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2-3 Introduction
4-5 The Break-in
5 Re-election
5-7 Role of the media
7-8 The Watergate Investigations
8-9 Saturday Night Massacre
9-10 The Tapes
10 The Resignation
10 Pardon
10-11 Aftermath
11 Webliography
Introduction:
The Watergate scandal is widely considered to be the biggest in political history anywhere in the world but trying to explain it is not easy. There are many names, many dates and many events. To understand Watergate you must to some degree understand the mind of Richard Nixon. He was a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy during World War II before he became a Californian congressman and senator. He was vice president to Dwight D Eisenhower for eight years until 1960 when he himself ran for election against John F Kennedy, the youthful and idealistic Democrat, who he lost to in one of the closest elections in US history. Nixon was deeply hurt by this, blaming the media for favouring his opponent and he long resented the success of the Kennedy clan, a resentment which lasted all the way to the White House which he was elected to in 1968. But his administration’s early years were hampered by the unpopularity of the Vietnam war which the US had been bogged down in since the late 50s. Tackling the unpopularity of the conflict was just one of many of Nixon’s ‘wars’.
Daniel Ellsberg was an employee of the Defense Department who leaked a classified assessment of the Vietnam War in 1971.The 7,000 page document came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. They cast doubt on the justification for entry into the war and revealed that senior government officials had serious misgivings about the war. When the New York Times and Washington Post began to publish the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon Administration sued them. The Supreme Court ruled that the papers could continue to publish the documents. After the release of the Pentagon Papers, the White House created a unit to ensure internal security. This unit was called the Plumbers because they stopped leaks. In 1971 they burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, seeking material to discredit him. It was later revealed that Nixon’s domestic advisor John Ehrlichman knew of and approved the plan. The ‘plumbers’ eventually branched out into other covert and illegal activities, working for the appropriately named CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President [Nixon]) and engaging in activities known as rat-f***ing – dirty tricks – where opposition groups would be infiltrated at campaign events. These tricks undermined Democratic presidential candidates such as Edward Muskie and included everything from forging the infamous Canuck letter – which torpedoed Muskie’s presidential hopes - to stealing campaign workers’ shoes. The Canuck letter was a forged letter to the editor of the Manchester Union Leader, published February 24, 1972, two weeks before the New Hampshire primary of the 1972 United States presidential election. It implied that Senator Edmund Muskie, a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, held prejudice against Americans of French-Canadian descent. The letter's immediate effect was to compel the candidate to give a speech in front of the newspaper's offices, known simply as "the crying speech."
The five burglars
The Break-in:
As part of these illegal activities, in the early hours of 17 June 1972, five men attempted to break-in to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex, about a mile from the White House. When a security guard discovered tape on a door latch outside the DNC HQ he called the police and the five men were arrested. Initial investigations by the FBI were able to establish a connection between one of the burglars and E Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA officer who it later transpired was one of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ tasked with fixing leaks and who in turn was connected to Charles Colson, special counsel to the president. Once this link was established, and leaked to the media, the uncovering of the true extent of the scandal began. It is important to note that Nixon never ordered the break-in at the Watergate complex – the approval for that came from Nixon’s former Attorney General and chair of CREEP John Mitchell – but he colluded in its aftermath to distance his administration from it. The ostensible purpose of this, was to photograph documents and install listening devices. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) connected cash found on the burglars to a slush fund used by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the official organization of Nixon's campaign.
“I can say categorically that… no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident,” he told a White House press in the immediate aftermath of the break-in.
In reality he was urging his lawyer John W Dean to cover-up the White House’s connection to the Watergate break-in. Six weeks after the break-in, he had told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman of the burglars and their leaders: “They have to be paid. That’s all there is to that.” The cover-up began.
Re-election:
Having denied his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon was able to weather the growing storm surrounding the Watergate break-in and win re-election in 1972 with one of the biggest margins in history, beating his Democrat opponent George McGovern in almost every state in the country.
Role of the media:
The connection between the break-in and the re-election committee was highlighted by media coverage — in particular, investigative coverage by The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. The coverage dramatically increased publicity and consequent political repercussions. Relying heavily upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deeply into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House.
Chief among the Post's anonymous sources was an individual whom Woodward and Bernstein had nicknamed Deep Throat; 33 years later, in 2005, he was confirmed to be William Mark Felt, Sr., the former Deputy Director of the FBI. Felt met secretly with Woodward, telling him of Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the White House staff regarded the stakes in Watergate extremely high. Felt warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and other reporters were getting their information, as they were uncovering a wider web of crimes than first disclosed. In one of their last meetings, all of which took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Rosslyn, VA at 2:00 am, Felt cautioned Woodward that he might be followed and not to trust their phone conversations to be secure. Felt also planted leaks about Watergate to Time Magazine, the Washington Daily News and other publications. While Carl Bernstein has ascribed Felt's motives to truth telling and protecting the justice system against Presidential abuse, historian Max Holland in his 2012 book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat claimed Felt planted the leaks to obtain the FBI director's job (the leaks hurt L. Patrick Gray, Nixon's friend who had recently been chosen for the director's position over Felt). John Dean remarked that "Max has got it right—he nailed it”. Bob Woodward who was interviewed for the book said the idea that they were reporting just what prosecutors had already found is "factually wrong" and a lot of the book is speculations and conjecture. Carl Bernstein said the book is part of the revisionism and debunking industries.
During this early period, most of the media failed to grasp the full implications of the scandal, and concentrated reporting on other topics related to the 1972 Presidential election. After the revelation that one of the convicted burglars wrote to Judge Sirica alleging a high-level cover-up, the media shifted its focus. Time Magazine described Nixon as undergoing "daily hell and very little trust". The distrust between the press and the Nixon administration was mutual and greater than usual due to lingering dissatisfaction with events from the Vietnam War. Public distrust of the media reached over 40%.
Nixon and top administration officials discussed using government agencies to "get" what they perceived as hostile media organizations. The discussions had precedent. At the request of Nixon's White House in 1969, the FBI tapped the phones of five reporters. In 1971, the White House requested an audit of the tax return of the editor of Newsday, after he wrote a series of articles about the financial dealings of a friend of the President's.
The Administration and their supporters accused the media of making "wild accusations", putting too much emphasis on this story, and of having a liberal bias against the Administration. Nixon said in a May 1974 interview with a supporter that if he had followed the liberal policies which he thought the media preferred, "Watergate would have been a blip." The media noted that most of the reporting turned out to be accurate and the competitive nature of the media guaranteed massive coverage of the political scandal.
The Watergate investigations:
Watergate came to be investigated by a Special Prosecutor, a Senate committee, and by the judge in the original break-in case. Judge Sirica refused to believe that the burglars had acted alone. In March 1973, defendant James W. McCord sent a letter to Sirica confirming that it was a conspiracy. Sirica’s investigation transformed Watergate from the story of a “third-rate burglary” to a scandal reaching the highest points in government. The Senate began hearings into Watergate in May 1973. The hearings were televised in their entirety. They focused on when the President knew of the break-in. In June 1973, former White House legal counsel John Dean delivered devastating testimony that implicated Nixon from the earliest days of Watergate. He was the first Nixon administration official to accuse Nixon of direct involvement with Watergate and the resulting cover-up in press interviews. On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read the court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord alleging perjury had been committed in the Watergate trial, and defendants had been pressured to remain silent. Trying to make them talk, Sirica gave Hunt and two burglars provisional sentences of up to 40 years. On March 28 on Nixon's orders, aide John Ehrlichman told Attorney General Richard Kleindienst that nobody in the White House had prior knowledge of the burglary. On April 13, Magruder told U.S. attorneys that he had perjured himself during the burglars' trial, and implicated John Dean and John Mitchell.
Two days later, Dean told Nixon that he had been cooperating with the U.S. attorneys. On that same day, U.S. attorneys told Nixon that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and other White House officials were implicated in the coverup.
On April 30, Nixon asked for the resignation of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, two of his most influential aides, both of whom were indicted, convicted and ultimately sentenced to prison. He fired White House Counsel John Dean, who went on to testify before the Senate and became the key witness against the president. Writing from prison for New West and New York Magazine in 1977, Ehrlichman claimed Nixon had offered him a large sum of money, which he declined. Richard Nixon, on the same day, Nixon appointed a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority to designate a special counsel for the Watergate investigation who would be independent of the regular Justice Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox to the position. On Monday, July 16, 1973, in front of a live, televised audience, the Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield whether he was "aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?" Butterfield's revelation of the taping system transformed the Watergate investigation yet again.
Saturday Night Massacre:
Special Prosecutor Cox immediately subpoenaed the tapes, as did the Senate, but Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as President of the United States, and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena, Cox refused. When Cox refused to drop his subpoena, on October 20, 1973, Nixon demanded the resignations of Attorney General Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus for refusing to fire the special prosecutor. Nixon's search for someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox ended with the Solicitor General Robert Bork. In March of 1974 the grand jury indicted seven Nixon officials – known as the Watergate Seven – for their involvement in the cover-up and many later served jail time. But the battle over the tapes continued and went all the way to the US Supreme Court where, with the exception of the recused Justice William Rehnquist (whom Nixon had appointed), there was a unanimous ruling that they should be released.
The tapes:
Nixon complied with the order in July 1974 and released the subpoenaed tapes which revealed several crucial conversations with his lawyer John Dean in which Dean described the continuing cover-up operations as a “cancer on the presidency”.
It then emerged that there had been an 18-minute section of the tapes erased. Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods said this had been done accidentally when she pushed the wrong foot pedal but photos posed for the media appeared to undermine the likelihood of this and analysis later determined the tape had been erased in several sections.
The in August of ’74, a previously unknown audio tape was released which recorded an Oval Office conversation a few days after the break-in which documented the formulation of a plan by Nixon and Bob Haldeman to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was at issue in the Watergate break-in. This is the exact audio from the tape that is referred to as the ‘smoking gun’ and in the words of Nixon’s own lawyers “proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers – for more than two years”.
Resignation:
The game was up. Facing certain impeachment after being told by Republican senators that they would vote in favour of such a motion, Nixon decided to resign, saying that the scandal over Watergate would prevent him from carrying out his duties:
“I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
Pardon
Succeeded by Gerald Ford – who himself had succeeded Nixon’s other vice president Spiro Agnew in ’73 - the new incumbent issued a presidential pardon to Nixon ensuring that he would not face any criminal prosecution. Impeachment proceedings against Nixon had already been dropped following his resignation. Ford explained that he felt the Nixon family’s situation was “an American.
Aftermath: Convictions, Frost/Nixon, popular culture
In total the scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty including some of Nixon’s most senior aides – chief of staff Bob Haldeman and special counsel Charles Coulsen along with two former attorneys general, and a number of other lawyers whose convictions severly tarnished the public image of the legal profession particularly in Washington.
Nixon continued to proclaim his innocence right up until his death in 1994 saying only that he had been wrong in not acting more “decisively” in dealing with the illegalities of the Watergate scandal. Famously he did a high-profile television interview with the British broadcaster David Frost in 1977.
The interview included Nixon’s answer to a question about the legality of his actions in which he said: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” He also apologized for the tragedy in which we all have played a part.”
Webliography:
watergate.info/
www.washingtonpost.com/watergate
www.history.com/topics/watergate
2-3 Introduction
4-5 The Break-in
5 Re-election
5-7 Role of the media
7-8 The Watergate Investigations
8-9 Saturday Night Massacre
9-10 The Tapes
10 The Resignation
10 Pardon
10-11 Aftermath
11 Webliography
Introduction:
The Watergate scandal is widely considered to be the biggest in political history anywhere in the world but trying to explain it is not easy. There are many names, many dates and many events. To understand Watergate you must to some degree understand the mind of Richard Nixon. He was a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy during World War II before he became a Californian congressman and senator. He was vice president to Dwight D Eisenhower for eight years until 1960 when he himself ran for election against John F Kennedy, the youthful and idealistic Democrat, who he lost to in one of the closest elections in US history. Nixon was deeply hurt by this, blaming the media for favouring his opponent and he long resented the success of the Kennedy clan, a resentment which lasted all the way to the White House which he was elected to in 1968. But his administration’s early years were hampered by the unpopularity of the Vietnam war which the US had been bogged down in since the late 50s. Tackling the unpopularity of the conflict was just one of many of Nixon’s ‘wars’.
Daniel Ellsberg was an employee of the Defense Department who leaked a classified assessment of the Vietnam War in 1971.The 7,000 page document came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. They cast doubt on the justification for entry into the war and revealed that senior government officials had serious misgivings about the war. When the New York Times and Washington Post began to publish the Pentagon Papers, the Nixon Administration sued them. The Supreme Court ruled that the papers could continue to publish the documents. After the release of the Pentagon Papers, the White House created a unit to ensure internal security. This unit was called the Plumbers because they stopped leaks. In 1971 they burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, seeking material to discredit him. It was later revealed that Nixon’s domestic advisor John Ehrlichman knew of and approved the plan. The ‘plumbers’ eventually branched out into other covert and illegal activities, working for the appropriately named CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President [Nixon]) and engaging in activities known as rat-f***ing – dirty tricks – where opposition groups would be infiltrated at campaign events. These tricks undermined Democratic presidential candidates such as Edward Muskie and included everything from forging the infamous Canuck letter – which torpedoed Muskie’s presidential hopes - to stealing campaign workers’ shoes. The Canuck letter was a forged letter to the editor of the Manchester Union Leader, published February 24, 1972, two weeks before the New Hampshire primary of the 1972 United States presidential election. It implied that Senator Edmund Muskie, a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, held prejudice against Americans of French-Canadian descent. The letter's immediate effect was to compel the candidate to give a speech in front of the newspaper's offices, known simply as "the crying speech."
The five burglars
The Break-in:
As part of these illegal activities, in the early hours of 17 June 1972, five men attempted to break-in to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex, about a mile from the White House. When a security guard discovered tape on a door latch outside the DNC HQ he called the police and the five men were arrested. Initial investigations by the FBI were able to establish a connection between one of the burglars and E Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA officer who it later transpired was one of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ tasked with fixing leaks and who in turn was connected to Charles Colson, special counsel to the president. Once this link was established, and leaked to the media, the uncovering of the true extent of the scandal began. It is important to note that Nixon never ordered the break-in at the Watergate complex – the approval for that came from Nixon’s former Attorney General and chair of CREEP John Mitchell – but he colluded in its aftermath to distance his administration from it. The ostensible purpose of this, was to photograph documents and install listening devices. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) connected cash found on the burglars to a slush fund used by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, the official organization of Nixon's campaign.
“I can say categorically that… no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident,” he told a White House press in the immediate aftermath of the break-in.
In reality he was urging his lawyer John W Dean to cover-up the White House’s connection to the Watergate break-in. Six weeks after the break-in, he had told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman of the burglars and their leaders: “They have to be paid. That’s all there is to that.” The cover-up began.
Re-election:
Having denied his administration’s involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon was able to weather the growing storm surrounding the Watergate break-in and win re-election in 1972 with one of the biggest margins in history, beating his Democrat opponent George McGovern in almost every state in the country.
Role of the media:
The connection between the break-in and the re-election committee was highlighted by media coverage — in particular, investigative coverage by The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. The coverage dramatically increased publicity and consequent political repercussions. Relying heavily upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deeply into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House.
Chief among the Post's anonymous sources was an individual whom Woodward and Bernstein had nicknamed Deep Throat; 33 years later, in 2005, he was confirmed to be William Mark Felt, Sr., the former Deputy Director of the FBI. Felt met secretly with Woodward, telling him of Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the White House staff regarded the stakes in Watergate extremely high. Felt warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and other reporters were getting their information, as they were uncovering a wider web of crimes than first disclosed. In one of their last meetings, all of which took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Rosslyn, VA at 2:00 am, Felt cautioned Woodward that he might be followed and not to trust their phone conversations to be secure. Felt also planted leaks about Watergate to Time Magazine, the Washington Daily News and other publications. While Carl Bernstein has ascribed Felt's motives to truth telling and protecting the justice system against Presidential abuse, historian Max Holland in his 2012 book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat claimed Felt planted the leaks to obtain the FBI director's job (the leaks hurt L. Patrick Gray, Nixon's friend who had recently been chosen for the director's position over Felt). John Dean remarked that "Max has got it right—he nailed it”. Bob Woodward who was interviewed for the book said the idea that they were reporting just what prosecutors had already found is "factually wrong" and a lot of the book is speculations and conjecture. Carl Bernstein said the book is part of the revisionism and debunking industries.
During this early period, most of the media failed to grasp the full implications of the scandal, and concentrated reporting on other topics related to the 1972 Presidential election. After the revelation that one of the convicted burglars wrote to Judge Sirica alleging a high-level cover-up, the media shifted its focus. Time Magazine described Nixon as undergoing "daily hell and very little trust". The distrust between the press and the Nixon administration was mutual and greater than usual due to lingering dissatisfaction with events from the Vietnam War. Public distrust of the media reached over 40%.
Nixon and top administration officials discussed using government agencies to "get" what they perceived as hostile media organizations. The discussions had precedent. At the request of Nixon's White House in 1969, the FBI tapped the phones of five reporters. In 1971, the White House requested an audit of the tax return of the editor of Newsday, after he wrote a series of articles about the financial dealings of a friend of the President's.
The Administration and their supporters accused the media of making "wild accusations", putting too much emphasis on this story, and of having a liberal bias against the Administration. Nixon said in a May 1974 interview with a supporter that if he had followed the liberal policies which he thought the media preferred, "Watergate would have been a blip." The media noted that most of the reporting turned out to be accurate and the competitive nature of the media guaranteed massive coverage of the political scandal.
The Watergate investigations:
Watergate came to be investigated by a Special Prosecutor, a Senate committee, and by the judge in the original break-in case. Judge Sirica refused to believe that the burglars had acted alone. In March 1973, defendant James W. McCord sent a letter to Sirica confirming that it was a conspiracy. Sirica’s investigation transformed Watergate from the story of a “third-rate burglary” to a scandal reaching the highest points in government. The Senate began hearings into Watergate in May 1973. The hearings were televised in their entirety. They focused on when the President knew of the break-in. In June 1973, former White House legal counsel John Dean delivered devastating testimony that implicated Nixon from the earliest days of Watergate. He was the first Nixon administration official to accuse Nixon of direct involvement with Watergate and the resulting cover-up in press interviews. On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica read the court a letter from Watergate burglar James McCord alleging perjury had been committed in the Watergate trial, and defendants had been pressured to remain silent. Trying to make them talk, Sirica gave Hunt and two burglars provisional sentences of up to 40 years. On March 28 on Nixon's orders, aide John Ehrlichman told Attorney General Richard Kleindienst that nobody in the White House had prior knowledge of the burglary. On April 13, Magruder told U.S. attorneys that he had perjured himself during the burglars' trial, and implicated John Dean and John Mitchell.
Two days later, Dean told Nixon that he had been cooperating with the U.S. attorneys. On that same day, U.S. attorneys told Nixon that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and other White House officials were implicated in the coverup.
On April 30, Nixon asked for the resignation of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, two of his most influential aides, both of whom were indicted, convicted and ultimately sentenced to prison. He fired White House Counsel John Dean, who went on to testify before the Senate and became the key witness against the president. Writing from prison for New West and New York Magazine in 1977, Ehrlichman claimed Nixon had offered him a large sum of money, which he declined. Richard Nixon, on the same day, Nixon appointed a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority to designate a special counsel for the Watergate investigation who would be independent of the regular Justice Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox to the position. On Monday, July 16, 1973, in front of a live, televised audience, the Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield whether he was "aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?" Butterfield's revelation of the taping system transformed the Watergate investigation yet again.
Saturday Night Massacre:
Special Prosecutor Cox immediately subpoenaed the tapes, as did the Senate, but Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as President of the United States, and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena, Cox refused. When Cox refused to drop his subpoena, on October 20, 1973, Nixon demanded the resignations of Attorney General Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus for refusing to fire the special prosecutor. Nixon's search for someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox ended with the Solicitor General Robert Bork. In March of 1974 the grand jury indicted seven Nixon officials – known as the Watergate Seven – for their involvement in the cover-up and many later served jail time. But the battle over the tapes continued and went all the way to the US Supreme Court where, with the exception of the recused Justice William Rehnquist (whom Nixon had appointed), there was a unanimous ruling that they should be released.
The tapes:
Nixon complied with the order in July 1974 and released the subpoenaed tapes which revealed several crucial conversations with his lawyer John Dean in which Dean described the continuing cover-up operations as a “cancer on the presidency”.
It then emerged that there had been an 18-minute section of the tapes erased. Nixon’s personal secretary Rose Mary Woods said this had been done accidentally when she pushed the wrong foot pedal but photos posed for the media appeared to undermine the likelihood of this and analysis later determined the tape had been erased in several sections.
The in August of ’74, a previously unknown audio tape was released which recorded an Oval Office conversation a few days after the break-in which documented the formulation of a plan by Nixon and Bob Haldeman to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was at issue in the Watergate break-in. This is the exact audio from the tape that is referred to as the ‘smoking gun’ and in the words of Nixon’s own lawyers “proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers – for more than two years”.
Resignation:
The game was up. Facing certain impeachment after being told by Republican senators that they would vote in favour of such a motion, Nixon decided to resign, saying that the scandal over Watergate would prevent him from carrying out his duties:
“I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
Pardon
Succeeded by Gerald Ford – who himself had succeeded Nixon’s other vice president Spiro Agnew in ’73 - the new incumbent issued a presidential pardon to Nixon ensuring that he would not face any criminal prosecution. Impeachment proceedings against Nixon had already been dropped following his resignation. Ford explained that he felt the Nixon family’s situation was “an American.
Aftermath: Convictions, Frost/Nixon, popular culture
In total the scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty including some of Nixon’s most senior aides – chief of staff Bob Haldeman and special counsel Charles Coulsen along with two former attorneys general, and a number of other lawyers whose convictions severly tarnished the public image of the legal profession particularly in Washington.
Nixon continued to proclaim his innocence right up until his death in 1994 saying only that he had been wrong in not acting more “decisively” in dealing with the illegalities of the Watergate scandal. Famously he did a high-profile television interview with the British broadcaster David Frost in 1977.
The interview included Nixon’s answer to a question about the legality of his actions in which he said: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” He also apologized for the tragedy in which we all have played a part.”
Webliography:
watergate.info/
www.washingtonpost.com/watergate
www.history.com/topics/watergate