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Watergate
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I. Introduction
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Watergate, designation of a major United States
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.
II. The White House
Tapes
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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, Solicitor General Robert
Bork 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 18½ 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." In April the House
Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House
conversations. At the end of that month, Nixon released edited
transcripts of the White House tapes. The conversations revealed an
overwhelming concern with punishing political opponents and
thwarting the Watergate investigation. The Judiciary Committee,
however, rejected Nixon's edited transcripts, saying that he did not
comply with their subpoena.
In April 1974
Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the
tapes of 64 presidential conversations to use as evidence in the
criminal cases against the indicted officials. Nixon refused, and
Jaworski appealed to the Supreme Court to force Nixon to turn over
the tapes. On July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8-0 in the United
States v. Nixon that Nixon must turn over the
tapes.
On July 29 and
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.
III. Further
Revelations
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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 on U.S.
activities during the Vietnam War (1959-1973) 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.
IV. Nixon's
Resignation
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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 (FBI) 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.
In April 1996
after more than two decades of bitter court battles that continued
beyond Nixon's death in 1994, attorneys for the estate of the former
president agreed to begin releasing more than 3000 hours of secret
Nixon White House tapes. The recordings had been stored in the National
Archives after Nixon's resignation, and had not been available
to the public.
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.
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Further
Reading
HOW TO CITE THIS
ARTICLE
"Watergate," Microsoft® Encarta® Online
Encyclopedia 2000
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft
Corporation. All rights reserved.
© 1993-2000 Microsoft Corporation.
All rights
reserved.
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