The Watergate scandal began early in the morning of June 17, 1972, when several burglars were arrested in the office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex of buildings in Washington, D.C. This was no ordinary robbery, as the prowlers were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught wiretapping phones and stealing documents. Nixon took aggressive steps to cover up the crime afterwards, and in August 1974, after his role in the conspiracy was revealed, Nixon resigned. The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their leaders and think more critically about the presidency.

The origins of the Watergate break-in lay in the hostile political climate of the time. By 1972, when Republican President Richard M. Nixon was running for reelection. The country had hard times, because the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and the country was deeply divided.

A forceful presidential campaign therefore seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. In May 1972 members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones.

The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 a group of five men returned to the Watergate building. As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed someone had taped over several of the building’s door locks. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch the spies red-handed.

It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. The most interesting thing is that in August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. People believed him, and in November 1972 the president was reelected in a landslide victory.

It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. This was a more serious crime than the break-in, because it was an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.

Meanwhile, seven conspirators were indicted on charges related to the Watergate affair. At the urging of Nixon’s aides, five pleaded guilty to avoid trial and the other two were convicted in January 1973.

By that time, a growing handful of people—including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. A handful of Nixon’s aides, including White House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president’s crimes, they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office. If prosecutors could get their hands on those tapes, they would have proof of the president’s guilt.

Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president’s executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself, but Judge Sirica, the Senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them.

When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. These events, which took place on the 20th of October, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some of the tapes, but not all.

Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an “unindicted co-conspirator”.

In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. While the president dragged his feet, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution.

Finally, on the 5th of August, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned in disgrace on August 8, and left office the following day. And another interesting point I would like to mention is that Nixon was the first President to be impeached, although he resigned himself.

Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office. Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They were convicted of very serious offenses and sent to federal prison. Nixon himself never admitted to any criminal wrongdoing, though he did acknowledge using poor judgment.

53. Identify the challenges that the Ford and Carter administration faced.
Ford's challenges. Gerald Ford faced the same economic problems as Nixon and was no more successful in dealing with them. The unexpected combination of inflation and high unemployment continued to plague the country. The president focused on inflation and launched the Whip Inflation Now (WIN) campaign, a voluntary effort that called on Americans to save their money rather than spend it.
The campaign, with its red and white WIN buttons, had little effect. Ford also reduced spending and the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates, but the recession worsened and unemployment reached nine percent. Only then did the administration shift gears and try to stimulate the economy through a large tax cut.
In foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state, providing continuity for American foreign policy. Détente with the Soviet Union remained a high priority, and in late 1974, Ford and Brezhnev met to work out the basis for the SALT II agreement (the negotiations of which had begun in 1972 and would continue into the Carter administration). In August 1975, at a summit conference held in Helsinki, the two leaders agreed to recognize the postwar boundaries of Western and Eastern Europe. Brezhnev also agreed to permit more Soviet Jews to emigrate, a decision helped perhaps by Congress having linked trade with the Soviet Union to Jewish emigration. In the Middle East, Kissinger continued his shuttle diplomacy of traveling back and forth between Israel and Egypt, begun after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the fall of 1975, Israel agreed to return most of the Sinai Peninsula, which had been captured during the 1967 Six‐Day War, to Egypt. The Ford administration also presided over the final act of the Vietnam War. In April 1975, the president asked Congress for $1 billion in aid for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and was refused. However, by that time, no amount of money could have prevented the North's victory, and news footage of the South Vietnamese civilians desperately trying to get in to the American embassy in the hours before Saigon fell provided some of the most enduring images of the end of the conflict.
Carter's foreign policy. Carter was a strong advocate of human rights as an element of American foreign policy. He sought better relations with the black nations of Africa, strongly opposed the apartheid policies in South Africa, and pressed countries such as Chile and South Korea to improve the treatment of their own citizens as a criteria for American support. Human rights violations in Nicaragua, for example, prompted the administration to end military and economic aid to the Somoza regime. Additionally, despite considerable conservative opposition, the president persuaded Congress to ratify two treaties that provided for the transfer of the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone to Panamanian control in 1999.
In June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II accord, which reduced the nuclear arsenals of both nations. But the progress of détente between the two nations came to an abrupt halt in January 1980 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its threatened communist government. SALT II was withdrawn from Senate consideration, an embargo on grain shipments to the USSR was put in place, and the president called for an international boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. None of these actions brought about any change in Soviet policy.
The Middle East represented the high point and the low point of the administration's foreign policy. Carter was responsible for the signing of the first peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors, Egypt. After the unprecedented visit of President Anwar el‐Sadat of Egypt to Israel in 1977, both Sadat and Israeli leader Menachem Begin were invited to the United States to work out a permanent settlement to their countries' differences. Under the Camp David Accords (September 1978), Israel completely withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and normal diplomatic relations were established between Israel and Egypt. The formal peace treaty was signed in Washington in March 1979.
Carter's success at Camp David was offset by his failure to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. In November 1979, Islamic militants overran the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. The president seemed to be at a loss on how to handle the situation. He tried negotiations, and when those failed, he ordered a rescue attempt that turned out to be poorly planned and unsuccessful. His inability to free the hostages was a major factor in his defeat in the 1980 election. Iran let the hostages go on the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president (January 20, 1981).