At 2:00 A.M. on June 17, 1972, five Cuban men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. These men named Gordon Liddy, counsel to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), as an accomplice, but President Richard M. Nixon insisted that the “White House had no involvement whatsoever” in this “third-rate burglary.” Liddy, in turn, could be linked to Operation Gemstone, an administration program to investigate and harass political opponents.
To keep Gemstone from becoming public knowledge, Nixon and his two top aides, H. R. Haldeman and John D. Erlichman, decided to get the Central Intelligence Agency to impede the pending FBI investigation of the break-in by having the CIA claim that it was a matter of national security. White House involvement in the burglary and in Gemstone was covered up successfully through the fall of 1972, and Nixon won a landside victory over his Democratic opponent, George McGovern.
Persistent stories in the Washington Post and other newspapers, however, linked administration officials to the break-in, wiretapping, illegal use of campaign contributions, forged documents to embarrass rival candidates, and other political “dirty tricks."
The Watergate burglars were provisionally sentenced to long prison terms by federal judge John Sirica, who hoped to prod them into talking in order to reduce their sentences. John Dean, the White House counsel, realized that he might be implicated, and he confessed his role in the matter to the Justice Department and implicated Nixon's top aides in the cover-up. On April 30, 1973, Nixon accepted the resignations of Haldeman and Erlichman.
The Senate appointed a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sam Ervin (Democrat-North Carolina), a folksy “country lawyer” and a specialist in civil liberties. In May1973 the committee began nationally televised hearings that captured public attention for the next three months. John Dean testified that the President had taken part in an elaborate cover-up of improper activities, although he had no evidence. But then an aide to Haldeman, Alexander But-terfield, admitted that the White House had taped conversations in the Oval Office. Both the Senate committee and the Justice Department's special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, demanded that Nixon turn over any recorded conversations involving Watergate. Nixon turned over some of the tapes but told Cox he could not have the rest, citing his right to the confidentiality of conversations in his office, a claim known as executive privilege.
Cox went to court to obtain the evidence, and Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused and was himself fired by the President; finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork, the next-ranking official in the Justice Department, agreed to carry out Nixon's order. This Saturday Night Massacre unleashed a fire storm of protest. Shortly thereafter the House Judiciary Committee opened an impeachment inquiry.
The House committee deliberated until July 24, 1974, when it voted to recommend that the full House pass three articles of impeachment. It accused Nixon of obstruction of justice (his attempt to use the CIA to impede an FBI investigation), abuse of power (misuse of the CIA, FBI, and Internal Revenue Service to harass his political enemies), and refusal to turn over evidence to Congress. It concluded that the President had “acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government,” causing “manifest injury to the people of the United States.”
After that vote, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon (1974), ordered the President to turn over his tapes and other evidence to the federal district court judge who was trying the Watergate crimes, for use by the new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. One of the tapes did show that Nixon had engaged in a cover-up and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is a federal crime and an impeachable offense.
Shortly afterward, a delegation of senior Republican senators, led by Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater, advised Nixon that the Senate would probably convict him if an impeachment trial were held. Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974. He was later pardoned for all Watergate-related crimes by his successor, Gerald Ford.
The Watergate scandal symbolized a dangerous imbalance in the federal system of checks and balances. It was the product of an excessive growth of Presidential power and of Presidential efforts to circumvent the legislative branch. The Senate investigation helped Congress restore its public image and regain some of its lost authority.
See also Ervin, Samuel J., Jr.; Ethics; Executive privilege; Ford, Gerald R.; Impeachment; Independent counsel; Investigations, congressional; Nixon, Richard M.; United States v. Nixon
Sources
- Philip B. Kurland, “The Watergate Inquiry, 1973”, in Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792–1974, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Bruns,
vol. 5 (New York: Bowker, 1975). Stanley L. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate (New York: Knopf, 1990). Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President's Men (New York: Warner, 1974)
