Watergate Happened 54 Years Ago

It's Wednesday, June seventeenth. Fifty four years ago today, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington DC. If you're under forty, you've probably heard "Watergate" used as a reference point a thousand times but couldn't actually explain what happened. Every scandal in America gets "gate" stuck on the end of it, Deflategate, Bridgegate, whatever, and most people using that suffix have no idea what the original scandal actually involved. So here's the short version: a president who was about to win reelection in one of the biggest landslides in American history authorized a break-in he didn't need, got caught because a security guard noticed tape on a door, and was brought down not by the crime itself but by a recording system he had installed in his own office to preserve his legacy. Richard Nixon built the machine that destroyed his presidency. That's Watergate. On the morning of June 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate complex named Frank Wills noticed a piece of tape over the latch of a basement door. The tape was keeping the door from locking. He removed it. When he came back on his next round, someone had re-taped it. He called the police. Officers found five men inside the Democratic National Committee offices carrying cameras, film, electronic bugging equipment, and about $2,300 in sequential hundred-dollar bills, which is basically a sign that says "this money came from somewhere official."

Three of the men were Cuban exiles. One was a Cuban American. The fifth was James McCord, a former CIA agent who also happened to be the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which, and I cannot stress this enough, was actually called CREEP. That was the real acronym. The committee running Nixon's reelection campaign had the acronym CREEP, and nobody in the room said "maybe we should change that."

The break-in was part of a broader campaign of political espionage and sabotage run by Nixon's inner circle. They were trying to wiretap the DNC's phones and photograph documents. But here's the part that makes the whole thing almost tragic in its pointlessness: Nixon didn't need to cheat. Five months later, in November 1972, he won reelection carrying forty nine out of fifty states. He beat George McGovern by over twenty three percentage points. It was one of the most lopsided victories in the history of presidential elections. The break-in that destroyed his presidency was for intelligence he never needed, against an opponent who never had a chance.

And it wasn't even the first break-in. This is the part that explains why Nixon's team thought they could get away with it: they'd already been doing this kind of thing for a year. In 1971, a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, classified documents showing that the government had been systematically lying to the public about the Vietnam War for over a decade. Nixon was furious, not because the Papers exposed his administration (they mostly covered the Johnson and Kennedy years), but because he couldn't tolerate leaks. He created a covert unit inside the White House to plug leaks and discredit Ellsberg. They called themselves the Plumbers. Their first job was breaking into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for medical records they could use to destroy his reputation. The same operatives who ran that break-in went on to plan and execute the Watergate job. By the time they walked into the DNC on June 17, they were already experienced at this. They just hadn't been caught yet. Nixon's involvement in the break-in itself is still debated by historians. What isn't debated is what happened next: he tried to bury it, and the burial is what killed his presidency.

Six days after the break-in, Nixon met with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman (HALL-duh-mun) in the Oval Office and approved a plan to have the CIA tell the FBI to stop investigating the Watergate money trail. The stated excuse would be that the investigation could jeopardize national security operations. This conversation was recorded. Nixon had installed a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office in 1971 because he wanted a detailed record of his presidency for historical purposes. He recorded everything: meetings, phone calls, casual conversations. Every word spoken in that office went onto magnetic tape. Including the one where he agreed to obstruct an FBI investigation.

For the next two years, the cover-up unraveled in slow motion. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein followed the money from the Watergate burglars back to the Nixon campaign, guided by a source they called Deep Throat. Deep Throat's identity remained secret for over thirty years. In 2005, former FBI deputy director Mark Felt revealed that he had been the source. The number-two official at the FBI had been leaking to the press because he believed the White House was corrupting the investigation his own agency was running.

In the summer of 1973, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield casually mentioned during a Senate hearing that the President had been taping all his conversations. The room went silent. From that moment, every investigation, the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the special prosecutor, was about one thing: getting the tapes. Nixon fought to keep the tapes with everything he had. He claimed executive privilege: the principle that a president's private conversations are confidential and can't be compelled by another branch of government. The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, subpoenaed the tapes. Nixon refused to hand them over and then ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox.

Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus (RUCK-ulls-house), to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and was fired. It fell to the third-ranking official at the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, to finally carry out the order. Bork fired Cox. The media called it the Saturday Night Massacre, and the public backlash was so severe that Nixon's approval rating, already low, collapsed further. The guy who won forty nine states less than a year earlier was now being compared to a dictator.

Nixon eventually surrendered some tapes, but one had an eighteen-and-a-half minute gap. His secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed she accidentally erased it while simultaneously answering a phone and pressing a foot pedal, a physical maneuver so improbable that news photographers asked her to demonstrate it. The resulting photo, known as the "Rose Mary Stretch," became one of the iconic images of the scandal.

In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon had to surrender sixty four additional tapes. One of them, recorded six days after the break-in, contained the conversation where Nixon approved using the CIA to block the FBI investigation. It became known as the "smoking gun" tape, and when it was released, whatever support Nixon had left in Congress evaporated overnight. On August 8, 1974, he announced his resignation on national television. He never admitted to criminal wrongdoing. "I am not a crook," he had told reporters the previous November, a quote that became possibly the least convincing denial in the history of American politics. Gerald Ford succeeded him and granted Nixon a full pardon a month later, sparing him from prosecution and outraging millions of Americans who wanted him to face trial.

Everyone else went to prison. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, served eighteen months. John Ehrlichman (ER-lick-mun), his domestic policy advisor, served eighteen months. John Mitchell, his attorney general, served nineteen months. G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the break-in, served over four years, the longest sentence of any Watergate figure. The Watergate burglars themselves served between one and fourteen months. In total, over forty administration officials were indicted or jailed. The person who authorized the cover-up, whose voice was on the tape approving the obstruction, walked free because a president he appointed pardoned him thirty days after taking office. The people who followed orders did time. The person who gave the orders didn't. The reason Watergate still gets referenced five decades later isn't because of what Nixon did. Presidents have done worse. It's because of what Watergate proved about the system.

Before Watergate, there was a general assumption among Americans that the president, whatever his flaws, operated within the rules. Nixon shattered that assumption publicly, on tape, in his own voice. The tapes didn't just catch a president breaking the law. They caught a president who sounded petty, paranoid, vindictive, and entirely willing to use the machinery of government to protect himself. The gap between the public image of the presidency and the private reality of how power was exercised became undeniable. A Gallup poll taken just before the scandal showed sixty eight percent of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. By 1974, that number had dropped to thirty six percent. It has never recovered. Trust in government in 2026 hovers around twenty percent.

Watergate also established the precedent that no one, including the president, is above the law, at least in theory. The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling that Nixon had to surrender his tapes was the first time a sitting president had been told by the judiciary that executive privilege had limits. That principle has been tested and debated in every administration since, and it's the legal backbone behind every congressional investigation, every special counsel, and every subpoena that targets a sitting president.

And then there's the suffix. "Gate" became the universal tag for any scandal in American life, from politics to sports to entertainment. Monicagate. Irangate. Gamergate. Deflategate. The word has been applied to so many trivial controversies that it's almost lost its weight, which is maybe the final irony: the scandal that taught America to distrust its leaders became so overused as a label that it stopped sounding serious. The original Watergate was a constitutional crisis that ended a presidency. Most of the "gates" that followed were not. But the reflex to name them that way tells you something about how deeply the original one scarred the country's relationship with power. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Fifty four years ago today, five men were arrested for breaking into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex. The break-in was connected to Nixon's reelection campaign, which he won five months later in a forty nine-state landslide, meaning the crime that ended his presidency was committed to win a race he was already going to win. The cover-up brought him down, not the break-in itself, and the evidence came from a taping system he had installed in his own office. He tried to keep the tapes. His attorney general resigned rather than fire the prosecutor demanding them. His deputy refused and was fired. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had to hand them over. The smoking gun tape proved he'd authorized the cover-up six days after the break-in. He resigned on August 8, 1974. Trust in government dropped from sixty eight percent to thirty six percent and has never recovered. Every scandal since has been called "something-gate," which means the most lasting legacy of the worst constitutional crisis in modern American history might be a suffix.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.