Watergate

What the claim says

The claim is that President Richard Nixon's re-election organization was behind the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, and that Nixon and his closest aides then covered it up with hush money, false statements and efforts to turn the FBI aside. Some retellings go further and say that Nixon himself ordered the burglary.

The documented core is firm. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF), the independent office created in 1973 to investigate the affair, states in its final report, which covers its work from May 1973 to September 1975, that agents of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP) broke into the DNC headquarters on June 17, 1972. The grand jury that heard the cover-up evidence concluded that Nixon had been a participant in the cover-up. What is not established is who ordered the burglary, or whether Nixon knew of it in advance.

The break-in

According to the special prosecutor's chronology, the DNC offices were first entered on May 28, 1972, and electronic surveillance equipment was installed. In the early hours of June 17, police found five men inside the offices carrying electronic equipment, cameras and large sums of cash, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit later recorded. The National Archives chronology says they were arrested while attempting to repair the surveillance equipment; the court said their mission was to fix a defective bugging device placed on the telephone of the DNC chairman during the earlier entry.

The five were Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis and James McCord. Several had histories with the CIA. Barker was a former CIA operative, and McCord, a former CIA officer and FBI agent, was on CRP's payroll as its chief of security. On September 15, 1972, a grand jury indicted the five together with E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, and G. Gordon Liddy, CRP's general counsel. Hunt pleaded guilty on January 11, 1973. Barker, Sturgis, Martinez and Gonzalez pleaded guilty on January 15. Liddy and McCord were convicted on all counts on January 30, in a trial before Chief Judge John J. Sirica.

Testimony at the later cover-up trial, as the Court of Appeals summarized it in 1976, was that the break-in was part of a CRP intelligence plan code-named Gemstone, devised by Liddy with Hunt. According to that testimony, Liddy presented the plan to John Mitchell, then still Attorney General, in January and February 1972, and on March 30, by which time Mitchell headed CRP, Jeb Magruder obtained Mitchell's approval at a meeting in Key Biscayne, Florida, attended by Mitchell and Fred LaRue. Mitchell told the grand jury on September 14, 1972, that he knew of no clandestine CRP intelligence program, and the jury convicted him of making false declarations on the strength of that testimony. The account of who approved what rests largely on such testimony.

The first cover-up, June to September 1972

The Washington Post reported the arrests on its front page on June 18, 1972. The White House dismissed the crime as a "third-rate burglary," as the Harry Ransom Center's finding aid for the Woodward and Bernstein papers puts it, and much of the press lost interest for a time.

Inside the campaign the response was different. The Court of Appeals described trial evidence that CRP officials asked the new Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, to have McCord released, and that Kleindienst insisted the burglars receive no special treatment. A press release on June 18 in Mitchell's name, approved by H. R. Haldeman, denied any CRP tie and suggested McCord might have been working for clients of his private security firm. Magruder burned the Gemstone papers after Mitchell suggested he "have a fire." At the White House, John Ehrlichman suggested that John Dean shred some of the contents of Hunt's safe and "deep six" the rest; Dean refused, and the most sensitive items went to the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, with instructions that they should never see the light of day. Gray complied. On August 30, 1972, Nixon announced that Dean had completed an investigation and that no one from the White House was involved.

The tape of June 23, 1972

The tape known as the "smoking gun" was recorded in the Oval Office on Friday, June 23, 1972, six days after the arrests. The Nixon Library's log of the tapes played in the Watergate trials describes it this way: Haldeman and Nixon discuss the progress of the FBI's investigation, especially the tracing of the source of money found on the burglars, and "They propose having the CIA ask the FBI to halt their investigation of the Watergate break-in by claiming that the break-in was a national security operation." Another segment from the same day covers how Hunt's involvement would point investigators toward the CIA and his role in the Bay of Pigs operation, and a third has Haldeman describing a meeting with Vernon Walters, the CIA's deputy director, and an earlier call from Gray to Walters.

Nixon released transcripts of three conversations with Haldeman from that day on August 5, 1974. In the accompanying statement he said the tapes "clearly show" that when he gave his instructions he "also discussed the political aspects of the situation" and was aware of the advantages of "limiting possible public exposure of involvement by persons connected with the reelection committee." He called his failure to tell his lawyers and staff about the tapes "a serious act of omission for which I take full responsibility and which I deeply regret." The special prosecutor's report describes the statement as acknowledging that Nixon had ordered steps to conceal from the FBI the involvement of White House and campaign officials.

The tape is evidence of obstruction, not of planning. It does not show who ordered the break-in. Nixon argued in the same statement that Gray did coordinate with the CIA's director and deputy director, that the CIA checked and told Gray its covert activities would not be compromised, and that on July 6, 1972, he told Gray to press ahead vigorously with his investigation. Those points are part of the record too.

Hush money and the March 1973 conversations

The Court of Appeals described the payments to the burglars as one of the two main parts of the conspiracy, the other being the cover story for Liddy's funds. According to the trial evidence, Liddy told Mardian and LaRue on June 20 or 21 that commitments had been made to provide the arrested men with bail, legal fees and living expenses. Dean, with the approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, approached Nixon's longtime fundraiser Herbert Kalmbach on June 28, and Kalmbach delivered $187,000 to the burglars between July 1 and mid-September. After the election Hunt called Charles Colson and warned that loyalty "is a two-way street." A secret $350,000 fund under Haldeman's control was tapped, and Hunt demanded a further $122,000 on March 16, 1973.

On March 21, 1973, Dean told Nixon in the Oval Office that there was a "cancer" growing on the presidency and guessed that future demands could reach another million dollars. The Nixon Library's summary of the recording lists "references to blackmail, perjury; discussion of paying the burglars off with one million dollars." The Court of Appeals quoted Nixon as replying that "you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten." Nixon returned several times to the Hunt demand, saying it should be "handled" to "buy time." Haldeman, testifying to the Senate committee in 1973, said Nixon followed up by saying "it would be wrong"; that testimony became a perjury count on which a jury convicted him, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. That evening Mitchell directed LaRue to deliver $75,000 to Hunt's attorney.

The House Judiciary Committee later listed, among the means of obstruction in its first article of impeachment, "Approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payment of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses." The trial evidence also described veiled assurances of clemency passed to Hunt and to McCord.

How the cover-up came apart

Press reporting kept the story alive. Bob Woodward discovered that McCord was a former CIA employee working for CRP and traced a telephone number in a burglar's address book to Hunt, then a White House consultant; Carl Bernstein confirmed calls to Hunt from telephone records and traced a check in a burglar's bank account to CRP. On October 10, 1972, they reported that the break-in was part of a broader campaign of sabotage against Nixon's opponents, paid for through CRP. Press secretary Ron Ziegler criticized the story, then apologized to the reporters and the Post on May 1, 1973.

The break-in trial opened on January 8, 1973. On March 19, McCord wrote to Judge Sirica that political pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, and Sirica made the letter public on March 23. On April 30, Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned and Dean was dismissed. The Senate had voted unanimously on February 7 to create a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin; its public hearings began on May 17. Dean told the committee on June 25 that the president had known of the cover-up as early as September 1972. Then Alexander Butterfield, a former deputy assistant to the president, told committee investigators on July 13 and testified publicly on July 16 that the White House had a taping system. It was voice-activated, had been installed on February 16, 1971, and was shut down after his testimony.

Tapes, special prosecutors and the Supreme Court

Cox and the Senate committee subpoenaed tapes on July 23, 1973. Nixon refused, and on October 12 the Court of Appeals ordered him to produce them. On the evening of October 20, after Cox rejected a compromise under which Senator John Stennis would review a statement of the tapes' contents, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to dismiss Cox. Richardson resigned, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was fired, and Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out the dismissal. After a firestorm of criticism Nixon agreed on October 23 to comply with the subpoena, and Leon Jaworski was sworn in as the new special prosecutor on November 5. A federal judge later held that Cox's firing had been illegal.

The tapes then produced their own scandal. On November 21 the White House disclosed that the tape of a June 20, 1972, conversation between Nixon and Haldeman had an 18 and a half minute gap. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's secretary, testified that she might have accidentally erased four or five minutes. A court-appointed panel of six experts reported on January 15, 1974, that the gap was produced by at least five separate hand operations of a recorder and that the conversation could not be recovered.

On March 1, 1974, the grand jury indicted seven men in the cover-up case: Charles Colson, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Robert Mardian, Mitchell, Kenneth Parkinson and Gordon Strachan. It also authorized the special prosecutor to name Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. Jaworski concluded it would be improper to indict a sitting president while the House impeachment inquiry was under way. On April 16 he sought 64 more recordings. On April 29 Nixon announced he would make edited White House transcripts public, saying the materials would "tell it all"; they were released on April 30, and he then refused the tapes.

The Supreme Court heard argument on July 8, 1974, and decided United States v. Nixon on July 24. Justice William Rehnquist took no part, and the Court ruled unanimously. It held that "neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances," and that a generalized claim of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.

Impeachment and resignation

The House authorized its Judiciary Committee on February 6, 1974, to investigate whether grounds for impeachment existed. The committee adopted three articles: Article I, obstruction of justice, on July 27 by a vote of 27 to 11; Article II, abuse of power, on July 29 by 28 to 10; and Article III, defying committee subpoenas, on July 30 by 21 to 17. Article I opens with the statement that agents of CRP committed the unlawful entry to secure political intelligence and that Nixon then engaged in a course of conduct designed to delay, impede and obstruct the investigation. Article II covered, among other things, attempts to obtain confidential tax information from the Internal Revenue Service and the misuse of the FBI and Secret Service.

Nixon released the June 23 transcripts on August 5. In a televised address on August 8, 1974, he said that because of the Watergate matter he might not have the support of Congress he considered necessary, and that he would resign effective at noon the next day. He resigned on August 9. The special prosecutor's report says he did so in the face of overwhelming support for impeachment in the House and almost certain conviction in the Senate. He was the first president to resign.

Prosecutions and what the numbers count

The WSPF's charter covered the break-in, offenses arising from the 1972 presidential election, and allegations involving the president and his staff, so its caseload went well beyond the burglary. Historian Garrett Graff, author of a 2022 history of the scandal, told CBS News: "Ultimately 69 people were indicted or charged with crimes."

That figure counts charges, not convictions. A companion figure of 48 people "found guilty and incarcerated" circulates in encyclopedia-style summaries, but the special prosecutor's final report narrates outcomes case by case and does not state a total of that kind. The report's cases range from the break-in itself to campaign-finance and ITT matters, include corporate defendants such as American Airlines, Goodyear and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, which pleaded guilty on October 17, 1973, to illegal campaign contributions, and end in acquittals and dismissals as well as convictions. Mitchell and Maurice Stans were acquitted on April 28, 1974, in a separate case about the financier Robert Vesco; Parkinson was acquitted in the cover-up trial; and the case against Strachan was dismissed at the prosecutor's request in March 1975. Any single count of convictions therefore depends on what is counted.

The convictions most closely tied to Watergate itself are documented one by one. Seven men were convicted in the break-in case, and the Court of Appeals affirmed those convictions in December 1974 and February 1975. Magruder, LaRue and Dean pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 1973, and Herbert Porter pleaded guilty on January 28, 1974, to making false statements to the FBI. Colson pleaded guilty on June 3, 1974, to obstructing justice in the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg. After a three-month trial a jury returned verdicts on January 1, 1975: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Mardian were convicted and Parkinson was acquitted. On February 21, 1975, Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were each sentenced to 2.5 to 8 years, and Mardian to 10 months to 3 years. On October 12, 1976, the Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell. In a separate opinion the same day, United States v. Mardian, it reversed Mardian's conviction and remanded for a new trial because his trial should have been severed from the others.

A separate investigation of the White House "Plumbers" unit produced guilty verdicts on July 12, 1974, against Ehrlichman, Liddy, Barker and Martinez in connection with the 1971 burglary of the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, committed to obtain the psychiatric records of Ellsberg. On May 17, 1976, the Court of Appeals affirmed the convictions of Ehrlichman and Liddy and reversed those of Barker and Martinez. Other cases grew out of the same prosecutors' work, among them Dwight Chapin's conviction on April 5, 1974, for lying to a grand jury about campaign "dirty tricks," which the Court of Appeals affirmed on July 14, 1975, and the July 27, 1974 perjury conviction of California's lieutenant governor, Ed Reinecke, in the ITT inquiry, which the Court of Appeals reversed on December 8, 1975.

Pardon and later consequences

On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon" for all offenses against the United States that he had committed or might have committed from January 20, 1969, through August 9, 1974. The WSPF report says the pardon came before the special prosecutor had decided whether to seek an indictment. Jaworski announced on October 12, 1974, that he would not challenge it because he did not believe a challenge had any chance of prevailing, and the office ended its consideration of Nixon as a defendant. Nixon was later questioned under oath for the grand jury on June 23 and 24, 1975.

Ford announced the same day an agreement giving Nixon control over access to his files. Congress responded with the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which Ford signed on December 19, 1974; the Supreme Court upheld it on June 28, 1977, and the National Archives took possession of the Nixon materials. The tapes run to more than three thousand hours. In September 2026 the Hoover Institution announced a project, led by historian Luke Nichter, to transcribe and annotate the whole collection.

Prison time varied. Dean was sentenced on August 2, 1974, to one to four years, entered prison on September 3 and was released on January 8, 1975, on an order reducing his sentence to time served. According to History.com, Mitchell served 19 months, and Haldeman and Ehrlichman 18 months each.

Key people

Richard Nixon was the subject of three articles of impeachment, and the grand jury authorized the special prosecutor to name him an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up. In August 1974 he acknowledged that the June 23 tapes were at variance with his earlier statements. He was never tried.

H. R. Haldeman, the chief of staff, was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury. John Ehrlichman, the domestic adviser, was convicted in both the cover-up trial and the Fielding burglary trial. John Mitchell, a former Attorney General who headed CRP until July 1, 1972, was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction and false statements to a grand jury. John Dean, the White House counsel, pleaded guilty on October 19, 1973, to conspiracy to obstruct justice and then testified for the prosecution. Liddy and Hunt planned the operation, and Hunt's payment demands drove the hush-money scheme. Alexander Butterfield, who disclosed the taping system, was reported dead on March 9, 2026, at the age of 99.

Who was Deep Throat

Woodward's secret source, nicknamed "Deep Throat" by Post editor Howard Simons, was W. Mark Felt, the FBI's Associate Director. His identity was revealed on May 31, 2005, in a Vanity Fair article by John D. O'Connor, a family friend, published in the magazine's July 2005 issue. Felt was 91. The Washington Post confirmed it, and NPR reported the confirmation on June 1. Felt had denied it for years; in a 1979 memoir he wrote, "I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!" He died on December 18, 2008, at the age of 95.

The Harry Ransom Center's finding aid says Felt gave deep background on condition that he not be identified, quoted or used as a sole source, and that he helped focus the reporters on the trail of money from the burglars to CRP and the White House. History.com reports that Woodward and Bernstein themselves stressed afterward that the tapes, the Senate hearings and the Supreme Court played an important role. Graff argues that Felt was not chiefly motivated by a wish to protect democracy but by wanting a job he did not get. For months, according to the finding aid, the Post's reporters could not connect the burglars to anyone close to Nixon.

What remains disputed or unknown

Graff put the main gap this way: "We don't know who ordered the burglary. And we don't really know what the burglars were up to that night." Nixon was never indicted, and the special prosecutor describes the grand jury's finding about him as concerning the cover-up. Magruder said in 2003 that he had personally heard Nixon authorize the break-in, according to History.com, but that is one man's claim, made decades later.

The cause of the 18 and a half minute gap is also unresolved. The experts found deliberate erasures, Woods said she might have caused part of it by accident, and no one was held responsible.

Allegations that the White House used the Internal Revenue Service against its "enemies" were investigated at length. Dean had testified about an "enemies project," and the prosecutors took testimony from perhaps a hundred witnesses on two specific incidents, but they concluded there was insufficient evidence and substantial legal problems standing in the way of any criminal charges. Article II of the impeachment resolution listed IRS allegations among its charges; they produced no conviction.

How the episode is used in later conspiracy talk

The suffix "-gate" is the clearest legacy. Dictionary.com defines it as a combining form extracted from Watergate, used in journalistic coinages, usually nonce words, for scandals resulting from concealed crime or other alleged improprieties in government or business. The label is a rhetorical borrowing, not a finding.

Watergate's unresolved questions have attracted speculation. In 1981 Hunt won a $650,000 libel judgment against a right-wing newspaper that had linked him to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the judgment was overturned several years later, according to History.com. The guessing game over Deep Throat's identity ran for three decades; Vanity Fair called it a parlor game among historians, and History.com reports that Nixon himself speculated about Felt as early as 1973.

A popular adage holds that a cover-up is always worse than the crime. Graff, speaking to CBS News, called it an adage that "actually turns out not to be true in Watergate," because Nixon's crimes were "quite terrible, myriad, and manifold."

What is documented, and where the claim outruns it

Court records, tapes, congressional investigations, and resignations establish the Watergate break-in, hush-money activity, obstruction, and abuse-of-power findings.

The unsupported leap is applying Watergate as a universal template to every political scandal before documents, witnesses, or legal findings exist.

Within Watergate itself the record is firm on five things: agents of Nixon's re-election committee broke into the DNC offices; people around Nixon paid and pressured the burglars to keep quiet; Nixon and Haldeman discussed using the CIA to slow the FBI on June 23, 1972; the Supreme Court forced the tapes into evidence; and Nixon resigned facing impeachment and was then pardoned. The claim outruns the record in several places. The record does not establish who ordered the break-in, and the charges against Nixon concerned what he did afterward. The oft-quoted "48 convictions" is not a figure the special prosecutor's report gives, and the cases in that report range from the break-in to campaign-finance and ITT matters, with corporate defendants and acquittals among them. The "enemies" and IRS allegations were investigated but produced no charges. Deep Throat was one important source among several and did not unmask the scandal single-handedly, as Woodward and Bernstein have said. And the "smoking gun" tape shows a plan to obstruct the FBI six days after the burglary, not a plan for the burglary.