The Watergate Scandal: A Political Scandal that Shook America

1. WatergateScandal http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00868/money-graphics-2008_868254a.jpg

2. Watch the “Quick Summary” • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXCxZE0hZ40

3. Stage 1: The Watergate Break-in

4. On June 17, 1972, five men carrying wiretapping equipment were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters located in the Watergate Complex in Washington D.C. http://www.mustseewashingtondc.com/attractions/watergate-complex.jpg

5. Frank Wills discovered a piece of tape over a basement-door lock in the Watergate apartment and office complex in Washington, D.C. Wills, a night watchman at the complex, removed the tape and left to get a cup of coffee. When he returned less than an hour later, he found the same lock had been re-taped, so he called the police.

6. Plainclothes officers responded to the call, and they soon confronted five burglars in the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor of the building. The burglars wore business suits and thin rubber gloves, and they carried cameras, film, a walkie-talkie, lock, picks, electronic surveillance equipment, and stacks of $100 bills. Although they offered false identifications at first, it was soon discovered that they worked for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, popularly known as CREEP. They were at the Watergate to bug the telephones and transmit Democratic campaign strategy back to CREEP.

7. Watergate Burglars http://www.peacebuttons.info/IMAGES/0617.1972_Watergate-burglar.jpg

8. Most newspapers downplayed or ignored the initial story about the break-in, but the WashingtonPost ran a story on the front page of its Sunday edition. The Post’s story was written by Bob Woodward, who with his colleague Carl Bernstein, soon began an in-depth investigation of the Watergate burglary.

9. John Mitchell (Nixon’s campaign manager) • In response to the story, John Mitchell, President Nixon’s campaign manager, denied that the burglary was part of a spying operation by the president’s men. The president’s press secretary ignored accusation. Within days of the break-in, President Nixon himself denied the White House had been involved.

10. Questioned by the press, the White House dismissed the incident as “a third-rate burglary attempt.” Pressed further, PresidentNixon himself denied any White House involvement. http://chnm.gmu.edu/7tah/workshops/ws1/images/tahwatergate.jpg

11. Stage 1: Questions • What does the acronym CREEP stand for? • Why do you think Nixon’s campaign would want to bug the phones at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Remember, Nixon is the incumbent Republican president. • Define: Hush Money

12. Stage 2: Investigations Begin

13. Nixon managed to keep the lid on the incident until after his re-election, but eventually the lid blew off due to congressional investigations. http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall06/Weiner/IMGS/whitehouseconnection.gif

14. Hunt and Libby had arranged for the illegal wiretaps (listening devices) at the Democratic headquarters, part of their campaign of ‘dirty tricks’ against the rival Democratic party. http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/woodstein/post/images/oct10_detail.jpg

15. Presidential Election of 1972

16. In the early days following the Watergate break-in, hardly anyone in the country suspected that there was a direct link between the burglary and the Whitehouse. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were two young reporters at the Post who pursued the story. The two reporters worked tirelessly to link Nixon’s advisers, and eventually Nixon himself, to a cover-up of the White House’s involvement in the burglary.

17. Soon, a number of newspapers and magazines aggressively covered the story, and a grand jury convened to investigate the ramifications of the break-in. After the initial grand jury investigations in September 1972, only two White House aides, Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, and the five burglars – James McCord, CREEP’s director of security; and four Cubans who had been recruited for the job – were indicted (charged with a crime). Both Liddy and Hunt had initially avoided arrest, but later pleaded guilty to involvement in the burglary.

18. In fact, G. Gordon Liddy & E. Howard Hunt, were former FBI and CIA agents currently working for Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. Their job was to protect the Nixon administration, anyway necessary, legal or not. Howard Hunt G. Gordon Liddy http://www.helmr.com/images/liddy.jpg http://media.keprtv.com/images/070124_Howard_Hunt.jpg

19. More than just a burglary… • Woodward and Bernstein and others obtained evidence that White House officials were responsible for a series of efforts to ensure Nixon was reelected. They planned to discredit and sabotage several Democratic presidential contenders, and pledged to do “whatever was necessary” to stop government leaks to the press.

20. More than just a burglary… • They also extorted (illegally used their official position to obtain) millions of dollars in campaign contributions from corporations seeking government favors, and even tried to get the Internal Revenue Service to, in Nixon’s words, “pressure our enemies.”

21. In the meantime, two reporters at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, uncovered the Committee’s to Re-elects illegal “slush fund’ and its links to key White House aides. http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Watergate/woodsteingraham.gif

22. More than just a burglary… • As news stories increasingly connected top presidential officials with such sordid activities, the White House issued stronger denials and put pressure on the Washington Post and others to back off.

23. Stage 2: Questions 4. Define: Indicted 5. Define: Extort 6. Although the Watergate Scandal did not single-handedly win Nixon his reelection in 1972, and despite tensions over the Vietnam Conflict, how close was the election?

24. “Deep Throat” • “Deep Throat” is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. • In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, a family attorney stated that former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. Felt was suffering from dementia at the time and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the attorney's claim.

25. “Deep Throat” • Woodward claimed that he would signal to "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When Deep Throat wanted a meeting he would make special marks on page 20 of Woodward's copy of The New York Times; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn," at 2:00 a.m.

26. Stage 3: Congressional Hearings

27. In March 1973, the grand jury investigating the burglary convicted Liddy, Hunt, and the five burglars and sentenced them to 20, 35, and 40 years in prison. Soon thereafter, L. Patrick Gray, the North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities, convened hearings on Watergate. The hearings were televised across the nation and were watched with great fascination by large numbers of Americans.

28. Former White House counsel John Dean testified before the committee in June. He revealed that Attorney General John Mitchell (who became Nixon’s campaign manager) had ordered the Watergate break-in and that the White House was covering up its involvement. Dean also testified that the president had authorized payments of hush money to the burglars to keep them quiet, a charge vehemently denied by Nixon’s aides.

29. On July 16, 1973, White House Aide Alexander Butterfield testified that Nixon had ordered a taping system installed in the White House to automatically record all conversations (something few people knew about). Now, the hearing’s key questions – What did the president know, and when did he know it – could be answered by listening to the tapes.

30. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to investigate, immediately subpoenaed (summoned to court) eight tapes from the White House to confirm Dean’s testimony.

31. Nixon refused to give them the tapes, claiming that they were “vital to national security.”

32. The Midnight Massacre • Cox told Nixon that wasn’t good enough, and Nixon proceeded to fire Cox. This firing became known as “The Midnight Massacre.” Cox’s dismissal prompted an outpouring of protest, which included 350,000 angry telegrams sent to Congress and the White House. Nixon responded to the unexpected protests by appointing another special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, and then turning over the subpoenaed tapes.

33. By this time many of Nixon’s top aides had been indicted for crimes related to Watergate.

34. Stage 3: Questions 7. Define: Subpoena 8. Prediction: What kind of information do you think is recorded on the tapes that President Nixon is refusing to give up?

35. http://video.anews.eu/videos_clips/theway/img/watergate2.jpg

36. Stage 4: The Secret Tapes When President Nixon finally turned over the secret tapes to Judge Sirica, some of the conversations requested by the special prosecutor were missing. One tape had a mysterious gap of 18.5 minutes which experts said resulted from five separate erasures. Nixon’s aides denied that any intentional erasures had occurred and blamed the 18.5 minute gap on an accidental erasure by Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

37. Finally on June 23, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to releasethe unaltered tapes. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/12/19/1229689270212/Gallery-deepthroat-dies---010.jpg

38. Woods told Judge Sirica she had accidentally erased the tape while she was transcribing it, but her description was rather implausible and accounted for only 5 minutes of erasure, leaving 13.5 minutes of missing tape unaccounted for. Americans believed the missing conversations were part of a larger White House effort to hide damaging evidence.

39. Seven top White House officials – including Mitchell and Colson – were indicted in March 1974 by a grand jury for their role in the Watergate cover-up. Though Nixon was not indicted with his top aides, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski gave Sirica a secret report and bulging briefcase of evidence against the president and asked him to send it to the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering impeachment charges against charges against the president.

40. Claiming executive privilege, Nixon refused to surrender the White House tapes. Under enormous pressure, he eventually released some of the tapes. One of the tapes was suspiciously missing 18-minutes of recording. http://watergate.info/images/740429address.jpg

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42. Then, Jaworski requested 42 more tapes. Instead of releasing the tapes, Nixon released transcripts of the tapes prepared by White House aides, who had edited out all irrelevant material. Their release caused a sensation: the Government Printing Office sold 800 copies in three hours on May 1, 1974, and paperback books rushed into print sold millions of copies.

43. “Expletive Deleted” • The transcripts were somewhat sanitized for public consumption; wherever vulgarities existed on the tape, the aides wrote, “expletive deleted” on the transcripts. The term “expletive deleted” took the place of vulgar curse words. Thus, popular culture began using the phrase “expletive deleted “instead of cursing.

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45. The guilty White House officials implicated President Nixon. During the testimony, it was discovered that Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the Oval office. http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall06/Weiner/IMGS/nixonsmen.gif

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47. Many of Nixon’s former supporters now doubted Nixon’s credibility and suggested that he needed to resign. • Two months later, Jaworski requested 64 more tapes as evidence in the cases against the indicted White House officials. • Nixon refused to comply, but the Supreme Court voted 8-0 in July of 1974 that he had to turn over the tapes.

48. Stage 4: Questions 9. What does “expletive deleted” mean? 10. In the political cartoon, please explain why Nixon is holding part of the sentence, “I am not a crook” in his mouth.

49. Stage 5: Nixon Resigns After the Supreme Court ruled in late July 1974 that Nixon must turn over the remaining tapes, the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment against the president. First, they charged him with (abuse of power) misuse of presidential power to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. Second, he had clearly obstructed evidence (obstruction of justice). Third, he had lied to Congress and concealed information (contempt of Congress) that would reveal the truth of the scandal.

50. The transcript of one such White House conversation clearly implicated Nixon in the cover-up only days after the Watergate break-in. The tapes contained the “smoking gun” – the irrefutable evidence that Nixon had knowingly violated the law and that he had known about and had participated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in from almost the very beginning – something he had steadfastly denied.