Watergate: The Night That Led to the Only Presidential Resignation in US History

The early morning hours of 17 June 1972, exactly 53 years ago today, turned out to be the start of a historic series of events that led to the—so far—absolutely unique resignation of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon. So, what happened that fateful night?

It was certainly more than just a ‘third-rate burglary attempt’, as President Nixon’s Press Secretary Ron Ziegler described the events in response to the initial reports of the break-in. Rather, it was a break-in that has ballooned to be what, to this day, is the greatest political scandal in American history.

Five men, Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis, forcefully entered the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Four of those men were Cuban exiles, and all five of them had worked with the Central Intelligence Agency prior.

‘It was a break-in that has ballooned to be what, to this day, is the greatest political scandal in American history’

Despite their high-level training, they were easily caught in their unscrupulous endeavour. Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed black duct tape on the latches on some of the complex’s doors, which allowed the doors to be shut but not locked. He first removed the tape, but once he realized that it had been put back on, he alerted police.

The five men inside the DNC headquarters were arrested that night.

News of the break-in hit the press the following day, but its magnitude was not comprehended at the time. The Committee for the Re-Election of the President, President Nixon’s reelection PAC, and two men in his administration, G Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt, were immediately implicated in the initial investigation.

As it turned out, the five men were not there to get some valuables for themselves: they were looking to capture sensitive information about presumptive Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern’s campaign.

Two journalists writing for The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, kept covering the story. Still in 1972, they even started to get insider information leaked to them through a source known as ‘Deep Throat’. It was only in 2005, at the age of 91, that Deep Throat revealed himself as FBI agent Mark Felt.

However, all this mattered little to the American people at the time. President Nixon ended up winning reelection in a massive landslide, carrying 49 out of the 50 states, and winning the popular vote by 23.2 points.

What would later turn out to be crucial for the story, however, was that Democrats still carried the House (as they did each Congressional election from 1954 to 1992), with a 242–192 majority.

The trials for the five Watergate burglars, González, Barker, McCord, Martínez, and Sturgis, started in January 1973, just as President Nixon was getting ready for his second inauguration. This has piqued the interest of the press and, in turn, the American public about the matter again.

Even more so after one of the defendants, McCord, wrote a letter to Judge Sirica during the sentencing in March, in which he claimed he was pressured to plead guilty and stay silent by members of the Nixon administration, and talked about a high-level conspiracy behind the break-in. This led to top people in the Nixon reelection committee being served with indictments, the US Senate forming the Watergate Committee, and President Nixon coming out in public to deny any involvement in the scandal.

Please note that, as the investigators found, President Nixon had no advance knowledge about the break-in. His implication in the crime occurred when he tried to cover it up once the news broke. His most egregious actions were trying to pressure the FBI to end the investigation prematurely, suggesting bribing the five defendants to stay silent, and firing his Attorney General and his Deputy Attorney General on the same night (known as the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’) after they refused to dismiss the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal at his order.

The landmark US Supreme Court decision United States vs Nixon also came from this scandal. In July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon was not protected by executive privilege from turning over the Oval Office recordings, as ordered by subpoenas.

By that time, it was clear that the Democrat-majority House was getting ready to impeach the President—something that had not happened in over a century, since the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. What’s more, it was looking increasingly likely that enough Republicans might turn on Nixon to get the two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove him from office.

Under that immense pressure, President Nixon decided to announce his resignation on 8 August 1974, less than two years after his resounding reelection victory. He remains the only POTUS to resign from office.

And it all started 53 years ago today, during the dead of night at a Washington, DC hotel—Watergate.

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