June 17, 1972 – police apprehended five burglars at the office of the Democratic Party in the

Watergate complex. Four of them formerly had been active in CIA activities against Fidel
Castro in Cuba. The fifth, James W. McCord, Jr., was the security chief of the Committee to Re-
elect the President.

The arrest was reported in the next morning’s Washington Post in an article written by Alfred E.
Lewis, Carl Bernstein, and Bob Woodward. Soon after, Woodward and FBI investigators
identified two coconspirators in the burglary: E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a former high-ranking CIA
officer only recently appointed to the staff of the White House, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former
FBI agent working as a counsel for CREEP. At the time of the break-in, Liddy had been
overseeing a similar, though uncompleted, attempt to break into and surveil the headquarters
of George S. McGovern, soon to become the Democratic nominee in the 1972 U.S. presidential
election.

Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler responded that the president would have no comment
on a “third-rate burglary attempt.” The preponderance of early media reports, driven by a
successful White House public relations campaign, claimed that there had been no involvement
by the Nixon administration or the reelection committee. Meanwhile, the conspirators destroyed
evidence, including their burglary equipment and a stash of $100 bills. Jeb Magruder, deputy
director of CREEP, burned transcripts of wiretaps from an earlier break-in at the DNC’s offices.
The president, his chief of staff, H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, and the special counsel to the
president, Charles Colson, Nixon’s close political aide, spread alibis around Washington.
Meanwhile, the White House arranged for the “disappearance” to another country of Hunt (who
never actually left the United States), part of a plan for the burglars to take the fall for the crime
as overzealous anticommunist patriots.

June 23, 1972 – the president, through channels, ordered the FBI to tamp down its investigation.
Later, this order, revealed in what became known as the Nixon tapes (Nixon’s secret recordings
of his phone calls and conversations in the Oval Office), became the “smoking gun” proving that
the president had been part of a criminal cover-up from the beginning.
Throughout the 1972 campaign season, Woodward and Bernstein were fed leaks by an
anonymous source they referred to as “Deep Throat,” who, only some 30 years later, was
revealed to be FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt, Sr. They kept up a steady stream of scoops
demonstrating (1) the direct involvement of Nixon intimates in Watergate activities, (2) that the
Watergate wiretapping and break-in had been financed through illegally laundered campaign
contributions, and, in a blockbuster October 10 front-page article, (3) that “the Watergate
bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted
on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House,” part of
“a basic strategy of the Nixon re-election effort.”

Nevertheless, the White House successfully framed Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting as
the obsession of a single “liberal” newspaper pursuing a vendetta against the president of
the United States.

Watergate Trial And Aftermath

The trial of the five arrested burglars and two accomplices began less than two weeks before
Nixon’s second-term inauguration. The relatively narrow indictment on charges of
burglary, conspiracy, and violation of federal wiretapping laws itself spoke to the success of the
White House in containing the scandal. The presiding judge, John J. Sirica, however, kept
badgering defendants and witnesses on matters not covered in the indictment—namely, the
financial and institutional involvement of the White House and reelection campaign.

All the defendants pleaded guilty except Liddy and McCord, who were convicted at the end of
January. The court was scheduled to reconvene on March 23 to hear sentences. In
the interim the Senate voted 77–0 to establish a special investigating committee on abuses in the
1972 presidential campaign (the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities) to be
presided over by the universally respected conservative North Carolina Democrat Samuel J.
Ervin, Jr. A strict constitutionalist, Ervin had been speaking out angrily on Nixon’s extraordinary
extensions of presidential power, including the unprecedented presidential “impoundment” of
funds authorized for expenditure by Congress and his continuation of the bombing of Cambodia
even after a cease-fire had been agreed to in the Vietnam War.
At the beginning of March, during Senate confirmation hearings of Nixon’s nominee to head the
FBI, L. Patrick Gray, it was alleged that a little-known White House legal aide named John
Wesley Dean III had been given personal access to the FBI’s Watergate investigation. This
revelation was followed almost immediately by the president’s unprecedentedly sweeping
refusal, under the claim of “executive privilege,” to allow aides such as Dean to testify before
Congress. Ervin responded that if the president pressed the issue, he would issue arrest warrants
to compel Nixon aides to testi

fy.

Meanwhile, Sirica controversially sought to leverage the hearings and continued grand
jury proceedings to induce the defendants to speak more forthrightly about a broader conspiracy.
He succeeded when defendant McCord passed him an extraordinary presentencing letter, in
which he explained that the defendants had been pressured to plead guilty and perjure themselves
about the involvement of higher-ups. On March 23 Sirica read the letter in open court. He then
took the contentious step of passing exceptionally long “provisional” sentences on the
defendants. However, Sirica made clear that were the defendants to speak frankly to the
reconvened Watergate grand jury or the Senate hearings, he would reduce their sentences.

Almost single-handedly, with great courage and risk to his reputation, Sirica had broken the case
wide open. Revelations began cascading through the press: that Gray may have been involved in
the cover-up; that the transnational conglomerate International Telephone and Telegraph
Corporation (later ITT Corporation), under investigation for corrupt financial ties to the White
House, had sabotaged a democratic election in Chile; and that Mitchell may have interfered in
the major securities fraud case of a $250,000 donor to the Nixon campaign.

In the middle of April—with Mitchell and other top aides facing indictment—the president
nervously announced that his own investigations had determined that “no one in this
Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” On April 17
presidential spokesman Ziegler infamously told the press that all previous White House
statements about Watergate were now “inoperative.” Two weeks later, on April 30, 1973, Nixon
gave a major televised address announcing the resignations of Dean; his two closest aides by far,
Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman; and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Nixon protested
his own innocence and promised cooperation with future investigations (even while including
legalistic language that implied strong limits to that cooperation).

The Ervin Hearings

By the time the Ervin hearings began on May 17, a new tenor for American political life had
been set: eye-popping revelations of nearly undreamed-of venality at the heart of American
power, followed by increasingly threadbare Oval Office protestations of innocence. It would not
let up for the next 15 months. The daily televised hearings were quite possibly comparable in
drama, import, and historic depth to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Lincoln-Douglas
debates of 1858, and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20. Presided over by four Democrats
led by Chairman Ervin—who became a folk hero (and to some a folk villain)—and three
Republicans led by Vice Chairman Howard Baker of Tennessee, the hearings were at first
covered gavel-to-gavel on all three commercial television networks—a business sacrifice that
spoke to the remarkable civic high-mindedness with which the country approached the
Watergate inquiry. Soon the networks began showing the hearings on a rotating basis.
Some Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations, however, continued to broadcast the hearings
live daily, other PBS stations reran telecasts of the hearings at night, while still others did both.

Trading volume shot down on the New York Stock Exchange. Housewives threatened not to do a
stitch of housework for as long as the hearings lasted. College students gathered around TV sets
in corridors between, and sometimes during, classes; high schools set up TVs in the cafeteria for
all-day civics lessons. “Never have I enjoyed watching television more than in the last two
weeks,” one Washington Post letter writer testified, “with the spectacle of high human drama
interwoven with the finest possible example of the democratic process at work unfolding before
my eyes for hours on end, with no rehearsal, no canned laughter, very little commentary (none
needed!), and, best of all, almost no commercial interruption!”

The feeling was not universal. Sticklers, including independent prosecutor Archibald Cox,
decried the unfairness of what he characterized as trying the principals in the media. Game-show
and soap-opera fans complained about the preemption of their favourite programs. Most
significantly for the later ideological direction of the country, though hardly noticed by elites at
the time, large portions of Americans derided the entire business as a political witch hunt (and
would continue to so view it into the 21st century). Still, some 35 million or so Americans
watched the Ervin hearings at one time or another.

What did they see? Methodical portraiture of a White House riddled with unprecedented and
extra-constitutional paranoia and corruption from the beginning, painted by a bipartisan panel
backed by the awesomely thorough staff work of some of the best young legal minds in
Washington (among them Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked for the House Judiciary
Committee during the impeachment hearings). In the spring of 1969, national
security adviser Henry Kissinger had wiretapped his staffers. In 1970 the White House set up an
illegal money-laundering operation to fund its favoured Senate candidates. In 1971, after the
disillusioned military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the White House
seemed to institutionalize what some have characterized as a culture of illegality. One young
staffer named Tom Charles Huston had earlier recommended a plan, approved and then
withdrawn by the president, that called for dramatically expanded illegal domestic spying
activities by the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. His specific plan was rejected, but a
very similar operation—which Americans came to know as the “Plumbers,” so called because its
original purpose was to ferret out leaks—was soon at work carrying out some of the same tasks.

It was revealed that, as the 1972 campaign season rolled around, roving cells of saboteurs
devised ways to weaken individual Democratic presidential campaigns while making it look like
the campaigns were actually sabotaging each other. A parallel fascination of the hearings was the
questioning of young Nixon aides who left senators incredulous with their explanations that
“ends-justifies-the-means” morality had become semiofficial White House policy. Another
continuing thread was the examination of illegal sources of the money that funded the
various clandestine operations. The drama was further intensified by ongoing investigation of the
White House’s attempts at stifling the panel’s investigation even as it was still under way.
The malfeasances multiplied every week—dredged up not merely by the Ervin committee but by
journalists, the Watergate grand jury, Watergate special prosecutor Cox, and any number of
related inquiries, including the trial in Los Angeles of Ellsberg (“Watergate West”), which had
ended just before the Ervin hearings began.
The operative constitutional question tying the complexity together was framed with special
eloquence by Vice Chairman Baker: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
Nothing, Nixon continuously maintained. That contention was thrown melodramatically into
doubt by Dean on June 25, 1973, in a nearly seven-hour statement to the Ervin committee,
watched by a huge portion of the American television audience, followed by five days of intense
cross-examination. Dean’s account established the president as the prime mover behind the
scandal and cover-up. However, these revelations were greeted with skepticism by many. It
appeared that the entire extraordinary business would devolve into a stalemate, the president’s
word against one of his aides—until, on July 16, Alexander P. Butterfield, formerly of the White
House staff, disclosed that all conversations in the president’s offices had secretly been recorded
on tape.

Both Cox and the Ervin committee promptly subpoenaed the tapes of several key conversations.
Nixon refused to provide them on the grounds of executive privilege and national security. When
Judge Sirica ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes and that order was upheld by the U.S. Court of
Appeals in October, Nixon offered instead to provide written summaries of the tapes in question
in return for an agreement that no further presidential documents would be sought. Cox rejected
the proposal, and on October 20 the president ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire
the special prosecutor. In an event that became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” both
Richardson and William D. Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general, resigned rather than carry
out the order, and Cox was finally dismissed by a compliant solicitor general, Robert Bork. It
was another extraordinary historical moment. Many responsible American officials literally
feared a White House coup d’état.