Nixon and Watergate

On the evening of June 12, 1972, Frank Wills patrolled a parking garage on what seemed like a regular routine of his duties as a private security guard in the Watergate towers in Washington, D.C. But there was nothing usual or routine about that night, for Frank Wills and for the United States. After spotting some duct tape in the door leading up into the building, Wills knew something was up. Suspicious, he radioed in for the local police. What Wills could not have known was how instrumental he would become in uncovering a burglary whose cover up eventually made its way directly to the White House.

Caught in the act of breaking into the Democratic headquarters office at Watergate, burglars Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Baker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis were arrested and later convicted in January 1973 for what ostensibly seemed like a routine burglary. Though the men were traced in one way or another to CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President, the White House denied the men were involved with the committee and disavowed their criminal activities. But a letter written by McCord to the trial judge John J. Sirica revealed the insidious nature of this burglary. All men, according to McCord, had been paid off with hush money from CREEP. What started seemingly as a burglary emerged as something much more.

A Senate investigation was launched to determine just how high up a cover up of the burglary went. The investigation uncovered a pattern of dirty tricks played by the White House to win against its perceived enemies, including Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who had released to the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, a secret analytical document about the United States’s unfeasibility to win the war in Vietnam. The limits of the freedom of press was tested when NYT became embroiled in the courts over its right to publish the document. Some of the same men who were involved in the Watergate break-in, including G. Gordon Liddy, had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to steal private files, ostensibly to use them to discredit Ellsberg. A secret campaign slush fund, an enemies list, and a plumbers unit to prevent leaks out of the White House were also discovered, all leading to key presidential advisors, opening up speculation that Nixon was involved in a cover-up.

Though the investigation was largely ignored by the mainstream press and much of the American public, several leading newspaper organizations were on top of every twist and turn in the investigation, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two investigative journalists with the Washington Post, were key players in uncovering the cover up, printing stories about who was involved in it and how close they were to the president.