Watergate: The Break-In That Changed American Politics
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Shortly after midnight on June seventeenth, nineteen seventy-two, a security guard at the Watergate complex named Frank Wills noticed tape covering the latches on stairwell doors in the building's office section. He pulled the tape off. An hour later, on his next round, the tape was back. He called the police.
Officers arrived and found five men inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor, attempting to photograph documents and plant listening devices. The men carried sophisticated surveillance equipment, consecutive serial-numbered hundred-dollar bills, and the phone number of a White House consultant in their address books.
The story that followed took two years to fully emerge. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the money and the connections while most of the Washington press corps dismissed the break-in as a minor burglary. Their source, an FBI official who identified himself only as Deep Throat and was not publicly identified until two thousand five as Associate Director Mark Felt, guided them through the architecture of the cover-up. The money trail led from the arrested men through the Committee to Re-Elect the President to accounts controlled by the White House itself.
The revelations accumulated: hush money paid to the burglars, perjury by cabinet officers, an eighteen and a half minute gap in a White House tape recording of the conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff three days after the break-in. Technical analysis commissioned by the court found the gap had been made in at least five separate manual segments. Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods demonstrated a physical posture she claimed could have caused the erasure accidentally; the posture required was judged physically implausible.
On August ninth, nineteen seventy-four, Richard Nixon became the only president in American history to resign from office.
The Watergate complex is luxury apartments today. The office suite where the break-in occurred is private. The suffix "-gate" has attached to every major political scandal in the American language since nineteen seventy-four. The break-in itself, if it had been discovered a few hours later, might never have been solved.
