“third-rate burglary attempt”

“Third-rate burglary attempt” was Ronald Ziegler’s dismissive label for the Watergate break-in, offered from the Florida White House in Key Biscayne. Its significance lies in the gap between the smallness the phrase asserted and the expanding evidence of pressure, concealment, and political damage that followed.

The Public Minimization

On the morning described in the account, the presidential press secretary briefly answered a question about the break-in. He said that “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is,” called it “a third-rate burglary attempt,” and declared it unworthy of further White House comment. The wording reduced a political intrusion to a petty, self-contained offense and cast further scrutiny as exaggeration.

That dismissal was immediately tested by events outside the press briefing. The next day, the Democratic Party chairman filed a million-dollar civil suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President, citing Charles Colson’s potential involvement and arguing that the developing facts pointed toward the White House. The lawsuit did not settle responsibility, but it made the question of how far the affair reached harder to dismiss as mere overstatement.

What the Phrase Could Not Contain

Later reporting revealed a campaign environment in which employees were frightened to speak. When Carl Bernstein visited committee staff at their homes, one employee trembled and begged him to leave before others saw him; another began to cry. Their reactions gave the story a human measure of the pressure behind the public silence. Meanwhile, fragments gathered from those visits suggested that records had been destroyed in the days after the break-in, though the employees could offer no specific firsthand account of that destruction.

The committee’s bookkeeper told Bernstein that people had already lied to the grand jury before it knew what questions to ask, and said that Sally Harmony and others had lied. Hugh Sloan, by contrast, had left because he suspected the situation was worse than the public account suggested. He said that no one had explicitly ordered staff not to talk, but that the message had been to “Hold ranks” and “Keep the ship together.” Together, these accounts depict not an isolated, trivial episode, but an affair surrounded by guarded testimony and pressure to maintain a common front.

A Dismissal Reversed by Disclosure

The contrast deepened as participants began to describe what they knew. Donald Segretti said that he wanted to tell the whole story, that he had not understood the larger operation, and that the White House had told him only his own role. Later, after James McCord’s testimony linked cash payoffs to the conspirators directly to the committee, a previously reticent committee official told Bob Woodward that the White House’s handling of the matter had undermined the presidency. The developing disclosures gave the early phrase its retrospective irony: what had been called too minor for comment became part of a much broader account of political operations, silence, and the effort to contain their consequences.