From the Nixon Library:

Watergate Break-in, 50th Anniversary

June 17 marks the 50th anniversary of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters located on the 6th floor of the Watergate Hotel and Office complex in Washington, DC. The investigation into the break-in exposed a number of controversial actions (collectively known as “Watergate”) that led to the highest levels of the Nixon administration and ultimately to the President himself.

The June 17 break-in was not the first burglary conducted by the intruders (also known as the “Plumbers”). They had successfully gained access to the DNC offices on May 28, during which they planted listening devices and photographed documents.

Security guard Frank Wills worked the midnight to 7 a.m. shift at the Watergate Complex. Wills sensed something was wrong shortly after starting his rounds on Saturday, June 17, 1972. According to his entries in the Watergate security record, he found paper-stuffed doors on levels B2 and B3 of the office complex. Wills also discovered tape covering the latches on some of the doors leading from the underground parking structure to multiple offices, allowing doors to close but remain unlocked. Wills thought the tape was left by the maintenance or custodial crew and removed it, thinking it was useless. Wills then "cut all lights out in hall" at 12:30 a.m. and began an investigation. He phoned the police when he arrived a short time later and saw that the latches had been re-taped. It was around 2 a.m.

Not long afterward, the police apprehended five men: Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis. They were accused of attempted burglary and telephone and other communications eavesdropping. "Police found lock-picks and door jimmies, nearly $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with serial numbers in sequence... a short-wave receiver that could pick up police calls, 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35-millimeter cameras, and three pen-sized tear gas guns," according to the Washington Post.

As news of the break-in unfolded, a group of Washington Post reporters, including Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who helped identify the five burglars the next day, discovered that James W. McCord was linked to President Nixon's reelection campaign – the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP). The reporters described McCord as a "salaried security coordinator for President Nixon's reelection committee."

Thus began one of the most intriguing and dramatic political events in American history, as President Nixon, under the threat of impeachment, ultimately resigned from the Presidency two years later, on August 9, 1974.

For contextual understanding as well as extracting vital information to make informed judgments when using primary sources for research, we invite you and your students to use these downloadable worksheets for better document and photo analysis.

Additionally, we encourage you to further explore Watergate through the Nixon Library’s Watergate Exhibit Evidence. The website section contains Watergate-related material such as photographs, scanned documents, audio, and video snippets that come directly from our collections.

Stayed tuned for regular updates from the Nixon Library Education and Public Programs Team.

Please feel free to contact us at NixonEducation@nara.gov if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

The Nixon Library Education and

Public Programs Team

This played out over two years, and I followed the "news" story obsessively until that glorious moment when Tricky Dicky bit the bullet and quit. As the decades rolled by, I changed my assessment from "glorious triumph for the rule of law" to "oh shit, more bullshit," as I learned more about Bob Woodward. In real life, he was nothing like the wide-eyed innocent portrayed by Robert Redford. He was previously the briefing officer from the Pentagon to the White House and, upon leaving the Navy, he applied to Harvard Law School and was accepted -- but declined to enroll. Instead he applied for a job as a Washington Post reporter. The only problem was that The Sundance Kid could not write a simple lead. Ben Bradlee farmed him out to a suburban paper where he could learn the basic skills of a beat reporter.

This casts a very different light on the story of Watergate.

It jogged my memory to recall a passage during the Sam Ervin Watergate hearings. Some random cop was testifying about the investigation into the original crime at the office of the DNC. He scoffed at what he considered the absurdity of having a bunch of guys on a simple job like bugging an office. At the time the guy just annoyed me because he was not telling me what I wanted to hear -- that Nixon was running his own personal Gestapo. I also heard someone point out how handy it was for the DC cops that these Watergate spooks had things like the White House phone number in their possession while on this caper. Luckily for those of us who hated Nixon at the time, Woodstein was there to make sure the planted clues would lead back to Nixon.

Bullshit has always been how the world works. It just looks different now because the ass really is
falling out of everything now.