IT began as what one central figure called “a third-rate burglary” and ended up as one of the most traumatic episodes in the public life of the United States and in the only case of a president resigning office. Forty years ago tomorrow, five men broke into the head offices of the Democratic National Committee, located in a new hotel and office complex on the Potomac River in Washington. The name of that complex – Watergate – quickly embedded itself in popular culture as synonymous with political scandal and bequeathed itself to subsequent scandals which the news media characterised by adding the suffix “-gate”.

The president at the time was Richard Nixon, who was a conservative, yet was able to break years of hostility between the US and China with a historic visit to Beijing four months before the Watergate break-in. He was a bright and clever man but suffered from a variety of demons – uncomfortable in his own skin, he was suspicious, bigoted, vindictive and not above using the powers of his office to lash out at those he considered his enemies.

The burglars were sent by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (fondly dubbed CREEP by its staffers) to plant wiretaps in the offices of senior Democratic officials. At first, the White House tried to slough off the incident. Four days after the break-in, Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, described it as a “third-rate burglary” and remarked, “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was.” But the sceptical instincts of a lower court judge and the ambitious hunger of two young reporters began a process of peeling back layers of disguise to reveal an extensive criminal conspiracy.

It was because of some simple pieces of tape that the world came to know about Watergate. While doing his rounds at the complex shortly after one o’clock on the morning of June 17, 1972, a security guard found tape covering the bolts on several doors at the offices of the Democratic Party. They allowed the doors to be closed but remain unlocked. He peeled off the tape and thought nothing of it. But when he returned an hour later, he found that someone had placed new tape on the locks, and he called the police, who discovered the five men and arrested them.

Three months later, the burglars and two others responsible for the plot were indicted on charges of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping. A District Court judge, John Sirica, thought from the beginning that there was something fishy, that pertinent details about the case were being deliberately withheld. As the case continued it became increasingly clear that the Watergate burglars were connected to CREEP and the Central Intelligence Agency.

In March 1973, Sirica read a letter to the court from one of the Watergate burglars, alleging that defendants had been pressured to remain silent, and that they had committed perjury during the trial. The White House claimed that it had no prior knowledge of the burglary, but soon the dyke began to crumble and Nixon’s aides began to talk to the FBI. Nixon had to ask his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, and his adviser, John Erlichman, to resign, and fired his staff counsel, John Dean.

The Senate had already voted to set up a committee to investigate the Watergate business, and chose a crusty old senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin, to head it up. Ervin, who called himself a simple “country lawyer” (even though he had studied at Harvard), spoke in a courtly manner in a slow southern drawl. He became one of the stars of the extensive television coverage the US networks gave the Senate hearings, which drew huge audiences – up to 85 per cent by some estimates – even though they took place in the summer doldrums.

The hearings provided an education in the democratic basis of the United States in its finest form, with members of opposing parties generally laying aside their affiliations and ideologies in a search for the truth. The truths they uncovered were, for the most part, not pretty. The committee heard from White House aides – some willingly and others under duress; members of Nixon’s Cabinet in their political roles as members of the re-election campaign; from staff members of the committee as well as friends and financial backers of the Nixon campaign.

I followed it from the national radio newsroom of the CBC in Toronto, where I was a relative newcomer. Every day as the hearings rolled on, some of us would sit at a typewriter and take notes about who was speaking and what they said, to enable our colleagues to quickly find the passages they needed from the hours of tape which captured the whole drama as it unfolded. We heard about an elaborate system to record conversations in the president’s offices and the Cabinet room; about high-level meetings at which plans to sabotage the opposition Democrats were discussed; about Nixon’s paranoia regarding those he considered enemies, about efforts to co-opt the CIA, the FBI and other government bodies to break the law and punish people and about the lengths to which Nixon and his cohorts were willing to go to cover up their illegal activities.

As the revelations rolled into the next year, several of Nixon’s senior associates were indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice and the House of Representatives began investigating the affair. Nixon was forced to release transcripts of the recordings of his conversations with his officials, and some suspicious omissions became the subject of a Supreme Court ruling that they had to be released. By the summer of 1974 the House Judiciary Committee, which had conducted hearings similar to those of the Senate, recommended that Nixon be impeached. Shortly after that, Nixon had to release some recordings which made it quite clear that he had been in charge of the cover-up from the very beginning.

He was now left naked, his remaining congressional support having evaporated, and impeachment now looming as a certainty. So, on August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned, ungracious to the end. It is interesting that regimes practising evil – from Nazi Germany and Idi Amin’s Uganda to Khmer Rouge Cambodia – always make careful records of their nefarious activities.

Watergate resulted in some decent legislation regulating campaign financing, and Nixon’s two successors – Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – generally ran administrations free from malice. But Ronald Reagan thumbed his nose at sanctions imposed on Iran after radicals took over the US embassy in Tehran and sold arms to the regime while using the money to finance guerrillas opposed to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Two junior reporters at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, had latched on to the story since the first court appearance by the five burglars, and pursued it in the face of considerable scepticism and resistance. Their efforts, supported by their boss, editor Ben Bradlee, and the publisher, Katherine Graham, kept the story going and forced the rest of the media to follow.

Forty years on, they have published a retrospective in which they conclude that “at its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law”.

Sadly, much of what fills US newspapers and airwaves today are virulent and vituperative attacks and braying nonsense from posturing pundits pulling in huge incomes by providing much heat and very little light.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca