After June 17, 1972, the word "Watergate" could no longer be just the name of an office and hotel complex in Washington, D.C. On that date it became a byword for political corruption. In the early hours of that mid-June morning, and in the middle of a presidential campaign, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in one of the Watergate offices. The details of this story would form an ever-rising pool of political deceit in which swirled a constitutional crisis that claimed a presidency. Every major aspect of the historic sequence of events in Watergate is reviewed:
* The trial of the "Watergate Seven" burglars
* Judge John Sirica
* Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities hearings, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin
* People: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, Hunt, Liddy
* Battle for the Tapes
* Trials and Tribulations
* Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Saturday Night Massacre
* Transcripts, Document Reproductions, Timelines, Photographs
* FBI Report excerpt with a Chronology of Watergate-related Events and Biographical Sketches of Major Figures
* The Aftermath
When Judge John Sirica gaveled the trial of the Watergate seven to order on January 8, 1973, federal investigators had already discovered a covert slush fund used to underwrite nefarious activities against Democrats. The money and the men on trial could be linked to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) at whose head sat the former Attorney General of the United States, and President Nixon’s former law partner, John Mitchell. At the trial, E. Howard Hunt, who had planned the break-in, and four of the burglars pleaded guilty. G. Gordon Liddy, who helped in the planning, and James McCord, the other burglar, refused to cooperate, were convicted of various charges, and sentenced to prison. Shortly after the trial, the United States Senate formed the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC). Meanwhile, James McCord, contemplating a long prison term, had a change of heart and wrote a letter to Judge Sirica. In it, he claimed that high White House officials had pressured the defendants to plead guilty. The five who pleaded had perjured themselves at the urging of "higher-ups." With the letter’s release, the saga moved decidedly from being a police story to a political story. It slipped beyond Washington’s beltway and captured national attention.
