Why nixon watergate

Richard Nixon died on April 22, This is a video produced by the Richard Nixon Foundation to commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death. The word specifically refers to the Watergate Hotel in Washington D. Even today, it is home to former Senator Bob Dole and was once the place where Monica Lewinsky laid low. If it had not been for the alert actions of Frank Wills, a security guard, the scandal may never have erupted. But the chronology of the scandal really begins during , when the burglars were arrested.

By , Nixon had been re-elected, but the storm clouds were building. By early , the nation was consumed by Watergate. His long political career began in when he was elected to the House of Representatives.

Nixon served as Vice-President for eight years, then lost the election to John F. He was vindicated by winning a landslide re-election. He was sworn in for a second term in Janury The first was on April 30, , in which he announced the departure of Dean, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. In marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate recently , the two journalists who were pivotal in helping uncover much of the scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote that during his five-and-a-half-years in power Nixon waged five overlapping wars — on the anti-war movement, the media, Democrats, the US justice system and history itself.

From the beginning of his presidency Nixon sought to undermine anyone who he considered an enemy. This was a group set up within the White House and tasked with stopping the leak of classified information to the media.

As part of these illegal activities, in the early hours of 17 June , five men attempted to break-in to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex, about a mile from the White House.

When a security guard discovered tape on a door latch outside the DNC HQ he called the police and the five men were arrested. YouTube: Newseum. Once this link was established, and leaked to the media, the uncovering of the true extent of the scandal began.

YouTube: electionwalldotorg. YouTube: ShortFormCinema. Their work mainly involved following the money trial which broadly led from the burglars back to CREEP which had a slush fund to pay for the all the illegal activities that were going in.

Their stories were continually criticised and denied by the White House and its press secretary Ronald Ziegler who later had to apologise to the men when it transpired that all of what they wrote was true. Bernstein and Woodword in the Washington Post newsroom in May The source was, in journalistic parlance, on deep background which meant he could not even be quoted anonymously.

By early , cracks began to appear in the cover-up of Watergate when FBI director Patrick Gray testified at hearings intended to confirm him as permanent director of the FBI that he had been asked to keep the White House abreast of the Watergate investigation on a daily basis. Soon afterwards one of the Watergate burglars, James McCord, wrote to Judge John Sirica claiming that he had perjured himself in testimony by lying about the nature of the burglary saying it had been a CIA operation when in fact it involved other government officials.

Soon after Dean began co-operating with Watergate prosecutors and Gray resigned as head of the FBI after it emerged he had destroyed files connected to the scandal. At the end of April there are further departures as White House officials John Ehrlichman, Bob Haldeman , and attorney general Richard Kleindienst all resigned because of their involvement.

Dean was fired. John Dean gave a page prepared statement to the Senate Watergate Committee in June , lasting a total of seven hours. AP Photo. But the most explosive relation came when the former presidential appointments secretary Alexander Butterfield revealed that all conversations and phone calls in Nixon's office had been taped since The tapes were almost immediately disconnected on Nixon's order and he refused to comply with the committee's subpoena for him to release the tapes invoking presidential privilege.

The battle over the release of the tapes continued as the special prosecutor, Cox, refused to drop the subpoena. Later Nixon famously went in front of the media and the world at a press conference from Disney World in Florida to declare that he is not a crook:. YouTube: maxpowers In March of the grand jury indicted seven Nixon officials - known as the Watergate Seven - for their involvement in the cover-up and many later served jail time. But the battle over the tapes continued and went all the way to the US Supreme Court where, with the exception of the recused Justice William Rehnquist whom Nixon had appointed , there was a unanimous ruling that they should be released.

Open journalism No news is bad news Support The Journal Your contributions will help us continue to deliver the stories that are important to you. Nixon complied with the order in July and released the subpoenaed tapes which revealed several crucial conversations with his lawyer John Dean in which Dean described the continuing cover-up operations as a "cancer on the presidency".

It then emerged that there had been an minute section of the tapes erased. Nixon's personal secretary Rose Mary Woods said this had been done accidentally when she pushed the wrong foot pedal but photos posed for the media appeared to undermine the liklihood of this and analysis later determined the tape had been erased in several sections.

The in August of '74, a previously unknown audio tape was released which recorded an Oval Office conversation a few days after the break-in which documented the formulation of a plan by Nixon and Bob Haldeman to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was at issue in the Watergate break-in.

This is the exact audio from the tape that is referred to as the 'smoking gun' and in the words of Nixon's own lawyers "proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers — for more than two years":. YouTube: multisuperhands. The game was up. Facing certain impeachment after being told by Republican senators that they would vote in favour of such a motion, Nixon decided to resign, saying that the scandal over Watergate would prevent him from carrying out his duties:.

YouTube: MCamericanpresident. After saying farewell to staff in the White House East Room on the morning his resignation came into effect - 9 August - Nixon and his wife Pat departed on Marine One. Before entering the helicopter he gave a famous v-sign salute which had become one of his best known trademarks while in office :. Later, when it came out that there was hard tape evidence concerning Nixon and other aides' roles in the cover-up, the administration took extraordinary measures — including going to the Supreme Court and attempting an unprecedented quashing of a Justice Department investigation — to prevent it from coming to light.

But more on that in a sec. Of course. The period from to was generally excellent for American music, but you wouldn't really know it from the singles charts. Case in point: The No. It sold basically no copies upon initial release, but June , the month of the break-in, saw the release of Big Star's 1 Record , my favorite record of all time and a power-pop classic.

You can listen to the whole thing on Spotify. Here's the opener, "Feel":. While the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses had done some taping of presidential meetings, the Nixon administration was the first and only one to record the president's activity so completely though his bedroom and residences in San Clemente and Key Biscayne were not taped. As former White House aide Alexander Butterfield — by then Federal Aviation Administration chief — testified before the Senate Watergate Committee in July , the system began recording in the spring of , and was activated by sound.

Few people in the White House other than Nixon knew they were being recorded:. The tapes represented the single best source of evidence into the White House's involvement in the break-in, and as such, the administration tried desperately to prevent the Senate Watergate Committee or the independent counsel whom the attorney general had by then appointed to investigate the incident from getting ahold of them.

It ultimately took a unanimous Supreme Court ruling following the independent counsel's securing of a subpoena against the president to force their release. They contained what became known as the "smoking gun" recording , in which Haldeman and Nixon, days after the break-in, discuss using the CIA to hamper the FBI's investigative efforts.

Within days of the public learning of the smoking gun tape, Nixon resigned from the presidency. The minutes are believed to include a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman about the Watergate arrests.

Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary, claimed that she accidentally erased the portion, but when she was asked to demonstrate how exactly that would have happened, the circumstance was so physically implausible that most discounted that explanation.

Most plausible, according to Drew, is Ehrlichman's allegation that Nixon personally erased the tapes, presumably because they contained discussion of a cover-up. In recent decades, as more and more tapes were made available to the public, journalists, and scholars by the National Archives, non-Watergate revelations about the Nixon presidency emerged. Nixon's anti-Semitism is on full display in the tapes, for example, and they also confirm Nixon and Henry Kissinger's support for the genocide being conducted by Pakistan's military government against Bangladesh in the latter's war for independence.

Most recently, a tape of Nixon discussing panda sex garnered some attention. The fight for the tapes was mainly conducted between the Nixon administration and the independent counsel in the Justice Department appointed to investigate the Watergate break-in.

The first such counsel was Archibald Cox , a former solicitor general from the Kennedy administration and a Harvard law professor. Cox subpoenaed the tapes, and the White House refused to comply, offering instead the "Stennis Compromise" : John Stennis, a conservative Democratic senator from Mississippi, could listen to the tapes and verify they matched transcripts released by the White House.

But Stennis was notoriously hard of hearing , and Cox would not agree to the deal. What happened next was arguably one of the most brazen abuses of presidential power in American history. Nixon ordered his attorney general, Eliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused, resigning instead. The new acting attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, refused as well, and resigned. The office of special prosecutor was abolished, and the investigation was sent back to the Justice Department proper.

The reaction to the events was furious. They continue:. The newspapers carried banner headlines. Within two days, , telegrams had arrived in the capital, the largest concentrated volume in the history of Western Union. Deans of the most prestigious law schools in the country demanded that Congress commence an impeachment inquiry. By the following Tuesday, forty-four separate Watergate-related bills had been introduced in the House.

Twenty-two called for an impeachment investigation. The reaction forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski , who would eventually succeed in his quest for the tapes.

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon. It's worth remembering that Nixon was never actually impeached or convicted. Impeachment the equivalent of an indictment in a normal trial would have required a majority vote of the House, and removal from office a supermajority vote of the Senate.

Nixon resigned before either could occur. That said, there was no question the votes were there to impeach him, and quite likely to remove him from office as well. The first article approved by the House committee charged him with "engag[ing] personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of [the Watergate break in]; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.

The second article charged him with a variety of abuses, including attempting to use the IRS to investigate political enemies, using the FBI to do illegal surveillance, overseeing the break-in to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and allowing the plumbers to work in the White House in general.