The opening of the Senate Watergate hearings on May 17 marked a shift from a bungled break-in and disputed accusations toward a public examination of the wider machinery surrounding Watergate. The opening coincided with reporting that placed the break-in within a longer pattern of White House surveillance and covert activity. The hearings’ significance lay not only in what the Senate Watergate Committee would investigate, but in how rapidly the inquiry and new disclosures made it harder to contain the scandal as an isolated incident.

Background and mounting pressure

The hearings began after months of accumulating evidence and competing claims. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters had prompted a $1 million civil suit by Democratic Party chairman O’Brien against the Committee for the Re-election of the President. O’Brien pointed to Charles Colson’s potential involvement and argued that the known facts were developing a line to the White House. The question was no longer only who had carried out the break-in, but whether it belonged to a larger political operation and what senior officials knew.

Inside the campaign committee, reporters encountered fear and pressure to remain silent. Employees trembled or wept as Bernstein made evening visits to their homes; several spoke of records being destroyed after the break-in, though they could not provide specifics. The Bookkeeper told him that people had already lied to the grand jury and that Sally Harmony and others had lied. Former treasurer Hugh Sloan, who had left because he suspected matters were worse than he had known, described the message to staff as an instruction to hold ranks and keep the organization together. Such fragments did not by themselves establish the full chain of responsibility, but they gave the widening inquiry a human and organizational context: silence was being maintained amid suspicion that the known account was incomplete.

The inquiry widens beyond Watergate

In the week before the hearings, the reporters assembled a long account of evidence they had been collecting for months. Published on May 17, it connected 17 wiretaps and the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to a pattern of White House vigilante activity previously described to Woodward by Deep Throat. The reporting traced undercover work back to 1969 and set out distinct examples: the Secret Service had sent the White House information about a Democratic presidential candidate’s private life; Senator Eagleton’s health records had reached John Ehrlichman’s office before leaking to the press; and H. R. Haldeman had personally ordered an FBI investigation of CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr in 1971. Taken together, the operations amounted to a broad campaign of illegal and quasi-legal activity, not merely an attempt to gather information at one political headquarters.

That account appeared amid an increasingly public contest over credibility. After the White House selected the Post as a target for its counterattack, newspapers around the country reported the anger of the President’s men, giving the allegations further attention. The New York Times then published telephone records showing calls linked to Donald Segretti to the White House and Dwight Chapin’s home, as well as numerous calls to Howard Hunt’s home and office. The records made it more difficult for the White House to dismiss the developing case as hearsay or innuendo.

Opening and early disclosures

The Senate Watergate hearings were scheduled to begin on May 17, the same day the account of the broader surveillance pattern appeared. This overlap placed the committee’s public inquiry alongside a widening news record: the hearings offered an institutional forum, while reporting brought together episodes that had previously surfaced as separate leads. The book does not describe the opening session’s individual proceedings in detail, but it presents the date as a threshold at which the accumulated investigation became a national public event.

The opening also followed Richard Nixon’s April 30 address, in which he accepted responsibility as the person at the top while announcing the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The next day, press secretary Ronald Ziegler apologized publicly to The Washington Post, Woodward, and Bernstein for his earlier criticism of their reporting, acknowledging that the White House had been wrong. Those reversals did not settle the questions before the committee; they demonstrated how far the administration’s earlier dismissals had lost authority.

The committee moved quickly. In later proceedings, Alexander Butterfield reluctantly disclosed the White House taping system on national television, laying its existence before the Senate committee and the country. That disclosure changed the evidentiary landscape: the inquiry now had to reckon not only with testimony and documents gathered by investigators, but with recordings made inside the White House. The hearings’ opening thus belongs to a sequence in which public scrutiny, investigative reporting, and disclosures from within the administration progressively widened the account of Watergate.