The Watergate is a complex of residential, office and hotel accommodation in Washington, DC, where a suite of rooms had been rented by the Democratic Party National Committee for the presidential election campaign of 1972. These rooms were burgled by a group of people working under the orders of senior members of the Republican Party, including some holding important positions on President Richard Nixon’s White House staff. The aim of the burglars appears to have been to gain information about Democratic campaign plans. The discovery of the burglars and their subsequent trials unleashed a massive burst of investigative reporting which ended by incriminating a host of major and minor figures, not so much for having been involved in the initial crime, but for attempting to cover up the White House connections, and generally to impede the course of justice. Among these were officers as senior as the Attorney-General and the president’s Chief of Staff. At that level the scandal would have been serious but, as most of it became public only after Nixon had won the 1972 election, it would not have prevented his continuing in the presidency. It became increasingly clear, however, that the president himself had been involved in the cover-up, and members of the House of Representatives began to move for his impeachment.
At the same time secret tape recordings the president had made of conversations in the White House came to be revealed, and court proceedings were instigated to force him to disclose them as vital evidence. Nixon’s attempts to prevent this move, claiming that the tapes were covered by a doctrine of executive privilege, were finally overthrown by the Supreme Court. The culmination of these developments led, as impeachment began to seem inevitable, to Nixon’s resignation in 1974; he was succeeded by the Vice-President, Gerald Ford, who shortly after gave him a presidential pardon. The crisis shook US politics; faith in executive leadership, already weakened by Nixon’s style of government (sometimes called ‘imperial presidency’) and his secret extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, collapsed. The following years saw Congress increase in power, relative to the presidency, and a series of attempts to curtail presidential prerogatives (see presidential government) and control financial corruption in electoral campaigns. The name Watergate has lingered and become a journalistic cliché, so that almost any political scandal, especially if it involves the theft of documents or the leaking and/or concealment of confidential information, has ‘-gate’ tagged to the end of it. A notorious example was the ‘Irangate’ scandal towards the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
This is the complete article, containing 426 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
