Watergate scandal

The Watergate scandal began with five men arrested inside Democratic headquarters and widened into a national crisis over the Nixon campaign’s connections to the burglary, the money behind the operation, and the effort to control what investigators and the public could learn. Its development depended on a chain of disclosures: campaign records connected an arrested man to the Committee for the Re-election of the President; checks and testimony pointed toward a secret fund; accounts of destroyed records and enforced silence raised questions about a cover-up. As The Washington Post pursued those links, the White House made the newspaper itself a target, turning a dispute over reporting into a public contest over credibility.

The Break-in and the First Denial

On Saturday morning, June 17, 1972, a Washington Post city editor called Bob Woodward early and asked him to come in. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters. They had been carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. What first arrived as a police story soon raised a political question: who had hired the men, and what was the purpose of their equipment?

The next morning, at editor Barry Sussman’s request, Woodward and Carl Bernstein returned to the office to follow up. A report on the Associated Press wire supplied an important connection: campaign-spending records filed with the government identified James McCord as the Committee for the Re-election of the President’s security coordinator. The arrest therefore could not be treated simply as an isolated burglary by men with private security backgrounds; one of the arrested men had held a position with the president’s campaign committee.

John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s campaign manager and a former attorney general, issued a statement from Los Angeles. He described McCord as the proprietor of a private security agency who had been employed months earlier to help install the committee’s security system. Mitchell said the campaign had no knowledge of McCord’s other business relationships and denied that the burglars had acted on the committee’s behalf or with its consent. His statement presented the campaign as opposed to the operation even as the reporters’ first documented connection placed a campaign security official among the arrested men.

The dispute moved quickly beyond the news pages. The day after the arrest, Democratic Party chairman O’Brien filed a $1 million civil damages suit against the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Citing the potential involvement of Charles Colson, O’Brien said the developing facts led toward the White House and argued that the bungled attempt had revealed the bugging only because it had failed. His challenge framed the burglary as a test of an administration’s stated commitment to law and order, not merely as a criminal case about the men caught at the scene.

Following the Money and the Records

Financial evidence gave the investigation a route from the burglary toward the campaign organization. Among the checks examined by Bernstein was a cashier’s check for $25,000, dated April 10 and payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. It was drawn on the First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida. The check was deposited on April 20 with four Mexican checks, producing a combined deposit of $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the remaining $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The transactions offered concrete amounts, dates, and account movements against which broader claims about campaign financing could be tested.

An investigator with the General Accounting Office described a larger pool of unaccounted cash in increasingly pointed terms over successive days: first as hundreds of thousands of dollars, then as a cash slush fund, and then as a hidden tangle beneath the apparent order of computerized financial reports. Woodward came to believe that this fund was the same pool of money Bernstein had heard described as convention-security funds in early July. According to the investigator, it totaled at least $100,000 and included money from Barker’s account obtained by cashing Dahlberg’s check. The reporting thus linked a specific check and bank account to a broader question about how cash was held and used.

The Post later reported that funds for the espionage operation were controlled by several principal assistants to Mitchell and kept in a special account at the campaign committee. Six weeks after Mitchell’s initial denial, Woodward told Mitchell’s successor as campaign manager, Clark MacGregor, what the newspaper had learned. The sequence mattered: the account of non-involvement had to contend not only with the arrested men’s campaign connection but also with reporting that placed control of the operation’s funds among senior campaign assistants.

Accounts of what happened inside the committee after the arrests added another line of inquiry. Bernstein’s draft reported that Mitchell’s principal associates at the committee, Robert Mardian and Fred LaRue, directed a large-scale clearing of records and instructed staff to close ranks. The reported cleanup followed Mitchell’s personal selection of LaRue and Mardian to direct the committee’s response. Employees said records had been destroyed in the days immediately after the burglary, although some described what they had heard secondhand and could provide no specifics. The reports raised a serious question about evidence preservation while distinguishing what witnesses had directly established from what they had only heard.

Silence, Indictments, and a Fight over Credibility

The reporting encountered not only missing records but frightened employees. One person Bernstein approached asked him to leave before others saw him and described the pressure on committee staff; another said she wanted to help and burst into tears. Their reactions did not establish what each employee knew, but they made the atmosphere surrounding the reporting visible. The committee bookkeeper later said that by the time the grand jury called her, people had already lied to it and investigators did not know what questions to ask.

Hugh Sloan described the pressure as an instruction conveyed without an explicit order to keep quiet. The message, he said, was to hold ranks and keep the ship together. He also said he had left because he suspected matters were worse than he had been told; his account registered hurt rather than triumph. Taken together with employees’ accounts of destroyed records, the repeated appeal to unity suggested how an organization could constrain disclosure without issuing a plainly worded prohibition.

On September 15, the grand jury indicted E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and the five men arrested on June 17. The seven faced as many as eight counts each, involving conspiracy, burglary, and violation of the federal wiretapping statute prohibiting electronic interception of oral communications. The Washington Post emphasized what the indictments did not settle: they left unanswered the central questions about the purpose of the espionage and who had sponsored it. The charges marked a formal legal consequence, but they did not resolve the campaign-level questions that had driven the investigation.

Those questions persisted as political conflict. George McGovern called the investigation a whitewash and pledged to pursue the case across the country, placing its stakes in the realm of national political morality. Later, after the connection involving Dwight Chapin brought Watergate to the Oval Office, the White House prepared to fight back. Although Time had developed damaging information too, The Washington Post was selected as the target. The administration’s officials set their credibility against the paper’s; newspapers around the country reported the confrontation, helping give the Post’s allegations wider currency. The counterattack intended to challenge the reporting also enlarged the public dispute over it.

From Campaign Fund to White House Crisis

As the 1972 election approached, the investigation produced little new information despite a large reporting effort led by Sussman. More than a dozen reporters worked intermittently on new contacts, isolated sabotage incidents, political consequences, profiles, court proceedings, and activity on Capitol Hill and at the White House. The contrast between the scale of the inquiry and the scarcity of fresh leads made the campaign’s final stretch especially frustrating. Meanwhile, the New York Times added a significant figure to the fund story: sworn testimony from people connected with the Nixon committee indicated that $900,000 had been disbursed from it.

The legal questions that remained open were voiced plainly by Chief Judge John J. Sirica at a pretrial hearing. He said the jury would want to know why the men had entered Democratic headquarters, whether their purpose was political espionage, whether they had been paid or sought financial gain, who had hired them, and who had started the operation. His questions separated the fact of the burglary and the charges against the seven from the still-unresolved chain of purpose, payment, and authorization.

By the following year, the pressure was described in the language of a flood building toward a break. The expected consequences were no longer limited to the men arrested in June: John Dean, Jeb Magruder, Mardian, Mitchell, and, most significantly, H. R. Haldeman were identified as figures likely to be swept into the crisis. That prediction expressed the scandal’s central expansion: evidence about a break-in and its financing had become a threat to senior political figures because investigators and reporters were asking who had directed the operation and managed its aftermath.

In a televised address, Nixon acknowledged that there had been an effort to conceal facts from the public and from him. He announced that he had accepted the resignations of Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, rejected blaming those to whom he had delegated responsibility for running the campaign, and said the responsibility belonged to him as the man at the top. His statement marked a shift from the earlier campaign denial toward presidential acknowledgment of responsibility, while leaving the scandal’s contested facts and consequences to the investigative process. White House Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler then publicly apologized to The Washington Post and two of its reporters for his earlier criticism of their Watergate reporting. The apology reversed the administration’s public posture toward the newspaper, though it did not erase the conflict that had made the press a prominent front in the crisis.