Washington – The scandal began with a botched burglary that initially attracted little attention but ended two years later with the only resignation of a U.S. president.
To many Americans, Watergate is a dimming memory, if that. A majority of Americans living now were not yet born or were children when President Nixon was forced from office in 1974.
It was a story of political espionage gone awry amid a presidential campaign, followed by a high-level coverup that finally unraveled when Nixon’s secret White House taping system came to light.
Incriminating conversations, it turned out, were all on tape.
Six days after the break-in at the Watergate complex near the Potomac River, Nixon agreed to a plan to derail the FBI’s investigation of the burglary at the Democratic National Committee’s offices by claiming the probe would interfere with a CIA operation.
That conversation – which finally emerged after a legal battle for the tapes that went all the way to the Supreme Court – put the final nail in Nixon’s political coffin, forcing him from office.
The tale began with G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI man who was finance counsel for the president’s re-election committee.
Liddy got $250,000 to pay for dirty tricks and espionage that included late-night forays to install telephone bugs at the DNC office and scouring the party’s files for useful information.
Caught in the act at the DNC on June 17, 1972, five burglars working for Liddy were a novelist’s dream: James W. McCord, a 20-year CIA technician who was in charge of security at the president’s re-election committee, and four Cuban-Americans recruited by E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who had participated in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Hunt was working informally for Nixon’s “plumbers” unit, set up to help stop government information leaks.
From the start, a couple of young unknown reporters from The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, pursued what they sensed was a scandal that went all the way to the White House.
Woodward was in court and heard McCord whisper “CIA” when the burglars were asked to identify themselves.
Although they kept the story in the public eye, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.
The Senate and the U.S. attorney’s office pursued Nixon’s aides, and with the pressure on, the president told two of them they would have to resign. He fired his White House counsel, John Dean, who proceeded to reveal the inner workings of a White House enmeshed in a scheme to provide hush money for the burglars.
Nixon insisted he knew nothing of any coverup and that he never encouraged his subordinates to employ improper campaign tactics.
“That was and is the simple truth,” Nixon told the nation.
The coverup collapsed when Nixon’s schedule-keeper, Alexander Butterfield, told the Senate of a taping system that recorded every conversation Nixon had in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Lincoln Bedroom sitting room and the Camp David presidential cabin.
The tapes were subject to subpoena, and the game was up.
