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This June 17 marks half a century since the beginning of one of the most important political controversies in the history of the United States: the Watergate scandal. This case revealed how former President Richard Nixon’s entourage spied on the Democratic Party’s campaign ahead of the 1972 presidential election and how the former president tried by all means to prevent this from being discovered. The controversy ultimately caused Nixon to become the first president of his country to resign.
On June 17, 1972, exactly 50 years ago, five people were arrested for attempting to rob the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex. An apparently unimportant event that, however, hid a much greater reality: espionage by former President Richard Nixon’s campaign team on his political rivals.
On that date, there were barely a few months left before the November elections, in which President Nixon was seeking re-election against Democrat George McGovern.
The weight of journalistic investigations
It is in this context that, in the early hours of June 17, five people were arrested for raiding the facilities of the Democratic Party. The case was hardly given importance, but it began to attract the attention of two young journalists from the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’ named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
For these two journalists, it was striking that among the five arrested was James McCord, a former member of the CIA and head of security for Nixon’s re-election campaign.
The investigations focused on finding out the relationship of these people with those known as ‘President’s Men’, figures close to Nixon who had great power. The help of some officials was essential in this process, among which the informer known as ‘Deep Throat’ stands out, a member of the FBI leadership who years later would be discovered as Mark Felt.
The investigations shed light on a campaign of espionage, orchestrated from the White House, which had the purpose of learning everything about President Nixon’s political rivals.
This information would be useful to attack and extort them and would facilitate re-election. A scandal that made the front pages of the ‘Washington Post’ in September 1972, but had hardly any media relevance. In fact, Richard Nixon won a landslide victory in the November presidential election and was re-elected.
Revelations at the Watergate trial
But the case wouldn’t die here since the trial against the five detainees would bring new information. In January 1973, the five defendants pleaded guilty to the robbery and burglary charges, but one of them, James McCord, decided to send a letter to the judge in charge of the case stating that he had received pressure and threats on his family to plead guilty.
A few words that caught the attention of the entire American press and raised suspicions. During the following months, the pressure around the Nixon Administration increased, until Congress decided to open an investigation into what happened.
Faced with this situation, Nixon began to react and fired some of the positions closest to his presidency. These people were involved in the espionage of the Watergate complex and were convicted of it. But feeling betrayed by President Nixon, they decided to reveal that the president used to record all the conversations he had in the Oval Office of the White House.
An institutional crisis over the Nixon recordings
The question of the recordings became a priority issue to find out whether or not the White House was involved in the Watergate scandal. The tension rose when the Supreme Court of the United States asked the president to hand over these recordings and he refused, causing an unprecedented institutional conflict for that time.
After several refusals, Nixon partially handed over the tapes and after it was discovered that recordings were still missing, he was forced to hand over the entire content.
What was revealed in the audios was a scandal of historic proportions. Nixon had not only tried to spy on the Democratic Party, but during the early Watergate investigations, he had tried to use the CIA to torpedo any inquiries the FBI might make into the matter.
The Inevitable End of Richard Nixon’s Presidency
This issue caused him to lose the support of his own party and to initiate an impeachment process that was ultimately not executed, since Richard Nixon resigned as president on August 8, 1974.
Nonetheless, Nixon did not face any charges, as a month later he was pardoned by his successor, Vice President Gerald Ford. Although in total, up to 48 people from the president’s entourage were sentenced to different prison terms.
The Watergate scandal is one of the most remembered political episodes of the 20th century in the United States and made Richard Nixon the only president who has resigned in the entire history of his country. For their part, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein received the Pulitzer Prize and demonstrated the importance of independent journalism as a control mechanism in a democracy.
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