Date of the June 17, 1972 Watergate break-in

June 17, 1972, was the date of the Watergate break-in, an operation whose significance widened as reporters connected the raid to campaign funds, senior officials, and efforts to keep the underlying activity hidden. The date marks not only the entry into the Democratic National Committee headquarters but the beginning of the public investigation’s effort to establish how that operation related to a larger political-intelligence system.

The Break-In and Its Immediate Record

An account published by the Los Angeles Times, based on Alfred C. Baldwin III’s description of the operation, supplied a vivid record of the raid and its preparations. From the Howard Johnson Motor Hotel across the street from the Watergate complex, Baldwin had monitored Democrats’ telephone conversations. James McCord told him that he would perform similar monitoring at the Democratic convention in Miami. Baldwin also recounted receiving a gun belonging to Fred LaRue when he was hired, an aborted attempt to enter and bug George McGovern’s headquarters, and Gordon Liddy’s suggestion that a street light be shot out to facilitate that entry.

Baldwin described another assignment guarding Martha Mitchell, and recalled E. Howard Hunt arriving at the Howard Johnson at 2:30 A.M. on June 17 and watching police lead five of his hired men away from the Watergate. His account made the operation and the siege mentality around it concrete, while also showing that the raid belonged to a wider pattern of surveillance and contemplated political interference. It did not, by itself, establish who had authorized every action or how each expenditure had been used.

Money and the Question of Authorization

The financial trail that reporters pursued included a $25,000 cashier’s check payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. It was deposited on April 20 alongside four Mexican checks, bringing the deposit to $114,000; four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000, while the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The check’s discovery gave the investigation a specific transaction to follow, but the reporters were still trying to determine who Dahlberg was when they encountered it.

In a later account of the secret fund, The Washington Post reported that funds for the Watergate espionage operation were controlled by principal assistants to John Mitchell and kept in a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President. The report said that more than $300,000 had been earmarked for sensitive political projects, that Gordon Liddy received money from the fund, and that records relating to the account had been destroyed. Those claims connected the raid to a concealed campaign-finance system, while the reporting’s cautious formulation reflected the difference between tracing money and establishing precisely which funds paid for which acts.

Hugh Sloan supplied a further link concerning control of the fund. He said that, beginning in 1971, he had called John Mitchell at the Justice Department when he was approached for money, and that Mitchell would tell him to distribute it. Sloan described the procedure as routine within a campaign budget exceeding $50 million. He also said that authority was later passed to others, including Jeb Stuart Magruder. His account placed Mitchell’s authorization of campaign expenditures in the period when he was Attorney General, but the reporters recognized that authorization of expenditures did not alone settle the precise scope of Mitchell’s knowledge of the break-in.

From Raid to Wider Operation

The investigation increasingly treated June 17 as a point of entry into a broader operation rather than an isolated burglary. Deep Throat urged the reporters to examine what had been called Offensive Security and warned that the FBI’s 1,500 interviews suggested matters beyond a single break-in. He described intelligence-gathering that included checks on campaign contributors and Democratic contributors, sometimes with the aim of finding compromising information. He also cautioned that some intelligence work was routine and that the operation had grown out of control. The account broadened the possible context of the raid while leaving the reporters to verify each strand independently.

A later report based on Jeb Stuart Magruder’s statements to federal prosecutors attributed approval and planning of the bugging operation to John Mitchell and White House Counsel John Dean. It also reported that Mitchell and Dean later arranged to buy the silence of the seven convicted Watergate conspirators. These were consequential claims about planning and the subsequent effort to contain the case; they emerged through later reporting and testimony, not from the date of the raid alone.

The Date as an Investigative Turning Point

The raid’s aftermath exposed the limits of the earliest official account. At the trial, the Justice Department had argued that lower-level officials such as Gordon Liddy were the moving forces behind the conspiracy. By May 1973, prosecutors had told Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen that they were close to indicting several of the President’s closest current and former aides, and had insisted that the President be personally informed. The President did not promptly announce the aides’ resignations or order his staff to cooperate, leaving prosecutors confused and disturbed by his response. The investigation’s focus had thus moved well beyond the men arrested at the Watergate complex.

The date also anchors the later chronology of concealment. Deep Throat told the reporters that, on June 28, files concerning E. Howard Hunt had been described to L. Patrick Gray as political dynamite and as material that should never become public; Gray later said he put the files in a burn bag. The account linked senior officials’ handling of those records to the attempt to contain the damage after the break-in. Meanwhile, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had kept their notes and lead lists since June 17, 1972, returning repeatedly to people and questions that were initially unresolved. The date’s lasting importance lies in that widening chain: a raid, a trail of money and authority, and an investigation that increasingly examined the effort to prevent those connections from becoming known.