The White House upheaval and resignations on April 30, 1973, amid Watergate marked a decisive shift from attacks on the investigation to an acknowledged crisis at the top of the Nixon administration. H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resigned, John Dean was fired, and Richard Kleindienst also resigned; Richard Nixon then addressed the country, saying that responsibility belonged to him. The next day, press secretary Ronald Ziegler apologized to The Washington Post and its reporters for the administration’s earlier criticism of their Watergate reporting.

Pressure Before the Resignations

The departures followed months in which Watergate reporting repeatedly met official dismissal and growing evidence of a wider political operation. The day after the break-in, Democratic Party chairman O’Brien sued the Committee for the Re-election of the President for $1 million, citing Charles Colson’s potential involvement and arguing that the facts pointed toward the White House. The administration’s first public framing was narrower: Ronald Ziegler called the break-in “a third-rate burglary attempt” and said it did not merit further White House comment.

As reporters pursued the story inside the committee, silence itself became evidence of pressure, though not proof of any individual’s guilt. One employee trembled and pleaded with Carl Bernstein to leave before others saw him; another said she wanted to help and burst into tears. A former committee bookkeeper told Bernstein that people had already lied to the grand jury before it knew what questions to ask. The fear and guardedness that reporters encountered made the task of establishing what had happened more difficult, while suggesting that the inquiry reached beyond a few isolated actors.

Hugh Sloan, the former treasurer of the Committee for the Re-election of the President, described leaving after suspecting that matters were worse than the public knew. He told Bernstein, “They’re worse,” and explained that he had left because he suspected the worst. Sloan also described the message given to employees without an explicit order to remain silent: “Hold ranks,” or “Keep the ship together.” His account connected organizational loyalty and the pressure to maintain appearances with the difficulty of obtaining testimony about the campaign’s affairs.

Other disclosures sharpened the stakes. Donald Segretti told Bernstein that he had not understood the larger operation and had learned about it by reading the newspapers; when asked who had kept him uninformed, he answered, “The White House.” After James McCord’s disclosures about payments to Watergate conspirators, a Committee for the Re-election of the President official told Bob Woodward that the handling of the affair had undermined the Presidency. Meanwhile, the White House had chosen The Washington Post as a target after the Chapin connection brought Watergate closer to the Oval Office. Its counterattack helped give the paper’s allegations wider currency, and telephone records published by The New York Times documented calls connecting Segretti with the White House, Dwight Chapin, and Howard Hunt.

April 30: Departures at the Top

The immediate news reached The Washington Post in fragments. A call from Capitol Hill was followed by tentative confirmation from a White House reporter. Ben Bradlee came out of his office to tell Bob Woodward, “It’s happening today.” The news was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had resigned, Dean had been fired, Kleindienst had resigned, and Richardson was moving from the Defense Department to become Attorney General. Bernstein arrived shortly afterward, but, hearing the news, declined a colleague’s request to talk.

Just before noon, the White House made its announcement, and the resignation letters arrived at the paper and were photocopied. Their wording presented the departures as an answer to accusation and public controversy. Haldeman referred to “various allegations and innuendoes” and to “the flood of stories” that made it virtually impossible for him to carry on his regular responsibilities. Ehrlichman said that, “regardless of the actual facts,” he had been the target of public attack, rumors, and unfounded charges. The letters thus recorded the officials’ stated reasons for leaving even as the upheaval itself showed how far the scandal had penetrated the administration.

The newsroom scene captured the abrupt change in the story’s scale. At 11:55 a.m., Bradlee was chatting with a visitor while idly trying to toss a plastic toy basketball through a hoop mounted on his office window. Howard Simons entered with the news. Bradlee’s mouth fell open; he put his cheek on the desk, closed his eyes, and banged the desk with his fist. Then he exclaimed, “How do you like them apples?” and called across the newsroom to Woodward, “Not bad, Bob! Not half bad!” Simons cautioned the gathering staff, “Don’t gloat.” The moment registered the paper’s vindication, but also the care required when reporting had become part of a national crisis.

Nixon’s Address and the Question of Responsibility

That evening, Nixon spoke from his desk, with a picture of his family on one side and a bust of Abraham Lincoln on the other. He acknowledged that there had been an effort to conceal facts from the public and from him. He described accepting the resignations of two close associates as one of the most difficult decisions of his Presidency, then rejected the idea that he could simply blame those delegated to run the campaign. “In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility,” he said. “That responsibility, therefore, belongs here in this office. I accept it.”

Nixon also credited the process that had brought the facts to light, naming a determined grand jury, honest prosecutors, Judge John Sirica, and a vigorous free press. He promised that “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” The address therefore combined an admission of responsibility with an effort to turn attention back toward the duties of the Presidency. Its central concession—that the responsibility belonged in his office—stood in sharp contrast to the administration’s earlier effort to minimize the break-in and discredit the reporting. Watching the broadcast, Katharine Graham reacted, “Oh, my God. This is too much.”

The Reversal in Public Stance

The next day, Ziegler publicly apologized to The Washington Post and to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for his earlier criticism of their investigation. Asked whether the White House owed the paper an apology, he said, “In thinking of it all at this point in time, yes,” and acknowledged that “mistakes were made in terms of comments.” He added, “When we are wrong, we are wrong, as we were in that case.”

The apology did not settle the Watergate investigation, but it made the change in the administration’s public position unmistakable. Only months earlier, the reporting had faced dismissive statements and a White House counterattack; now the President had publicly accepted responsibility, senior officials had departed, and the press secretary conceded that the administration had been wrong about the reporters. The sequence turned the struggle over whether Watergate was a limited burglary or a broader crisis into a confrontation over accountability at the highest level.