Watergate: What Actually Happened, and Why the Name Still Means Scandal

In 1989, Billy Joel released "We Didn't Start the Fire," a song that is really just a list. Dozens of names and events fired off in order, four decades of headlines set to a drumbeat. Somewhere in the middle, between the Cold War and the space race, he sings a single word: "Watergate." No explanation. None was needed. By 1989 the word had already stopped meaning a building and become shorthand for a certain kind of political rot, so well known it needed no footnote.

That is what happened to Watergate over time. Almost everyone knows the word. Far fewer could say what actually happened, or why it brought down a president who had just won the biggest landslide of his era. What most people remember is a blur of shadowy car parks and a reporter's whispered source. The real story is slower and more serious: a chain of small decisions to lie, each one made to protect the one before it.

A building, to begin with

Watergate is a complex of flats and offices beside the Potomac in Washington, a curved cluster of concrete balconies that still stands. In 1972 the Democratic National Committee, the body that runs the Democratic Party's national campaign operations, had its headquarters on the sixth floor. That address is the only reason a word for a building became a word for a scandal. Had the offices been anywhere else, the affair would carry some other name. Instead the name of the place stuck to the crime, and then to every crime that came after it.

The break-in

At around half past two in the morning on 17 June 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills noticed something odd on his rounds. A strip of tape held a stairwell door latch open so it would not lock. He peeled it off. When he came back and found the latch taped again, he called the police. Officers arrived in an unmarked car and climbed to the sixth floor, where they found five men inside the DNC offices.

They were not ordinary burglars. They wore surgical gloves and carried cameras, bugging equipment, walkie-talkies, and a stack of cash in crisp, sequentially numbered bills. One of them, James McCord, was the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-elect the President, the fundraising and campaign arm of Richard Nixon's re-election effort, an organisation whose acronym, fittingly, was CRP. This was not their first visit. They had been in weeks earlier to plant listening devices, and had come back to fix a faulty bug and photograph documents. What looked at first like a petty break-in was a professional intelligence operation aimed at a sitting president's political opponents.

Why anyone should have cared

On the surface it looked minor, even pointless. Nixon was heading for one of the biggest election wins in American history, and that November would take 49 of the 50 states. A campaign that far ahead had no obvious need to bug anyone.

The break-in was not a one-off. It was one visible piece of a much wider programme of political spying and sabotage run out of the campaign, paid for partly with money laundered through accounts that were never meant to be traced. Nixon's operatives had a name for the forged letters, planted rumours, and disruption they aimed at Democratic rivals. They called it, with a straight face, "ratfucking." The burglars were just the part of the machine that happened to get caught.

But the deeper problem was never the crime. It was the response to it. From the first days, the most senior figures in the White House set about making sure the trail never reached them. In that instinct to cover up, a break-in became a constitutional crisis.

The cover-up is the real story

Nixon was not forced from office because his campaign committed a burglary. He was forced out because of what was done to hide it.

Within days, the White House began funnelling money to the arrested men to buy their silence, hush payments in exchange for guilty pleas and quiet mouths. Documents were shredded. Officials lied to the FBI and later to a grand jury. On 23 June 1972, less than a week after the arrests, Nixon personally approved a plan to have the CIA lean on the FBI and tell it to halt the investigation, on the false excuse that it might expose secret national-security operations. A sitting president had reached into the machinery of government to smother a criminal inquiry into his own campaign. That is the difference between a scandal and an abuse of power, and it is why the affair ended where it did.

Following the money

While the White House worked to contain the story, two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, kept pulling at its loose threads. Their method was unglamorous: phone calls, doorstep visits, cross-checked names, the patient work of figuring out who paid whom. They were guided in part by a confidential source they nicknamed Deep Throat, whose identity stayed secret for more than three decades and was revealed only in 2005 to be Mark Felt, the second most senior official at the FBI.

The reporting mattered because of one connection above all. The cash carried by the burglars traced back to funds controlled by the re-election campaign. That link, from the men on their knees in a darkened office to the money that had put them there, turned a local police story into a national political one. It kept the affair alive in print through the long months when official Washington would happily have let it die.

The hearings and the tapes

In 1973 the Senate set up a select committee to investigate, and held its hearings on live daytime television. Day after day, ordinary Americans watched aides and officials describe, under oath, a White House that behaved like a criminal outfit. The newspaper stories had laid out the facts. The hearings put faces to them, and turned public unease into public certainty.

Then came the detail that decided everything. A White House aide named Alexander Butterfield revealed, almost in passing, that Nixon had installed a voice-activated system to record his own conversations in the Oval Office. It was no longer one man's word against another's. It was on tape, in the president's own voice, waiting to be played.

The endgame

What followed was a long, grinding fight over those recordings. The special prosecutor appointed to the case, a Harvard law professor named Archibald Cox, demanded the tapes. Nixon refused, citing "executive privilege," the idea that a president's private discussions are shielded from outside scrutiny. When Cox would not back down, Nixon ordered him fired. In October 1973 his attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out the order, and the third-ranking official finally did it, an evening the press named the Saturday Night Massacre. The public reaction was fierce. Telegrams poured into Washington, and impeachment, until then a distant possibility, hardened into a real prospect.

The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously, 8 to 0, that not even a president stands above the ordinary demands of justice. Nixon had to hand over the tapes. Among them was the recording of 23 June 1972, six days after the break-in, which caught Nixon approving the plan to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI. It became known as the smoking gun, the moment his own voice proved the cover-up he had spent two years denying. Within days his remaining defenders in Congress fell away, and the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment.

Resignation, and what came after

Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974, the only American president ever to do so, leaving the White House by helicopter with a stiff wave that has been replayed ever since. He never admitted to a crime, speaking instead of having lost his "political base." A month later his successor, Gerald Ford, gave him a full pardon for any offences he might have committed in office. Ford argued the country needed to move on. His critics called it a deal that let the most powerful man in the affair walk free while his subordinates went to prison. The debate has never fully closed.

The aftermath reshaped American public life. Congress tightened campaign-finance rules, strengthened ethics and open-government laws, and grew far more willing to check the presidency it had long deferred to. The press came out more confident, more adversarial, and briefly more admired. The language changed too. Almost every serious scandal since has been fitted with the suffix "-gate," a small reminder of the original that has been slapped, often absurdly, onto everything from sporting rows to deflated footballs.

How close it came

Strip away the decades of shorthand and Watergate is plain enough to state. The ordinary powers of a presidency, the agencies, the money, the loyalty of appointees, were turned to spy on political opponents and then to bury the evidence. Stopping it took the courts, the press, and Congress all doing their jobs at once, and refusing to blink.

The comforting version of the story says the system worked. The more honest version is that it very nearly did not. It worked because a night guard checked a door twice, because two reporters would not let a small story go, because an FBI man leaked, because judges and senators of the president's own party finally chose the institution over the man. Change a few of those choices and the tapes stay buried. The guardrails held. But only just, and only because enough people refused to let them fail.

Sources

• History, "The Watergate Scandal: Timeline, Deep Throat and Nixon's Resignation".
• National Constitution Center, "United States v. Nixon (The Tapes Case)".