Watergate scandal (1972): Saturday Night Massacre

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, federal prosecutors, Judge John Sirica, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Ervin Committee) and a special prosecutor's office pulled the thread through 1973. White House counsel John Dean testified. The existence of a taping system was revealed. The Saturday Night Massacre of 20 October 1973 — Nixon's firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy William Ruckelshaus — turned a burglary story into a constitutional crisis.

On 24 July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon that the president had to surrender tapes. The House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974. President Gerald Ford pardoned him on 8 September. Many aides and burglars were convicted. The status is mixed because the president left office without a criminal trial, while the surrounding dock was full. The legal afterlife includes the Ethics in Government Act, campaign-finance rules and a permanent '-gate' suffix in English.

A burglary that became a constitutional file Watergate is the English-language type case of a political scandal: a dated break-in, a paper trail, televised hearings, a Supreme Court order, a resignation and a statute wave. The Watergate is a Washington hotel, office and apartment complex. The DNC rented offices there in 1972. The five men arrested on 17 June — including James McCord, a CRP security coordinator, and Cuban exiles with prior CIA-adjacent histories — were not random burglars. Address-book entries led to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, White House and CRP operatives.