The Watergate Scandal

In the early hours of 17 June 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills was walking his round in the Watergate office complex in Washington when he noticed tape placed across a door latch to stop it locking. He removed it. When he came back and found fresh tape in the same place, he called the police. Inside the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee, officers found five men in suits and surgical gloves, carrying cameras, lock picks and bugging equipment. They had come to repair listening devices planted on an earlier visit and to photograph documents. This was political surveillance, not burglary for money, and it had been going on for some time. The men refused to explain themselves, and gave false names to the court. Then one of them, asked by the judge what he did for a living, quietly admitted to having worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. The room went very still.

That man was James McCord, and he was not merely a former intelligence officer. He was the security coordinator of the Committee to Re-elect the President — the campaign organisation working to return Richard Nixon to the White House that November. In the burglars' pockets and hotel rooms, investigators found new hundred-dollar bills in sequence and an address book naming E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer employed as a consultant at the White House. Within days, the trail ran from a taped door latch to the president's own building. Nixon's press secretary refused to take the story seriously, dismissing it as "a third-rate burglary", and senior officials denied having any knowledge of the operation; the president himself insisted that no one currently employed in his administration was involved. It was the beginning of a cover-up that would last more than two years.

What the public did not yet know was that the break-in belonged to a wider pattern. After the Pentagon Papers — a secret history of the Vietnam War — were leaked to the press in 1971, a small unit was created inside the White House to stop further leaks and discredit those responsible. They were nicknamed the "plumbers", because their job was to plug leaks; their methods included burglary, wiretapping and dirty tricks against political opponents. The Watergate break-in grew out of this world. None of it damaged Nixon at the polls: in November 1972 he was re-elected in a landslide, losing only one state and the District of Columbia. Yet two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, kept working the story, following the money from the campaign to the burglars. They were helped by a confidential informant known only as "Deep Throat", whose identity was protected for more than thirty years; in 2005 he was revealed to be Mark Felt, then associate director of the FBI.

Through 1973 the cover-up began to unravel, and it unravelled from the inside. The burglars had been paid to stay silent, but silence is expensive and does not hold. In March, James McCord wrote to Judge John Sirica, claiming to have been under political pressure to plead guilty and stating that others had lied under oath. Sirica, a tenacious judge who had never believed five men acted alone, read the letter in open court, and the story moved from the newspapers into the machinery of the state. In April, Nixon's two most senior aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, resigned. In the summer, the Senate set up a special committee whose hearings were broadcast live into American living rooms. Its most damaging witness was John Dean, the young White House counsel, who accused the president directly of taking part in the cover-up. Nixon's defenders replied that it was one man's word against another's — and on the evidence then available they were not wrong.

Then came the revelation that changed everything. In July 1973 a former White House aide, Alexander Butterfield, was asked almost routinely whether there was any recording system in the president's offices. He admitted that there was: Nixon had installed a voice-activated system that had been taping his own conversations for years. Everything said in the Oval Office was preserved. Suddenly there was a way to settle the question, and the fight over the tapes became the whole story. Nixon refused to hand them over, claiming executive privilege — the principle that a president's conversations stay confidential. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox went to court to subpoena them anyway. In October 1973 Nixon had Cox dismissed; the Attorney General and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the order, and a third official did it. The press called that night the "Saturday Night Massacre", and the reaction was ferocious. Nixon released some transcripts, but an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap had appeared in one recording, and it has never been satisfactorily explained.

The argument ended in the Supreme Court. In July 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the justices ruled unanimously that executive privilege is real but not absolute, and that the president must surrender the tapes. He complied. Among them was a conversation from 23 June 1972 — six days after the break-in — in which Nixon agreed to have the CIA lean on the FBI and slow its inquiry, on false grounds of national security. It was an agreement to obstruct justice, recorded in his own voice, and it became known as the "smoking gun" tape. Before it, a supporter could argue that the president had been badly served by his staff; after it, that argument was impossible. The tape was so incriminating that it needed no interpretation, and the men who had defended him for two years read it and stopped.

After the smoking gun, the end came quickly. The House Judiciary Committee had already approved articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress; the full House would almost certainly have voted to impeach, and the Senate to convict. Senior figures from his own party told him plainly that his support had gone. On 8 August 1974 Nixon announced that he would leave office, and the next day he became the first and so far only American president to resign, walking to a helicopter on the White House lawn, turning and raising both arms before he flew away. His vice-president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in that afternoon and said the long national nightmare was over. A month later, Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for any federal crimes he might have committed in office, arguing that a former president on trial would tear the country apart. His critics accused him of doing a deal, and the pardon almost certainly cost Ford the next election.

Nixon himself never accepted the account the tapes had written. In the years that followed he admitted to serious errors of judgement and to letting down those who trusted him, but he consistently denied committing any crime, and insisted that other presidents had done similar things unpunished. The closest he came to an admission was in 1977, in a long series of television interviews with the British broadcaster David Frost, watched by an enormous audience. Pressed hard, Nixon conceded that he had let the American people down; but even there he framed his actions as mistakes rather than crimes, and defended the idea that a president acting in the national interest stood in a different legal position from an ordinary citizen. Historians still argue how much of that was belief and how much the last defence left to him. Some of those directly implicated in the cover-up did go to prison, including senior aides and the Attorney General who had run his campaign.

The echoes are everywhere, some trivial. Ever since, English has attached the suffix -gate to almost any public scandal, from politics to football, so that a word from a Washington office block now travels the world as shorthand for institutional wrongdoing. The serious consequences were institutional: Congress tightened the rules on campaign finance and disclosure, and later created formal arrangements for independent counsels to investigate the executive — machinery that has itself been controversial ever since. Investigative journalism was transformed: two reporters and a confidential source had helped bring down a president, and a generation of graduates followed them into newsrooms. And there is an honest argument that runs in two directions at once. On one reading, the system worked exactly as designed: the courts, Congress and the press each did their job, and the most powerful man in the world was made subject to the law. On another, the affair damaged something less repairable — trust in American government, measured by opinion polling, fell sharply in these years and has never returned to what it was.