Watergate was a designation of a major U.S. scandal that began with the
burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic party's 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-sponsered 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.
"The Berlin Wall" of Ehrlichman and Haldeman on Ap...
English: President Nixon delivers an Address to th...
English: A photo of the Watergate Complex taken fr...Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned as well. The new
attorney general, Elliot Richardson, appointed a special prosecutor, Harvard
Law School profesor Archibald Cox, to conduct a full-scale investigation of
the Watergate break-in. In May of 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 immediately denied this assertion.
The testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield unlocked the
entire investigation pertaining to White House tapes. On...