Who is watergate scandal

By early , the nation was consumed by Watergate. His long political career began in when he was elected to the House of Representatives. Nixon served as Vice-President for eight years, then lost the election to John F. He was vindicated by winning a landslide re-election.

He was sworn in for a second term in Janury The first was on April 30, , in which he announced the departure of Dean, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. A more defiant speech was delivered on August 15, Perhaps the politically most difficult speech was the one on April 29, , in which Nixon released partial transcripts of the White House tapes. Political investigations began in February when the Senate established a Committee to investigate the Watergate scandal.

The Committee also uncovered the existence of the secret White House tape recordings, sparking a major political and legal battle between the Congress and the President. In , the House of Representatives authorised the Judiciary Committee to consider impeachment proceedings against Nixon.

The work of this Committee was again the spotlight a quarter of a century later when Bill Clinton was impeached. The House Judiciary Committee voted to accept three of four proposed Articles of Impeachment, with some Republicans voting with Democrats to recommend impeachment of the President.

There were the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton , of course, but perhaps the most obvious analogue is the one president who resigned before Congress could kick him out: Richard Nixon. So what did Nixon do exactly that made Watergate so infamous — and how did the scandal itself come about? Everyone knows that Watergate had something to do with a break-in at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. But it's not really the break-in itself that ended Richard Nixon's presidency so much as the fact that the ensuing investigation revealed a tangled web of wrongdoing of almost unfathomable scale and complexity, implicating the highest levels of the White House up to and including the president.

Veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate in real time, and her excellent book on that period — Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall — was recently reissued. In , near the 40th anniversary of the resignation, she helped walk us through the trickier points of the scandal and its aftermath. Wagner Archives at New York University, was also enormously helpful. Three of them were Cuban by background, a fourth was an American who had participated in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and the fifth was a former CIA employee.

They were found with two listening devices, and two ceiling panels in an office adjacent to that of DNC chair Lawrence O'Brien were removed, suggesting that the burglars were attempting to bug O'Brien's office.

The break-in — the fourth such attempt, Drew says, with one previous break-in succeeding but not accomplishing the mission at hand — had been planned by Howard Hunt and G. Hunt was a veteran CIA operative who had been involved in the agency's successful plot to overthrow left-leaning Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and in the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion. Liddy was a former FBI agent turned aspiring Republican politician, who became close with the Nixon election team after a failed congressional run.

Both were members of the team known as the White House plumbers — but more on that in a minute. Exactly what the burglars were hoping to find, through either photographing documents or bugging the office, is still somewhat unclear. Hunt insisted they were looking for evidence that the DNC was receiving money from the North Vietnamese or Cuban governments. Liddy has recently claimed the plan was to find information embarrassing to White House counsel John Dean.

Perhaps the most popular theory is that Nixon was worried that O'Brien knew about his financial dealings with billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes, for whom O'Brien served as a lobbyist in addition to his DNC duties.

If that was in fact what the money was used for, it'd be natural for Nixon to fear what O'Brien could do with that knowledge. There is no smoking gun indicating that Nixon ordered the break-in personally. As Rutgers professor and Nixon expert David Greenberg notes , CRP staff member and Watergate co-conspirator Jeb Magruder claimed to have heard Nixon authorize the break-in, but no hard evidence has turned up to confirm that allegation.

However, Nixon certainly created an environment in which criminality was acceptable and even encouraged, and actively participated in covering up the crime. Far from it. Nixon's operatives engaged in a whole bevy of criminal activity, much of it targeted at sabotaging his political opponents.

His White House had an investigative unit known as the "plumbers" who were tasked with much of this. One notorious plumber operation involved breaking into the offices of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, as a government contractor, had contributed to a massive report on the war effort in Vietnam, detailing ways the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses had misled the public about the war, that would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers. Ironically, the break-in led to the dismissal of the espionage charges against Ellsberg, and didn't yield much useful information for the plumbers.

President Nixon mused about using the plumbers to break into the Brookings Institution, a think tank where two other scholars who had worked on the Pentagon Papers Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin worked, so as to retrieve any related documents in their possession; Colson would eventually consider doing the job through a firebombing.

CRP, Nixon's campaign committee, illegally attempted to interfere in the Democratic primaries in a variety of ways. CRP operative Donald Segretti was involved in many of the worst of these efforts, including fabricating multiple documents with stationery from Maine Sen.

Edmund Muskie, the vice presidential nominee and a strong contender for the presidency that year. One accused Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, also a contestant, of having an illegitimate child with a teenager and of having been arrested for homosexuality. Another slurred French-Canadians as "Canucks," then a potent racial epithet; that damaged Muskie's standing in the New Hampshire primary and contributed to his eventual defeat.

And there was more that simply never got unearthed. There's tape of Colson bragging about blackmail efforts where even Nixon sounds surprised — but on the tape, Colson swears he'll take those secrets to his grave, and he seems to have kept his word Colson died in Reviewing John Dean's book The Nixon Defense , Bob Woodward wrote that "the full story of the Nixon administration's secret operations may forever remain buried along with their now-deceased perpetrators.

The White House's involvement was unearthed through a combination of government investigations into the break-in and investigative reporting by the Washington Post's Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Within days of the break-in, Bernstein and Woodward figured out that one of the five men arrested for the crime, James McCord, had a contract to do security for the Republican National Committee, and had connected the burglars to Hunt, and Hunt to Colson.

On September 15, , the five burglars, Liddy, and Hunt were indicted by a federal grand jury. By January — after Nixon was reelected in a landslide, winning every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia — Hunt and the four of the actual burglars had pleaded guilty, and Liddy and McCord were found guilty after a trial.

But John Sirica, the district court judge who tried these defendants, stated he was "not satisfied" the full story of the break-in had been told, and on February 7, the Senate voted unanimously to create a temporary "select" in Congress jargon committee, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina, to investigate the break-in.

It became clear that the conspiracy — and, in particular, the cover-up — reached higher in March , when McCord sent a letter to Sirica alleging a high-level cover-up and suggesting he feared retaliation if he were to "disclose knowledge of the facts in this matter. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director, testified during his confirmation hearings to become permanent director that he had provided White House counsel John Dean with files concerning the FBI's investigation into the break-in, and that Dean had "probably lied" to investigators.

From that point, it wasn't long before senior aides to the president began to be forced out for their involvement. These events, which took place on October 20, , are known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes. Early in , the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes.

While the president dragged his feet, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution. Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on August 8, and left office the following day. Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office.

Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, served four and a half years. Haldeman spent 19 months in prison while John Ehrlichman spent 18 for attempting to cover up the break-in. Nixon himself never admitted to any criminal wrongdoing, though he did acknowledge using poor judgment. His abuse of presidential power had a long-lasting effect on American political life, creating an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust.

While many Americans had been deeply dismayed by the outcome of the Vietnam War, and saddened by the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy , Martin Luther King and other leaders, Watergate added further disappointment to a national climate already soured by the difficulties and losses of the previous decade. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. February Richard Nixon orders the installation of a secret taping system that records all conversations in the Oval Office, his Executive Office Building office, and his Camp David office and The s were a tumultuous time.

In some ways, the decade was a continuation of the s. Women, African Americans, Native Americans, gays and lesbians and other marginalized people continued their fight for equality, and many Americans joined the protest against the ongoing Jordan's speech