Watergate: The Scandal That Brought Down a President

Summary

Increasingly and mistakenly viewed as a single scandal within the United States government, what is commonly referred to as the Watergate scandal serves as an overarching term for a series of scandals beginning in 1971 and extending through 1974, although more than any other, it refers to the specific break-in at the Watergate Hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C. The crisis, originating in a secretive battle between the two major political parties, the Nixon White House’s paranoia, and the ensuing conflict concerning the release of confidential information to the public, induced senior government officials into committing crimes (most notoriously petty burglary) and coverups for the purposes of character assassination and inter-political espionage, and it ultimately resulted in the first and only resignation of a sitting American president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Watergate has since become so synonymous with scandal that “gate” is typically added to the end of words associated with scandals even today.

In the wake of the seemingly peculiar burglary, gradual media and judicial pursuits of the thread of scandals led from one thing to another over the following years until it began to culminate with Congressional impeachment proceedings and a momentous showdown between the President and the Supreme Court over the release of presidential tapes, a moment in which Nixon seriously considered defying the Court and initiating a constitutional crisis. When he at last surrendered them, excerpts were blatantly missing, most famously an 18 minute stretch. Given the flurry of activities, it has only been in recent years that historians have gained a full measure of the nation’s perilous status during the intense battle between the various branches of the federal government, and the American public’s view of government in general took a decidedly negative turn.