Watergate began with a leak-plugging squad and ended with a president resigning
The burglars caught inside Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972 were not a one-off. They came from a White House effort to stop leaks that had already broken into a psychiatrist's office. Covering up their arrest cost Richard Nixon his presidency, and gave the world the all-purpose suffix -gate.
The obsession with secrecy started early. When The New York Times revealed the secret bombing of Cambodia in May 1969, Nixon had reporters and suspected leakers wiretapped. In June 1971 the paper began printing the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War leaked by analyst Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon told aide Chuck Colson to stop leaks by any means, and a unit nicknamed the Plumbers was formed. With the former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, it burgled the Los Angeles office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, hunting for compromising material.
For the 1972 campaign, G. Gordon Liddy, counsel to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and Hunt drew up Operation Gemstone, a menu of covert schemes including kidnapping protesters. The version generally thought to have been approved by John Mitchell, the former attorney general then running the campaign, called for bugging Democratic offices in the Watergate complex. Mostly Cuban burglars carried it out, and their arrest set off the unravelling. Why the break-in happened and who exactly ordered it are still debated.
The cover-up held long enough for Nixon to win a landslide. Then the burglars' 1973 trial prompted a Senate investigation, while The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, helped by a source called Deep Throat, traced illegal campaign funding of spying. Nixon had secretly installed microphones in the Oval Office in 1971. When special prosecutor Archibald Cox demanded the tapes, Nixon fired him in the Saturday Night Massacre, and the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the order.
In July 1974 the Supreme Court ordered the tapes released, and the House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment. The so-called smoking gun recording showed Nixon ordering the CIA to halt the FBI's inquiry. On August 9, 1974, he became the first American president to resign. Sixty-nine people were charged, including two cabinet members; his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him.
Source: Watergate scandal
