On the evening of June 12, 1972, Frank Wills patrolled a parking garage on what seemed like a regular routine of his duties as a private security guard in the Watergate towers in Washington, D.C. But there was nothing usual or routine about that night, for Frank Wills and for the United States. After spotting some duct tape in the door leading up into the building, Wills knew something was up. Suspicious, he radioed in for the local police. What Wills could not have known was how instrumental he would become in uncovering a burglary whose cover up eventually made its way directly to the White House.
Caught in the act of breaking into the Democratic headquarters office at Watergate, burglars Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Baker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis were arrested and later convicted in January 1973 for what ostensibly seemed like a routine burglary. Though the men were traced in one way or another to CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President, the White House denied the men were involved with the committee and disavowed their criminal activities. But a letter written by McCord to the trial judge John J. Sirica revealed the insidious nature of this burglary. All men, according to McCord, had been paid off with hush money from CREEP. What started seemingly as a burglary emerged as something much more.
A Senate investigation was launched to determine just how high up a cover up of the burglary went. The investigation uncovered a pattern of dirty tricks played by the White House to win against its perceived enemies, including Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who had released to the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, a secret analytical document about the United States's unfeasibility to win the war in Vietnam. The limits of the freedom of press was tested when NYT became embroiled in the courts over its right to publish the document. Some of the same men who were involved in the Watergate break-in, including G. Gordon Liddy, had broken into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to steal private files, ostensibly to use them to discredit Ellsberg. A secret campaign slush fund, an enemies list, and a plumbers unit to prevent leaks out of the White House were also discovered, all leading to key presidential advisors, opening up speculation that Nixon was involved in a cover-up.
Though the investigation was largely ignored by the mainstream press and much of the American public, several leading newspaper organizations were on top of every twist and turn in the investigation, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two investigative journalists with the Washington Post, were key players in uncovering the cover up, printing stories about who was involved in it and how close they were to the president.
On April 30, 1973, two of those White House key advisors implicated in the coverup, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehlichman, were fired and later indicted and imprisoned. White House counsel John Dean was also fired when he was set to testify during the Senate hearings. Dean, after witnessing what was happening in the White House, turned against Nixon and testified to the Senate committee hearings of a cover up of massive proportions led by the president and his men. At the time of Dean's testimony, though, there was no real proof of the president's complicity. It was his word against Nixon's.
Though Nixon denied any involvement in the burglary, he assigned new Attorney General Elliot Richardson to pick an independent prosecutor. On May 19, Richardson tapped Archibald Cox for the job.
The Senate Committee hearings on the Watergate break-in and cover-up began on May 17 and ended August 7 of 1973. Broadcast both on the ABC and NBC networks, the hearings were watched by 85% of television viewers. The hearings attempted to shed light on what actually happened that night of June 12, who was involved, and how high that involvement went. Despite Nixon's continued denials, the public was growing more skeptical. Republican Senator from Tennessee Howard Baker voiced these concerns when he asked the now famous line: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
It was during the hearings that Americans got the first word of possible tape recordings out of the White House. After learning that there were mechanisms in the White House that allowed for recorded meetings and conversations in the Oval Office, Cox subpoened those tapes. Citing executive privilege, Nixon refused to turn them over. The contest of wills between Cox and Nixon led to what would later be called “The Saturday Night Massacre.” Realizing that Cox wasn't going to play the loyal lap dog he had insisted from all his advisors, Nixon wanted Cox fired, but knew that doing so himself would put him in legal hot water. A search commenced in the White House for someone to do the dirty deed. This job eventually fell on Robert Bork, who was then Solicitor General. Bork fired Cox on October 20, 1973, setting off a firestorm of protest from the public who had now become convinced that Nixon was indeed involved in the cover up. The public demanded for Nixon's impeachment. Though Nixon had always been known as “Tricky Dick,” the pejorative did not stick as much as it did during those waning months of his administration.
