Watergate
The 1972 burglary and the two-year cover-up that followed, which ended with an American president resigning rather than face certain impeachment.
On 17 June 1972 a security guard at the Watergate office complex in Washington found tape over a door latch, called the police, and five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee with cameras, bugging equipment, and sequential hundred-dollar bills. One of them turned out to be the security coordinator of the Committee to Re-elect the President.
Richard Nixon won re-election that November in one of the largest landslides in American history, carrying forty-nine states. Twenty-one months later he resigned.
What it was actually about
The burglary itself was almost beside the point. Nixon was going to win comfortably and did not need whatever was in the DNC's files.
What mattered was that the break-in was one operation of a much larger apparatus. There was a unit inside the White House, nicknamed the Plumbers, formed to stop leaks after the Pentagon Papers were published, which had already burgled the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for material to discredit him. There was an enemies list. There were wiretaps on journalists and officials, campaign dirty tricks against Democratic candidates, and the routine use of the FBI, the CIA, and the Internal Revenue Service against political opponents.
And there was the cover-up, which is what destroyed him. Within days the White House was arranging hush money for the burglars and pressuring the CIA to tell the FBI to stand down on national security grounds. That last act, obstruction of a federal investigation by the president personally, was the crime.
How it unraveled
Several institutions worked at once, which is the part worth remembering.
Two junior reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, kept the story alive through the months when nobody else was interested, guided by a source inside the FBI known as Deep Throat, revealed in 2005 to have been the bureau's associate director Mark Felt.
The federal judge who tried the burglars, John Sirica, refused to accept that five men had done this on their own initiative and used the threat of long sentences to break the silence. A Senate select committee held televised hearings through the summer of 1973, and a witness disclosed almost in passing that Nixon had taped his own conversations in the Oval Office.
The tapes then became the entire fight. Nixon refused to release them, citing executive privilege. When the special prosecutor pressed, Nixon ordered him fired in October 1973; the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than do it, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, and the public reaction was so violent that a new prosecutor had to be appointed with stronger guarantees.
In July 1974 a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon that executive privilege does not cover evidence in a criminal case. The tapes went over. One of them, from 23 June 1972, six days after the break-in, recorded Nixon agreeing to have the CIA obstruct the FBI investigation. It was released on 5 August. His remaining support in Congress vanished within days, and he resigned on 9 August 1974.
Nearly fifty people were eventually convicted, including the attorney general and the president's chief of staff and chief domestic adviser. Nixon himself was pardoned a month later by his successor, Gerald Ford.
The echo
The optimistic reading, dominant for a generation, is that the system worked: a free press, an independent judiciary, a legislature willing to investigate its own party's president, and a Supreme Court that ruled unanimously against the man who had appointed several of its members.
The pessimistic reading has gained ground. It worked slowly and narrowly, it depended on a tape recorder Nixon had installed himself, and the pardon meant no president was ever tried. The reforms that followed, campaign finance limits, the special prosecutor statute, the War Powers Resolution, have mostly been weakened, repealed, or worked around.
What is not in doubt is the suffix. Every subsequent scandal in the English-speaking world gets -gate attached to it, which is a small, permanent monument to the summer American politics stopped assuming the president was telling the truth.