Watergate
Watergate, designation of a major U.S.
political scandal that began with
the burglary and wiretapping of the
Democratic party's campaign headquarters,
later engulfed President Richard M.
Nixon and many of his supporters in a
variety of illegal acts, and culminated
in the first resignation of a U.S.
president. The burglary was committed on
June 17, 1972, by five men who were
caught in the offices of the Democratic
National Committee at the Watergate
apartment and office complex in
Washington, D.C. Their arrest eventually
uncovered a White House-sponsored
plan of espionage against political opponents
and a trail of complicity that
led to many of the highest officials in the land,
including former U.S.
Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Counsel John
Dean, White
House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, White House Special Assistant
on
Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, and President Nixon himself. On April
30,
1973, nearly a year after the burglary and arrest and following a
grand jury
investigation of the burglary, Nixon accepted the resignation of
Haldeman and
Ehrlichman and announced the dismissal of Dean. U.S.
Attorney General Richard
Kleindienst resigned as well. The new attorney
general, Elliot Richardson,
appointed a special prosecutor, Harvard Law
School professor Archibald Cox, to
conduct a full-scale investigation of the
Watergate break-in. In May 1973 the
Senate Select Committee on
Presidential Activities opened hearings, with Senator
Sam Ervin of North
Carolina as chairman. A series of startling revelations
followed. Dean
testified that Mitchell had ordered the break-in and that a major
attempt was
under way to hide White House involvement. He claimed that the
president had
authorized payments to the burglars to keep them quiet. The
Nixon
administration vehemently denied this assertion. The White House Tapes
The
testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield unlocked the
entire
investigation. On July 16, 1973, Butterfield told the committee, on
nationwide
television, that Nixon had ordered a taping system installed in
the White House
to automatically record all conversations; what the president
said and when he
said it could be verified. Cox immediately subpoenaed eight
relevant tapes to
confirm Dean's testimony. Nixon refused to release the
tapes, claiming they were
vital to the national security. U.S. District Court
Judge John Sirica ruled that
Nixon must give the tapes to Cox, and an
appeals court upheld the decision.
Nixon held firm. He refused to turn
over the tapes and, on Saturday, October 20,
1973, ordered Richardson to
dismiss Cox. Richardson refused and resigned
instead, as did Deputy Attorney
General William Ruckelshaus. Finally, the
solicitor general discharged Cox. A
storm of public protest resulted from this
"Saturday night massacre." In
response, Nixon appointed another special
prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Texas
lawyer, and gave the tapes to Sirica. Some
subpoenaed conversations were
missing, and one tape had a mysterious gap of 181
minutes. Experts determined
that the gap was the result of five separate
erasures. In March 1974 a grand
jury indicted Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman,
and four other White House
officials for their part in the Watergate cover-up
and named Nixon as an
"unindicted co-conspirator." The following month
Jaworski requested and
Nixon released written transcripts of 42 more tapes. The
conversations
revealed an overwhelming concern with punishing political
opponents and
thwarting the Watergate investigation. In May 1974 Jaworski
requested 64 more
tapes as evidence in the criminal cases against the indicted
officials. Nixon
refused; on July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8-0 that Nixon
must turn over
the tapes. On July 29-30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee
approved three
articles of impeachment, charging Nixon with misusing his power
in order to
violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, obstructing
justice in
the Watergate affair, and defying Judiciary Committee subpoenas.
Further
Revelations Soon after the Watergate scandal came to light,
investigators
uncovered a related group of illegal activities: Since 1971 a
White House
group called the "plumbers" had been doing whatever was
necessary to stop
leaks to the press. A grand jury indicted Ehrlichman, White
House Special
Counsel Charles Colson, and others for organizing a break-in and
burglary in
1971 of a psychiatrist's office to obtain damaging material
against
Daniel Ellsberg, who had publicized classified documents called
the Pentagon
Papers. Investigators also discovered that the Nixon
administration had
solicited large sums of money in illegal campaign
contributions—used to
finance political espionage and to pay more than
$500,000 to the Watergate
burglars—and that certain administration officials
had systematically lied
about their involvement in the break-in and cover-up.
In addition, White House
aides testified that in 1972 they had falsified
documents to make it appear that
President John F. Kennedy had been
involved in the 1963 assassination of
President Ngo Dinh Diem of South
Vietnam, and had written false and slanderous
documents accusing Senator
Hubert H. Humphrey of moral improprieties. Nixon's
Resignation Throughout
this period of revelations, Nixon's support in Congress
and popularity
nationwide steadily eroded. On August 5, 1974, three tapes
revealed that
Nixon had, on June 23, 1972, ordered the Federal Bureau of
Investigation
to stop investigating the Watergate break-in. The tapes also
showed that
Nixon himself had helped to direct the cover-up of the
administration's
involvement in the affair. Rather than face almost certain
impeachment, Nixon
resigned on August 9, the first U.S. president to do so. A
month later his
successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him for all crimes he might
have committed
while in office; Nixon was then immune from federal prosecution.
The
Watergate scandal severely shook the faith of the American people in
the
presidency and turned out to be a supreme test for the U.S.
Constitution.
Throughout the ordeal, however, the constitutional system
of checks and balances
worked to prevent abuses, as the Founding Fathers had
intended. Watergate showed
that in a nation of laws no one is above the law,
not even the president