Watergate- In 1972, there was a break in and the Pentagon Papers were leaked. Several burglars were arrested in the office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate complex of buildings in Washington, D.C. Those involved were all connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught wiretapping phones and stealing documents. President Nixon tried to cover up the crimes bit he was exposed in his role. The Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their leaders and think more critically about the presidency.
by Bryn Rochon
1. E. Howard Hunt: A former CIA operative, Hunt was a member of the “Plumbers,” an informal White House team tasked with preventing and repairing information “leaks” such as the 1971 release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers. After investigators found his phone number in address books belonging to the Watergate burglars, they connected the dots between the burglary, President Nixon and his reelection campaign.
2. G. Gordon Liddy: A former FBI agent who served as general counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President was responsible for planning and supervising the Watergate break-in. According to testimony heard in the trial, he received about $332,000 in campaign funds, which he used to carry out a number of intelligence-gathering operations.
3. Charles “Chuck” Colson: As special advisor to the president, Colson was the mastermind behind many of the “dirty tricks” and political maneuvers that brought down the Nixon administration. As Colson told E. Howard Hunt in a recorded telephone conversation, he would write in his memoirs that “Watergate was brilliantly conceived as an escapade that would divert the Democrats’ attention from the real issues, and therefore permit us to win a landslide that we probably wouldn’t have won otherwise.”
4. John Ehrlichman: Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs, also served as head of the “Plumbers.” He attempted to cover up the botched Watergate break-in.
5. H.R. Haldeman: The Nixon administration White House chief of staff became a key figure in the Watergate probe as investigators zeroed in on tape-recorded conversations of White House meetings. One of the tapes included a now-famous 18-and-a-half-minute gap, which was later revealed to include a conversation between Haldeman and Nixon. Haldeman was also implicated in the so-called “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon talked about using the CIA to divert the FBI’s investigation of Watergate.
6. John Mitchell: The notoriously gruff and fiercely loyal Mitchell was Nixon’s attorney general before he resigned in 1972 to become director of the Committee to Re-elect the President. According to testimony in the Watergate hearings, Mitchell approved the break-in and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
7. Jed Stuart Magruder: A White House communications adviser, Magruder played a key role in planning the Watergate break-in, and later covering it up.
8. Archibald Cox: He was hired as a special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate scandal. Archibald Cox was fired from his post by President Nixon just five months later in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre”. This was a White House shake-up that led to the resignation of two other Justice Department staff as well. Cox was fired after insisting President Nixon give him unrestricted access to tapes of conversations leading up to the break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters.
9. Mark Felt: A senior FBI official during the Watergate years. Known for decades only as “Deep Throat,” the mysterious government source who helped Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward untangle the Watergate conspiracy. Mark Felt met from time to time with Woodward—always in deserted parking garages, and always taking extreme precautions to ensure they had not been followed—providing clues that guided the journalist’s reporting.
10. Sam Ervin: Chairman of the Senate Watergate committee that investigated the air in televised hearings, Ervin became a national hero for serving as a moral compass. The purpose of the hearings was to "probe into assertions that the very system has been subverted."
11. Howard Baker: A Republican senator from Tennessee, Baker was vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee that investigated the scandal, and is famously remembered for asking former White House counsel John Dean on June 29, 1973: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”
12. Benjamin Bradlee: : As executive editor of The Washington Post from 1965 to 1991, Bradlee oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal—despite facing erce criticism for the aggressive investigation. A year earlier, Bradlee had accused the Nixon administration in his decision to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a series of top-secret les detailing the U.S. government’s activities in Vietnam.
13. James McCord-A former CIA officer and FBI agent, McCord was one of the burglars arrested at the Watergate complex, and the “chief wiretapper” of the operation. During the burglary, McCord, then security director of the Committee to Reelect the President , left a piece of tape on the latch of a stairwell door, inadvertently alerting a security guard to the burglary in progress.
14. Virgilio Gonzalez: A Cuban refugee and locksmith by trade, Gonzalez was one of the burglars arrested at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. He had been recruited in Miami by E. Howard Hunt, who had played a key role in the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
15. Donald Segretti: A former military prosecutor, Segretti was an operative for the Committee to Re-elect the President, known as the architect behind Nixon’s campaign of political sabotage against Democratic opponents. In one such smear campaign, he created an anonymous letter falsely claiming that former senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had fathered an illegitimate child with a teenager.
16. John Dean: Serving as White House counsel from 1970 to 1973, Dean helped cover up the Nixon administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and illegal intelligence-gathering. But as the investigation was closing in, he had warned fellow staffers, “The jig is up. It’s over,” and reportedly said to Nixon, “We have a cancer within, close to, the presidency, that is growing.” Nixon fired him shortly thereafter.
17. Alexander Butterfield: As deputy White House chief of staff to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, Butterfield controlled the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the Oval Office. He revealed the existence of the tapes when he was questioned by the Senate Watergate Committee, effectively sealing Nixon’s fate.
18. Robert Bork: A conservative judge, solicitor general and acting attorney general in the Nixon Administration. He carried out President Nixon’s orders to fire counsel Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed conversations taped in the Oval Office.
19. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: Young reporters at The Washington Post, teamed up to cover the burglary at the Watergate complex, and the ensuing scandal. Piecing together the story from dozens of sources, many of them anonymous, they leaned primarily on tips from a mysterious government operative nicknamed “Deep Throat.
