Watergate scandal (1974): Saturday Night Massacre

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.

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.