Watergate scandal (1972): Seventeen June 1972

This page does not reconstruct surveillance technique. The public record is who paid, who knew and who lied afterward. The White House and CRP denied a link; the money and the later tapes said otherwise. Woodward and Bernstein's early stories, with an FBI source later revealed as Mark Felt ('Deep Throat'), kept the file alive through the 1972 election, which Nixon won in a landslide.

Hearings, tapes and a massacre on Saturday Judge Sirica pressed the burglars. McCord's March 1973 letter said pressure to stay silent had come from the White House. Dean's Senate testimony in June 1973 described a cancer on the presidency. Alexander Butterfield revealed the taping system. Those three beats turned rumour into a documentary case.

When Cox insisted on tapes, Nixon ordered him fired. Richardson and Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do it; Robert Bork carried out the order. The Saturday Night Massacre produced a firestorm, a new special prosecutor (Leon Jaworski) and, eventually, United States v. Nixon. The 18½-minute gap on one tape became a symbol of missing evidence, not a mystery about whether a cover-up existed.