Two reporters alone brought down a president.
Woodward and Bernstein mattered. So did Sirica, Dean, the Senate, Cox, Jaworski and the Supreme Court.
The cover-up is closed as fact. The justice of the pardon is not closed as argument.
English still prefers two reporters in a garage to a Supreme Court syllabus.
Still open
- The pardon argument — Whether Ford was right to block a Nixon trial remains a civic dispute, not a missing-fact problem.
- The 18½-minute gap — What those minutes contained is unknown. That they sit inside a cover-up file is not.
- How far 'what did he know' ran — The smoking-gun tape answers the June 1972 CIA-FBI request. Historians still map other days. They are footnotes on a resigned presidency.
- Independent-counsel afterlife — Whether the 1978 statute was a cure or a new disease is a later congressional fight, still taught as Watergate's child.
- What '-gate' now means — The suffix drifted. Open question for language, not for 1974.
Myth vs record
It was only a third-rate burglary.
That was the White House line in 1972. The tapes show a cover-up of political intelligence work tied to CRP.
Nixon was convicted in criminal court.
He resigned and was pardoned. Subordinates were convicted. Mixed is the correct status.
Deep Throat was a composite or a fiction.
In 2005 the source was identified as W. Mark Felt. The garage myth was real enough; it was never the whole case.
Local notes
Washington as workplace memory
English in the capital still treats Watergate as local geography: a complex, a courthouse and a paper. Tourists photograph the sign.
Journalism-school English
Columbia, City University and British journalism courses assign All the President's Men as scripture. Primary sources are the hearings and the opinion.
Global '-gate' English
From London to Delhi, English-language papers attach the suffix to local scandals. The export is the word, not the 1974 statute wave.
Watergate remains a mixed civic file: a documented cover-up, a resignation, a pardon and laws that still structure how English speakers name a scandal.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.