raymond Price, With Nixon (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 188–191; James Keogh, President Nixon and the Press (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1972), 39, 132–145; Magruder, American Life, 196–197; Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 87, 233. [8] Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House (London: Faber, 1983), 61–62, 86–88, 319; Matthew Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger, Partners in Power (New York: Penguin, 2007), 118–124. [9] See for instance Ron Briley, “Nixon and Historical Memory,” Perspectives 36, no. 3 (1996).

[10] Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982), 1184. [11] Hersh, 383–401, and David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 114–116, 323–29. [12] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 151. [13] As quoted in Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 22. [14] See for instance Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (London: HarperCollins, 1973). David Sarias is a professor of history at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain.

The Watergate Scandal Essay - 1138 Words Watergate Scandal Essay ...By: Leigh Overstreet THE WATERGATE SCANDAL Watergate is a hotel in Washington D.C. where the Democratic National Committee held their campaign headquarters. The current president at the time was Richard M. Nixon, who was involved in the scandal himself and which lead to the cause of his resignation. The Watergate scandal should not have happened, but it did and it caused the American people to judge less... 1094 Words | 3 Pages Nixon and the Watergate Scandal Research Paper ...The Watergate Scandal Victoria Daniele Constitutional History May 19, 2013 The Watergate Scandal involved a number of illegal activities that were designed to help President Richard Nixon win re-election. The scandal involved burglary, wiretapping, campaign financing violations, and the use of government agencies to harm political opponents. A major part of the scandal was also the cover-up of all...

2146 Words | 6 Pages Watergate Scandal Essay ...The Watergate Scandal Essay written by Unknown The Watergate Scandal was a series of crimes committed by the President and his staff, who were found to spied on and harassed political opponents, accepted illegal campaign contributions, and covered up their own misdeeds. On June 17, 1972, The Washington Post published a small story. In this story the reporters stated that five men had been arrested breaking into the headquarters of the... 2046 Words | 5 Pages Watergate Scandal Timeline Essay ...lWatergate Scandal Timeline A Complicated President There have been many scandals throughout American presidential history, but only one has ever brought down a presidency. To understand Watergate, it is helpful to have an understanding of the culture of the administration, and of the psyche of the man himself. Richard M. Nixon was a secretive man who did not tolerate criticism well, who engaged in numerous acts of duplicity, who kept lists of...

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The term 'Watergate', labeled by Congress in 1974, stands for not only the burglary, but also for the numerous instances of officially sanctioned criminal activity and abuses of power as well as the obstruction of justice that preceded the actual break-in (Kutler 9). Watergate involved the political behavior of the President and his men, beginning during... 2327 Words | 10 Pages Watergate Paper ...Watergate Paper Hist/145 Jessica Lee 5/21/11 Brooklyn Sawyers Watergate was a foiled burglary attempted by five men, nicknamed the “plumbers”, who were hired by President Richard Nixon. The Nixon campaign denied any involvement and the administration just dismissed the break-in as “a two bit burglary” (Wall Street Journal, May 1973). The Vice President Agnew and Senator Proxmire thought that the charges were careless and misdirected and felt that the...

774 Words | 3 Pages The Watergate Scandal: Summary & Significance | Online Homework Help | SchoolWorkHelper The Watergate Scandal: Summary & Significance You are here: PDF The Watergate Scandal was a series of crimes committed by the President and his staff, who were found to have spied on and harassed political opponents, accepted illegal campaign contributions, and covered up their own misdeeds. On June 17, 1972, The Washington Post published a small story. In this story the reporters stated that five men had been arrested breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The headquarters was located in a Washington, D.C., building complex called Watergate. These burglars were carrying enough equipment to wiretap telephones and take pictures of papers. The Washington Post had two reporters who researched deep into the story. Their names were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; they discovered that one of the suspects had an address book with the name and phone number of a White House official who could have been involved in the crime. The reporters suspected that the break-in had been ordered by other White House officials.

In a press conference on August in 1972, President Nixon said that nobody on the White House Staff was involved in the crime. Most of the public accepted Nixon’s word and dropped the questioning. But when the burglars went to trial four months later, the story changed rapidly from a small story to a national scandal. It ended only when Richard Nixon was forced from office. Watergate was connected to Vietnam; it eventually exposed a long series of illegal activities in the Nixon administration. Nixon and his staff were found to have spied on and harassed political opponents, planned contributions to the campaign, and tried to cover-up their illegal acts. These crimes that they did were called the Watergate scandal, named after the building that it happened. For years Nixon was carrying on the crimes and they were not noticed until now. 1969 was the really date in which Watergate was really beginning. It all started when the White House staff made up a list called “enemies list”. Nixon had enemies which include 200 liberal politicians, journalists and actors. Most of these people made a public speech against the Vietnam War. Nixon’s aides formed a conducts tax audits on these people that he thought were enemies.

He also had agents find out secret information that would harm them. Nixon was always worried about govt. Employees revealing secret info. To the news paper or any sort of press. The president’s agents helped him by wiretapping phone lines that belonged to reporters in order to find any revealing some material. Nixon was so worried that during the Cambodia bombing he had to wiretap his own staff members. On June in 1971, The New York Times formed work that was published about the history of the Vietnam War; these were known as the Pentagon Papers. They got the information from secret government papers. The papers blamed the policies that were formed and caused the beginning of the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, a former employee, gave the documents to the paper. Nixon became very angry by their publishes. Nixon tied to make Ellsberg’s actions a form of treason, but he was not content to take him to court. Instead he made a secret group of CIA agents they were called the “plumbers” this is a name made up because they cover up leaks, such as the pentagon papers, that could hurt the White House. While they were searching for info. They found Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

They discovered nothing wrong. The next time the plumbers are involved is the next election. Nixon was always worried about having enough votes for the election in 1972. Nixon was concerned that Edmund Muskie of Maine would win because he was the strongest Democratic candidate. Hoping to wipe out Edmund from the competition, the plumbers began to play a bunch of so called “dirty tricks”. They issued make believe statements in Muskie’s name and told the press false rumors about him, so that they could publish it to the public. And most of all, they sent a letter to the New Hampshire newspaper starting that Muskie was making mean remarks about French Canadian ancestry. All of these aides forced Nixon to begin getting above Muskie in the elections. Overall, the Democratic nomination went to George McGovern, a liberal senator from South Dakota. His supporters included many people who supported the civil rights, anti-war, and environmental movements of the 1960s. McGovern had fought to make the nomination process more open and democratic. Congress had also passed the 26th amendment to the Constitution allowing eighteen-year-Olds to vote.

As a result, the 1972 Democratic Convention was the first to include large numbers of woman, minorities, and young people among the delegates. McGovern’s campaign ran into trouble early. The press revealed that his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, had once received psychiatric treatment. First McGovern stood by Eagleton. Then he abandoned him, picking a different running mate. In addition, many Democratic voters were attached to Nixon because of his conservative positions on the Vietnam War and law enforcement. Meanwhile, Nixon’s campaign sailed smoothly along, aided by millions of dollars in funds. Nixon campaign officials collected much of the money illegally. Major corporations were told to contribute at least 100,000 dollars each. The collected much it clear that the donations could easily buy the companies influence with the White House. Many large corporations went along. As shipbuilding tycoon George Steinbrenner said “it was a shakedown. A plain old-fashioned shakedown" The final blow to McGovern’s chances came just days before the election, when Kissinger announced that peace was at hand in Vietnam. McGovern had made his political reputation as a critic of the war, and the announcement took the wind out of his sails. Nixon scored an enormous victory.

He received over 60 percent of the popular vote and won every state except Massachusetts. Congress, however, remained under Democratic control. On January of 1973, two months after Nixon had won the presidential election, the misdeeds of Watergate began to surface. The Watergate burglars went on trial in Washington D.C.., courtroom. James McCord, one of the burglars, gave shocking evidence. A former CIA agent who had led the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, McCord worked for the Nixon re-election campaign. McCord testified that people in higher office had paid people “hush money” to the burglars who were involved in Watergate. With the money they were supposed to conceal White House involvement in the crime. After they investigated for awhile, they quickly found out that the break-in was approved by the attorney General, John Mitchell. Even thought John Mitchell was one of the most trusted advisors, Nixon denied to know anything about the break-in and cover-up of the crime. The public found out not to soon that Nixon was not telling the truth. The public also found out that Nixon had ordered his aides to block any info to the investigators.

The White House also tried to stop flow of the investigations, because they were afraid that it would uncover very important secrets. Nixon would not appear at the congressional committee, complaining that if he were to testify it would violate the separation of powers. Even thought that idea doesn’t appear in the constitution at all. It was a developing tradition to protect the president. This made people feel that Nixon was abusing executive privileges just to cover-up his crimes. When Nixon had no possible way of protecting the White House staff he fired them. Such as when he fired two of his aides, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichwan, because they were on the line of being charged for the crimes. But they were still convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. On May of 1973, they broadcasted the hearings on television to millions of people, the public felt that it was very gripping and made them distraught. A official told the court that Nixon had tape-recorded all the conversations on tape. Nixon had hoped these tapes would one day be used by historians to document the triumph of his term; instead they were used to prove that he was guilty.

The president refused to release the tapes, claiming the executive privilege gave him the right to keep his record private. That caused him to go to court, before it was decided, Vice President Agnew was charged with income tax evasion. He was also charged for accepting bribes and exchanging for political favors. Agnew resigned because of the charges on October of 1973. He was only charged of tax evasion and the others were dropped. This scandal was not connected to Watergate, but it put a lot of stress on Nixon. Nixon nominated Gerald Ford in place of Agnew. Ford did very little to salvage Nixon reputation. A couple of days after Agnew resigns, the federal court made Nixon hand over the tapes. Nixon refused, and Cox ordered him to, but Nixon had his attorney fire him. Cox was an idle to Richardson, because he was his professor in law school. Richardson refused Nixon’s order and resigned. President Nixon then ordered the deputy Attorney General to fire Cox. This massive event was known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Many people of the nation felt that Nixon’s blocking of the judicial process a proof of guiltiness. People mailed Congress many telegrams saying to begin impeaching proceedings against the president.

So the House Judiciary Committee did that, and fired him. President Nixon had remained cool and still acted as if he was innocent. At a press conference on November, his famous quote was “I am not a crook”. He avoided questions and was agitated. People that day who were watching television knew that Nixon was going to be in hot water. Internal Revenue Service’s also discovered something that could harm Nixon. They noticed that in 1970 and 71′ he had only paid $800 in taxes when he earned over $500,000. The nation found out that he also used public money to fix-up his house in Florida and California. Nixon keep on refusing to give up Watergate tapes. Then, on April 1974, he gave out the transcripts of the tapes. He edited the transcripts and tried to cover up the crimes, but it did not work and it gave Nixon a bad reputation. The Committee voted to bring impeachment charges in July against Nixon. The first one said that the president knowingly covered-up the crimes of Watergate. The second said that he used Government Agencies to violate the Constitution of the U.S..

The third asserted that he would be impeached because of the withholding of evidence from Congress. Shortly after the house committee voted to impeach the President, the case wants to the entire House for a final say. Nixon at this point still counted on the public to back him out, because of some that doubted his involvement. A decision came out a couple of days after the vote for Nixon to release the tapes that involved the Watergate. Nixon at this point had to follow through with it and hand over t he tapes. Nixon for a long time claimed that he had no idea of the Watergate scandal until John Dean told him on March 21, 1973. The tapes showed that Nixon was a true liar, and not only knew about it, but ordered it. Because of this Nixon met with A group of republican leaders and they tried to convince him to resign from office. He did just that on August 9, 1974, Nixon broadcasted that he was resigning to the nation. This meant that President Richard Nixon was the first president of the United States to resign from office. The nation was shocked after this whole scandal by the way Nixon had lied to the public and abused his own powers.

This lead most of the public never to trust a president as they did before, because of the massive secrecy in the Government. But the best part is that the country did survive the trauma, which is wonderful. The day of Nixon’s resignations Gerald Ford was sworn in to presidency. Related posts: Watergate Knowledge Base > History > History Watergate The Watergate scandal was a political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s as a result of the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement. Studying to receive a BA in History from Columbia University. I love NY sports from Red Bulls to Yankees. Don't mind spending cold Friday nights with a movie and cup of hot chocolate. Curated Facts It was hard to avoid being struck by the passage of time, especially for those of us who passed through the portals of The Washington Post. Ben Bradlee, his gait somewhat slowed, sat near the front as William Weld, the congressional Watergate investigator who later became Massachusetts governor, called him the true hero of Watergate.

Katharine Graham’s voice was heard only on a promotional video, while her son, Don, the company’s chief executive, watched with rapt interest from the aisle. Article: Watergate Remembered Four... Former White House counsel John Dean described the moment when burglar G. Gordon Liddy “confesses the whole thing to me”—not just the involvement in Watergate but an attempt to bust into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The cavernous room was transported back to the days of men in suits with rubber gloves and wads of cash. Dean and another panelist, Egil “Bud” Krogh, went to jail in the coverup. Article: Watergate Remembered Four... By now, of course, Watergate has become part of our folklore: Five men wearing business suits and surgical gloves arrested in the middle of the night with illegal bugging devices at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. The burglars turned out to be part of a wide-ranging political espionage and sabotage operation run by President Nixon's top aides, one that triggered a massive White House cover-up directed by the president himself.

After that cover-up unraveled, more than 70 people, including cabinet members and White House assistants, were convicted of criminal abuses of power; only a pardon by his presidential successor spared Nixon himself from becoming the first chief executive in history to be indicted for felonies committed in the Oval Office. In the words of Stanley Kutler, the scandal's leading historian, Watergate "consumed and convulsed the nation and tested the constitutional and political system as it had not been tested since the Civil War." Article: Watergate Revisited&nbsp;... × Amazon Results At first, few people took the Watergate burglary seriously, and it had no impact on the presidential election of 1972. Yet by 1974 the scandal caused President Richard Nixon to resign his office rather than face impeachment. Twenty-one individuals associated with the Nixon administration and the Committee to Reelect the President eventually went to jail for Watergate-related crimes, including John Dean and H.R. Haldeman.

The press, the special prosecutor, and the courts all played significant roles in uncovering the evidence of illegal activities that caused the president to resign, but it was a special committee of the United States Senate that focused attention most sharply on the people and events surrounding Watergate and helped the public understand what happened. On November 7, 1972, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, won a landside re-election to a second term. Two years later, he resigned—the first president in history to do so. Nixon resigned because of “Watergate”—a scandal that began with a bungled burglary and ended with criminal charges against his closest aides and demands for his impeachment. Early in 1972, Nixon’s aides were working hard to make sure he won the election in November. The Committee to Reelect the President (CRP)—headed by John Mitchell, who had just resigned from his post as attorney general—was raising huge amounts of money and working on plans to undermine the Democratic candidate. One of those plans, proposed by CRP’s special counsel, Gordon Liddy, was to break into the Democratic Party headquarters.

John Mitchell agreed to give Liddy $250,000 from CRP’s money, and Liddy, with his partner Howard Hunt, began planning the burglary. Article: BRIA 25 4 The Watergate S... Watergate burglars arrested - Jun 17, 1972 - HISTORY.com Watergate burglars arrested Publisher A+E Networks Five men are arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Senate investigations eventually revealed that President Richard Nixon had been personally involved in the subsequent cover-up of the break-in; additional investigation uncovered a related group of illegal activities that included political espionage and falsification of official documents, all sanctioned by the White House. Nixon became increasingly embroiled in the political scandal. On July 29 and 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment, charging that Nixon had misused his powers to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, obstructed justice, and defied Judiciary Committee subpoenas. To avoid almost certain impeachment, Nixon resigned from office on August 9. The Watergate affair had a far-ranging impact, both at home and abroad.

In the United States, the scandal shook the faith of the American people in the presidency. In the final analysis though, the nation survived the constitutional crisis, thus reinforcing the system of checks and balances and proving that not even the president is above the law. Nixon’s resignation had dire consequences for the Vietnam War. Nixon had always promised that he would come to the aid of South Vietnam if North Vietnam violated the terms of the Paris Peace Accords. With Nixon gone, there was no one left to make good on those promises. When the North Vietnamese began their final offensive in 1975, the promised U.S. support was not provided and the South Vietnamese were defeated in less than 55 days. Related Videos Watergate Complex, Washington DC Sightseeing-Travel Attractions-Must See Washington DC Washington, DC 20037 Attractions>Sight Watergate is the popular name for the political scandal and constitutional crisis that began with the arrest (June 17, 1972) of five burglars who broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building. It ended with the resignation (Aug. 9, 1974) of President Richard M. Nixon.

The Watergate Hotel was originally built as a luxury apartment building within in the six-building Watergate complex famous for the 1972 burglary by men associated with President Nixon's re-election committee. This historical event put The Watergate on the map forever. Today the hotel, known as Swissotel Washington - The Watergate, features very generously sized rooms that were part of a $13 million renovation completed in February 2000. The Watergate complex includes the hotel, three luxury apartment buildings with over 600 apartments, penthouses and townhouses as well as two office buildings. The complex's shopping mall includes a grocery store, drug store, hair salon and upscale shops such as Saks Jandel, Valentino and Yves Saint-Laurent. Other Web Resources Because the city was built from scratch, Washington's regular town plan is easy to grasp. Centered on Capitol Hill and its governmental monoliths, the District is divided into four quadrants - northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. Dozens of broad avenues , all named after states, run diagonally across a standard grid of streets , meeting up at monumental traffic circles like Dupont Circle. North-south streets are numbered, east-west ones are lettered.

There's no J Street, an intentional slight to early Supreme Court Justice John Jay, or X, Y or Z Street. I Street is often written Eye Street. Be sure to note the relevant two-letter code in any address (NW, NE, SW, SE), which shows its quadrant; 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW is a long way from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave SE. Once in the city, stop at the DC Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center , Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW (Mon-Sat 8am-6pm, Sun noon-5pm; tel 202/328-4748), which can help with maps, tours, bookings and citywide information. Look for visitor information desks at the airports and Union Station. The White House Visitor Information Center , 1450 Pennsylvania Ave NW (daily 7.30am-4pm; tel 202/208-1631), supplies free maps and handy guides to museums and attractions; the most useful is the free Washington DC Visitors Guide .

Watergate: The Scandal That Brought Down Richard Nixon Watergate: The Scandal That Brought Down Richard Nixon THE BURGLARY Watergate has entered the political lexicon as a term synonymous with corruption and scandal, yet the Watergate Hotel is one of Washington’s plushest hotels. Even today, it is home to former Senator Bob Dole and was once the place where Monica Lewinsky laid low. It was here that the Watergate Burglars broke into the Democratic Party’s National Committee offices on June 17, 1972. If it had not been for the alert actions of Frank Wills, a security guard, the scandal may never have erupted. MORE CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS The story of Watergate has an intriguing historical and political background, arising out of political events of the 1960s such as Vietnam, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1970. But the chronology of the scandal really begins during 1972, when the burglars were arrested. By 1973, Nixon had been re-elected, but the storm clouds were building. By early 1974, the nation was consumed by Watergate.

MORE RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON Richard Milhous Nixon is one of the most fascinating political figures of the 20th Century. His long political career began in 1947 when he was elected to the House of Representatives. By 1952, Nixon had been chosen as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate, but not before he was embroiled in a scandal that led to the infamous Checkers Speech. Nixon served as Vice-President for eight years, then lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy. He recovered from political defeat to be chosen again as the Republican Party’s candidate at the 1968 election. Following a year of turmoil, including two political assassinations, Nixon became the nation’s 37th President on January 20, 1969. Later that year, he delivered his ‘Silent Majority’ speech on the Vietnam War, articulating his belief that the bulk of the American people supported his policies and programs. He was vindicated by winning a landslide re-election. He was sworn in for a second term in Janury 1973.

MORE NIXON REACTS TO WATERGATE Nixon made three major speeches on the Watergate scandal during 1973 and 1974. The first was on April 30, 1973, in which he announced the departure of Dean, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. A more defiant speech was delivered on August 15, 1973. Perhaps the politically most difficult speech was the one on April 29, 1974, in which Nixon released partial transcripts of the White House tapes. MORE THE INVESTIGATIONS Initial investigations of Watergate were heavily influenced by the media, particularly the work of two reporters from the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, along with their mysterious informant, Deep Throat. Political investigations began in February 1973 when the Senate established a Committee to investigate the Watergate scandal. The public hearings of the Committee were sensational, including the evidence of John Dean, Nixon’s former White House Counsel. The Committee also uncovered the existence of the secret White House tape recordings, sparking a major political and legal battle between the Congress and the President.

In 1974, the House of Representatives authorised the Judiciary Committee to consider impeachment proceedings against Nixon. The work of this Committee was again the spotlight a quarter of a century later when Bill Clinton was impeached. MORE THE FINAL DAYS Nixon’s last days in office came in late July and early August, 1974. The House Judiciary Committee voted to accept three of four proposed Articles of Impeachment, with some Republicans voting with Democrats to recommend impeachment of the President. The final blow came with the decision by the Supreme Court to order Nixon to release more White House tapes. One of these became known as the ‘smoking gun’ tape when it revealed that Nixon had participated in the Watergate cover-up as far back as June 23, 1972. Around the country, there were calls for Nixon to resign. At 9pm on the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon delivered a nationally televised resignation speech. The next morning, he made his final remarks to the White House staff before sending his resignation letter to the Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

MORE GERALD FORD – THE MAN WHO PARDONED NIXON Gerald Ford became the 38th President of the United States when Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. He was the first Vice-President and the first President to ascend to both positions without being elected. Regarded on all sides of politics as a decent man, Ford will be remembered for his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon. MORE 1000+ images about USA - Watergate on Pinterest | Dean o'gorman, Bobs and Washington Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas USA - Watergate The Watergate scandal occurred as a result of the June 17 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington This led to an illegal cover up by the Nixon administration. Investigation by Congress resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon and indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty and incarcerated, many of whom were Nixon's top administration officials. 76 Pins30.89k Followers

Question: What was the Watergate building that was the subject of a US political scandal that began in 1972?
Answer: Office building