What was watergate

YouTube: willfungku Watergate has led to the publication of hundreds of books, dozens of films and many, many references in popular culture including the use of the suffix -gate for any scandal. After 40 years it continues to resonate in modern day politics and acts as a warning to anyone in public life of the dangers of being too driven by power to not notice the moral, ethical and legal implications of what you are doing.

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Newsletters : Sign Up. Partner Publications. The latest Irish and international sports news for readers and members. The Senate investigation revealed the existence of audiotapes, the content of which proved incriminating to President Nixon, and ultimately led to his resignation. Nationally televised, the Watergate Committee hearings boosted public confidence in Congress. This committee can serve another quite important function that neither a grand jury investigation nor a jury proceeding is equipped to serve, and that is to develop the facts in full view of all the people of America.

Skip to main navigation Skip to main content. Print Materials Brochures International Translations. His campaign paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the burglars to buy their silence. Although Nixon won the election in November , the scandal escalated. Soon after, a letter written by McCord alleged that five of the defendants had been pressured into pleading guilty during their trial.

Others, too, began to crack under pressure. 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