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—— ON THIS DAY ——
JUNE 17, 1972
Watergate Complex, Washington, D.C., USA
53 years ago
Richard Nixon — the thirty-seventh President of the United States, whose attempt to cover up the White House connection to the Watergate break-in led to articles of impeachment, the release of tape recordings that proved his complicity, and his resignation on August 9, 1974.
At 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., noticed that tape had been placed over a lock on a basement door — preventing it from latching. He removed it. Forty-five minutes later, checking again, he found new tape on the same lock. He called the police. Officers in plainclothes discovered five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee, photographing documents and planting listening devices. The five men were arrested. One of them had an address book containing the name of E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer connected to the White House. The unraveling began.
The break-in was the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), the political organization running Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign. Nixon was already polling at twenty points ahead of his Democratic opponent George McGovern; the break-in served no rational political purpose. Nixon's campaign would win forty-nine of fifty states. The burglars were unnecessary. The cover-up that followed — payments to the burglars, manipulation of the CIA and FBI, destruction of evidence — was far more damaging than any information the burglars could have obtained.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Watergate Complex, Washington, D.C. — the hotel, office, and apartment complex where five men were arrested during a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, initiating the chain of events that ended a presidency.
The Washington Post's coverage of the Watergate affair — led by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, directed by editor Ben Bradlee, and informed by an anonymous source within the FBI whom they called 'Deep Throat' — is the most celebrated act of investigative journalism in American newspaper history. The source revealed in 2005 to be W. Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI — fed Woodward information through a series of parking garage meetings that allowed the Post to follow the money and the connections from the burglars up through CREEP to the White House.
The Senate Watergate Committee hearings, televised live in 1973, introduced the American public to the full scope of the scandal. The revelation by White House aide Alexander Butterfield that Nixon had secretly recorded all conversations in the Oval Office was the turning point. Nixon resisted subpoenas for the tapes; the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon (1974) that he must produce them. When the tapes were released, one contained an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap that White House secretaries attributed to accidental erasure — an explanation no independent expert found credible.
The 'smoking gun' tape — a conversation between Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in — recorded Nixon explicitly directing the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation of Watergate. Its release on August 5, 1974, destroyed Nixon's remaining congressional support. The House Judiciary Committee had already voted three articles of impeachment. Told by Republican leaders that he would certainly be convicted by the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. He was the first and remains the only US president to have resigned.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Watergate established the principle that no president is above the law. The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that Nixon must produce the tapes — even over claims of executive privilege — is a foundational precedent for the accountability of the executive branch. The ruling has been cited in every subsequent clash between presidential claims of privilege and congressional or judicial authority.
The coverage of Watergate transformed how Americans thought about investigative journalism. Woodward and Bernstein's reporting showed that persistent, source-driven journalism could hold government accountable at the highest levels. The story created a generation of journalism students who went into the profession specifically to replicate what the Post had done. The suffix '-gate' became the permanent shorthand for political scandal in the English language.
The Watergate scandal's long-term effect on American public trust in government was significant and lasting. Public trust in the federal government, already damaged by Vietnam, fell sharply during the Watergate period. Nixon's resignation and the subsequent revelations about the extent of the White House criminal enterprise contributed to a cynicism about political institutions that has never fully recovered.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On June 17, 1972, a security guard noticed tape on a door lock. Five men were arrested. A president tried to cover it up. The cover-up required lying to the FBI, the CIA, Congress, and the American public. Two years later, he resigned rather than be impeached and convicted. The cover-up is always worse than the crime.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
— Richard Nixon, interview with David Frost, May 19, 1977 — a statement that the Supreme Court had implicitly already refuted in United States v. Nixon (1974)
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Watergate break-in, the cover-up that brought Nixon down, Woodward and Bernstein's reporting, the Saturday Night Massacre, and the Supreme Court ruling that forced the release of the tapes?
