Watergate scandal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Watergate scandal began with a botched burglary on the 17th of June, 1972, when five men were caught planting listening devices inside the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at Washington D.C.'s Watergate complex. What followed was not simply a crime story. It was a two-year unraveling that forced the first resignation of a sitting U.S. president and sent 69 people to face criminal charges, including two cabinet members.

  At its center was Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, a man so consumed by paranoia about political enemies that he had authorized an elaborate machinery of surveillance, sabotage, and deception long before anyone taped a door latch at the Watergate. The break-in was one piece of a far larger covert operation called Gemstone. The cover-up that followed revealed something arguably more damning than the original crime.

  Who actually ordered the burglary has never been established. The motives remain disputed to this day, spawning theories that range from a simple intelligence-gathering operation to a sexpionage plot to a CIA trap. Over 30 memoirs have emerged from those involved, and their accounts often contradict each other. What the scandal left behind was a word suffix that now circles the globe: "-gate", attached to any scandal, anywhere, in any language.

• 2. The Plumbers

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  Daniel Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page classified study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times in June 1971. The papers had been commissioned in 1967 and exposed systematic government deception about the war's progress. Nixon was initially calm about the disclosure, since the documents predated his presidency. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was not calm. Kissinger had been Ellsberg's mentor and, according to White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, pushed Nixon into what he called a "frenzy".

  The Supreme Court ultimately allowed the papers' publication. After that ruling, Nixon told aide Chuck Colson to stop all leaks "by any means". Colson recruited retired CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, a veteran of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat and the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy joined the group. Liddy himself named the team "ODESSA", after a rumored Nazi Schutzstaffel organization. The name that stuck, however, came from Young's grandmother, who misunderstood what the word "leaks" meant and suggested calling the team the "Plumbers".

  The Plumbers' first significant operation was a September 3 burglary of the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding. Hunt enlisted Cuban collaborators from the Bay of Pigs era, including CIA veteran Bernard Barker and anti-Castro exiles Eugenio Martinez and Felipe De Diego. The burglars reported finding nothing, staged what looked like an addict's ransacking to cover their tracks, but De Diego later said they found and photographed Ellsberg's records. Liddy suspected Hunt had simply routed the photographs to the CIA instead.

  Beyond Ellsberg, the Plumbers pursued targets that illustrated how far the unit had drifted. They plotted to drug Ellsberg with LSD at a Washington gala, considered forging a diplomatic cable to link John F. Kennedy to the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, and investigated Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick accident. Attorney General John Mitchell later coined the collective label: "the White House horrors".

• 3. Operation Gemstone

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  Liddy became general counsel for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President in December 1971, introduced by deputy campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder as "our man in charge of dirty tricks". On the 27th of January, 1972, Liddy and Hunt pitched a set of covert schemes to Attorney General Mitchell under the name Operation Gemstone.

  The proposals were extravagant. Operation Diamond called for kidnapping, drugging, and detaining likely protesters during the 1972 Republican National Convention; Liddy nicknamed it Nacht und Nebel, after an Adolf Hitler directive, and envisioned an "Einsatzgruppe" of mobsters that Hunt claimed had committed 22 murders. Operation Emerald proposed a spy airliner to trail the Democratic nominee. Operation Turquoise would send Cuban commandos to sabotage air-conditioning at the Democrats' Miami convention. Operation Sapphire proposed a boat staffed with sex workers to entrap Democrats.

  Mitchell rejected the entire package as unrealistic and expensive. He asked for something simpler. The scaled-down Gemstone that followed proposed burglarizing the Watergate office of Democratic National Committee chair Larry O'Brien, bugging hotel suites during the Miami convention, and breaking into the eventual Democratic nominee's campaign headquarters. Mitchell is generally believed to have approved this version, though historian Garrett Graff and biographer James Rosen dispute that conclusion.

  One side target was the Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun. The desired material may have related to possible Democratic nominee Edmund Muskie or to the finances of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who had dealings with Nixon and his brother Donald Nixon. Hunt and Liddy said the plan was abandoned after Hughes declined to provide a getaway plane. Yet Greenspun's office showed signs of forced entry, and Ehrlichman told Nixon in 1973 that Hunt and Liddy had flown to Las Vegas, broken Greenspun's safe, and removed something from it.

• 4. The Break-In and Arrest

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  Security guard Frank Wills found tape on a garage door latch at the Watergate complex during his shift on the night of the 17th of June 1972, and removed it, assuming a maintenance worker had left it behind. He then left to eat at the Howard Johnson's motel across the street with an intern named Bruce Givner. When Wills returned and found the latch retaped, he called the police.

  The responding car was an unmarked Metropolitan Police cruiser belonging to a special undercover vice squad whose officers were dressed as hippies. Alfred Baldwin, stationed at the Howard Johnson's as a surveillance lookout, saw the car but dismissed it. He alerted the team only after the officers turned on lights on the eighth floor. Hunt, listening from a hotel room, dismissed even that as the night guard.

  McCord had taped the door latch horizontally, leaving visible tape on the sides of the frame. That was the error that set the evening in motion. Inside the DNC offices, the burglars had abandoned picking the lock and instead removed the door from its hinges entirely. When the three Metropolitan officers swept the building floor by floor and found the taped sixth-floor door, they moved in. McCord and four others were hiding behind a partition. They surrendered under false names.

  Hunt and Liddy fled their hotel room in a Jeep, leaving behind traceable items in the two suites. Hunt drove to the White House, deposited electronic equipment in a safe, and took $10,000 before returning home. The arrested men's listening devices led Metropolitan police to involve the FBI, on the presumption of a federal wiretapping violation. By the 23rd of June, a federal grand jury of 23 Washington residents had begun hearing testimony. The burglars' address books listed "WH" beside Barker's entry and referred explicitly to Hunt.

• 5. The Cover-Up

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  On the morning of June 18, Liddy visited the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, destroyed Gemstone files, and reported the arrests to Magruder. Nixon was informed shortly after. By June 19, CIA agent Lee Pennington Jr. had already destroyed incriminating material at McCord's home, and Magruder had burned further Gemstone files at his own house.

  The most consequential decision came on the 23rd of June, when Nixon approved a plan to use the CIA to pressure the FBI into dropping its investigation. In a recorded Oval Office conversation with Haldeman, Nixon instructed that the FBI be told the investigation would "open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again". This tape would later be called the "Smoking Gun". CIA director Richard Helms agreed to pass the message to the FBI, though deputy director Vernon Walters, threatened with resignation, ultimately refused to halt the investigation unless the CIA put the request in writing.

  Deputy campaign finance manager Herbert Kalmbach was recruited to deliver hush money. Anthony Ulasewicz delivered $180,000 in cash to the arrested men. After Hunt's wife died in a plane crash, Bay of Pigs invasion leader Manuel Artime continued distributing the payments.

  Nixon's cover-up worked well enough to survive the 1972 election. In November, Nixon won re-election in the largest landslide in American history, carrying 49 of 50 states. Most Americans knew of the break-in but did not associate it with Nixon. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post had been investigating since the break-in, guided in part by an anonymous FBI source that editor Howard Simons named "Deep Throat" after the 1972 pornographic film of the same name. That source was Mark Felt, the FBI's deputy associate director, who had been passed over for the director's position after J. Edgar Hoover's death and was using leaks to undermine acting director L. Patrick Gray.

• 6. The Tapes and Their Secrets

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  Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office by 1971, managed by the Secret Service. The system recorded 3,432 hours of conversation between the 16th of February 1971 and the 12th of July 1973. Nixon kept its existence from even his own secretary, Rose Mary Woods. Journalist Garrett Graff later called the tapes "the root cause of Nixon's downfall".

  The tapes' existence became public on the 13th of July 1973, when Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield revealed them to the Ervin Committee. Vice President Spiro Agnew and White House counsel J. Fred Buzhardt both suggested destroying them. Nixon did not, for reasons that remain unclear; he may have wished to preserve his legacy or protect himself against perjury.

  Special prosecutor Archibald Cox, whom Attorney General Elliot Richardson had appointed with a guarantee that Cox could only be dismissed for "extraordinary improprieties", subpoenaed the tapes. Nixon fired Cox on the 20th of October 1973 in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Richardson refused Nixon's order and resigned in protest. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also refused and was fired. Solicitor General Robert Bork, next in line, carried out the firing. FBI agents sealed the prosecution force's office. The mailgrams and telegrams flooding Congress reached nearly 500,000. Nixon's approval rating fell to 24 percent.

  Of the nine subpoenaed tapes, two turned out to be missing. A third had an 18-minute, 15-second erasure in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on the 20th of June 1972, the first thought to discuss Watergate after the break-in. Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed she had accidentally hit record instead of stop while reaching for the telephone during transcription. In a physical reenactment, she could not maintain the foot-pedal position she described. The contortion required became known as the "Rose Mary Stretch". In January 1974, an expert panel concluded that the tape had been erased in five to nine separate segments using hand controls.

• 7. Impeachment and Resignation

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  On the 24th of July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the subpoenaed tapes were admissible. Nixon complied and released the first 20. Three days later, on July 27, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to recommend the first article of impeachment: obstruction of justice. A second article on abuse of power followed on July 29. A third, contempt of Congress, was approved on July 30. Ninety percent of Americans followed the proceedings on radio or television.

  On August 5, the White House released the June 23 "Smoking Gun" tape, revealing that Nixon had known of and directed the cover-up from its earliest days. Republican support collapsed almost immediately. California governor Ronald Reagan and Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush both urged Nixon to resign. Senator Barry Goldwater told Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig that Nixon had only 12 votes left in the Senate, adding: "He has lied to me for the last time."

  Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, fearing what Graff describes as a "berserk" Nixon, reportedly alerted military leaders to confirm any presidential launch orders with himself or Henry Kissinger before acting.

  On August 7, House minority leader John Rhodes, Senate minority leader Hugh Scott, and Senator Goldwater visited Nixon in the Oval Office. They did not explicitly ask him to resign, but made clear he lacked the votes to survive. Nixon resolved to step down. In an August 8 Oval Office address, he announced his resignation, effective at noon the following day, becoming the first U.S. president to do so. On the 9th of August 1974, Nixon and his family left the White House on Army One for Andrews Air Force Base, then boarded Air Force One for California. Gerald Ford's inauguration speech, delivered in the East Room, declared that "our long national nightmare is over". The Time magazine resignation special edition sold 527,000 copies, the most of any newsweekly up to that point.

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Gerald Ford issued Nixon a full pardon on the 8th of September 1974, covering all acts committed during his presidency. Ford's press secretary Jerald terHorst resigned in protest the same day. The president's approval rating fell by 22 percentage points. Biographer Jay Farrell concluded that implicit suggestions between Haig and Ford may have "greased" Nixon's departure, though no explicit agreement is documented on tape or in writing.

  In total, 69 people were charged with crimes related to Watergate. Most were convicted or pleaded guilty. John Mitchell, who had served as Attorney General, remains the highest-ranking U.S. government official to have been imprisoned. At his sentencing, he remarked: "It could have been worse. They could have sentenced me to spend the rest of my life with Martha Mitchell."

  In 1977, Nixon accepted $600,000 for a series of interviews with British journalist David Frost, hoping to rehabilitate his reputation. He was caught off guard by the combative questioning and declared, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." Watergate produced major legislative reforms, including the Presidential Records Act, which designated all presidential records as publicly owned, and the Ethics in Government Act. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act emerged from concerns about the surveillance tactics revealed during the investigation. Congress also strengthened the Freedom of Information Act and created intelligence oversight committees.

  Because nearly everyone convicted in the Watergate crimes was a lawyer, the American Bar Association mandated ethics courses at law schools. The 1974 film adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein's book All the President's Men introduced the phrase "follow the money" to the American vocabulary; Graff calls it the second most famous Watergate quote, after "I am not a crook". Frank Wills, the security guard who found the taped door latch, played himself in the film.