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Sign up. The ongoing impeachment process in the House is naturally bringing to mind other times Congress has weighed removing a president for impeding justice. There were the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton , of course, but perhaps the most obvious analogue is the one president who resigned before Congress could kick him out: Richard Nixon.
So what did Nixon do exactly that made Watergate so infamous — and how did the scandal itself come about? Everyone knows that Watergate had something to do with a break-in at the Watergate building in Washington, DC.
But it's not really the break-in itself that ended Richard Nixon's presidency so much as the fact that the ensuing investigation revealed a tangled web of wrongdoing of almost unfathomable scale and complexity, implicating the highest levels of the White House up to and including the president.
Veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate in real time, and her excellent book on that period — Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall — was recently reissued. In , near the 40th anniversary of the resignation, she helped walk us through the trickier points of the scandal and its aftermath.
Wagner Archives at New York University, was also enormously helpful. Three of them were Cuban by background, a fourth was an American who had participated in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and the fifth was a former CIA employee. They were found with two listening devices, and two ceiling panels in an office adjacent to that of DNC chair Lawrence O'Brien were removed, suggesting that the burglars were attempting to bug O'Brien's office.
The break-in — the fourth such attempt, Drew says, with one previous break-in succeeding but not accomplishing the mission at hand — had been planned by Howard Hunt and G. Hunt was a veteran CIA operative who had been involved in the agency's successful plot to overthrow left-leaning Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and in the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion. Liddy was a former FBI agent turned aspiring Republican politician, who became close with the Nixon election team after a failed congressional run.
Both were members of the team known as the White House plumbers — but more on that in a minute. Exactly what the burglars were hoping to find, through either photographing documents or bugging the office, is still somewhat unclear.
Hunt insisted they were looking for evidence that the DNC was receiving money from the North Vietnamese or Cuban governments. Liddy has recently claimed the plan was to find information embarrassing to White House counsel John Dean.
Perhaps the most popular theory is that Nixon was worried that O'Brien knew about his financial dealings with billionaire tycoon Howard Hughes, for whom O'Brien served as a lobbyist in addition to his DNC duties. If that was in fact what the money was used for, it'd be natural for Nixon to fear what O'Brien could do with that knowledge.
There is no smoking gun indicating that Nixon ordered the break-in personally. As Rutgers professor and Nixon expert David Greenberg notes , CRP staff member and Watergate co-conspirator Jeb Magruder claimed to have heard Nixon authorize the break-in, but no hard evidence has turned up to confirm that allegation. However, Nixon certainly created an environment in which criminality was acceptable and even encouraged, and actively participated in covering up the crime.
Far from it. Nixon's operatives engaged in a whole bevy of criminal activity, much of it targeted at sabotaging his political opponents. His White House had an investigative unit known as the "plumbers" who were tasked with much of this. One notorious plumber operation involved breaking into the offices of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, as a government contractor, had contributed to a massive report on the war effort in Vietnam, detailing ways the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses had misled the public about the war, that would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers.
Ironically, the break-in led to the dismissal of the espionage charges against Ellsberg, and didn't yield much useful information for the plumbers. President Nixon mused about using the plumbers to break into the Brookings Institution, a think tank where two other scholars who had worked on the Pentagon Papers Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin worked, so as to retrieve any related documents in their possession; Colson would eventually consider doing the job through a firebombing.
CRP, Nixon's campaign committee, illegally attempted to interfere in the Democratic primaries in a variety of ways. CRP operative Donald Segretti was involved in many of the worst of these efforts, including fabricating multiple documents with stationery from Maine Sen.
Edmund Muskie, the vice presidential nominee and a strong contender for the presidency that year. One accused Sen. His abuse of power, his use of the IRS, FBI and CIA against his perceived enemies, his obstruction of justice, payment of hush money, maintenance of an enemies list, are just a few of the crimes he committed while President and while trying to become President. Most of his criminal activities are forgotten, other than the Watergate scandal, itself not one crime, but a lengthy series of criminal behavior by the President and his underlings.
Some wish to forgive him simply because he was a Republican, the victim of the liberal media and a Democratic Congress. In December of tapes of telephone conversations recorded in the Oval office during the administration of Lyndon Johnson in were released to the public. Dirksen did not argue or defend the Republican nominee. The Nixon campaign was deliberately acting to impede the progress of the Paris Peace Talks, which were then attempting to find a peaceful solution to the Vietnam War.
Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up.
Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. These events, which took place on October 20, , are known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes. Early in , the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes.
While the president dragged his feet, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution. Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on August 8, and left office the following day.
Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, served four and a half years. Haldeman spent 19 months in prison while John Ehrlichman spent 18 for attempting to cover up the break-in.
Nixon himself never admitted to any criminal wrongdoing, though he did acknowledge using poor judgment.
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