WATERGATE SCANDAL

Watergate Scandal
Watergate Scandal


(1972–75), U.S. political scandal surrounding the revelation of illegal activities on the part of the incumbent(serving/sitting) Republican administration of President Richard M. Nixon during and after the 1972 presidential election campaign.


The matter was first brought to public attention by the arrest of five men who, on June 17, 1972, broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, an office–apartment–hotel complex in Washington, D.C. Within a few days of their arrest at the Watergate, charges of burglary and wiretapping were brought against the five and against E. Howard Hunt, Jr., a former White House aide, and G. Gordon Liddy, general counsel for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. All seven were tried before Judge John J. Sirica, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in January 1973. During the months between their arrest and their trial, President Nixon and his aides had denied that anyone in the administration had been involved, despite persistent press reports to the contrary, especially in The Washington Post.


Of the seven, five pleaded guilty and two were convicted by a jury.

At sentencing on March 23, 1973, Sirica read a letter from one of the defendants, James W. McCord, Jr., which charged that the White House had been conducting a “cover-up” to conceal its connection with the break-in. McCord also charged that the seven defendants had been pressured by the White House to plead guilty and remain silent.

With the White House now clearly implicated, President Nixon on April 1973, announced that he had begun a new investigation. White House press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler said that all previous statements issued by the executive branch regarding Watergate were “inoperative.” After two weeks, Nixon issued a public statement that he took responsibility for the actions of staff members implicated in the case. Nixon, however, denied any personal knowledge of either the campaign of political espionage(spying) or the attempts to conceal any wrongdoing.


However, Alexander P. Butterfield, formerly of the White House staff, disclosed that conversations in the president's offices had secretly been recorded on tape.


When the tapes were subpoenaed for, Nixon refused on the grounds of executive privilege and national security. When Judge Sirica ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes and that order was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Nixon offered instead to provide written summaries of the tapes in question in return for an agreement that no further presidential documents would be sought.


A storm of public protest pressured Nixon into releasing the tapes on December 8, but of the nine tapes specified in Sirica's order, only seven were delivered (the White House claimed the other two had never existed); and one of the seven contained a gap that, according to a later report by a panel of experts, could not have been made accidentally.


By the beginning of 1974, several former White House aides were either under indictment or had pleaded guilty to charges stemming from Watergate. The term itself had come to denote not merely the original break-in but also more or less related allegations of misconduct, including the purchase of governmental favours with campaign contributions and other “dirty tricks” of the 1972 campaign. On August 1974 the President supplied transcripts of three tapes that clearly implicated him in the cover-up. With these revelations, Nixon's last support in Congress evaporated. He announced his resignation on August 8, stating that he “no longer had a strong enough political base” with which to govern. He left office at 11:35 AM the following day, August 9.


Former President Nixon was spared any further punishment when his successor, Gerald R. Ford, granted an unconditional pardon on September 8, 1974.