Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. Most voters believed him, and in November 1972 the president was reelected in a landslide victory. In August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. It was not immediately clear that the burglars were connected to the president, though suspicions were raised when detectives found copies of the reelection committee’s White House phone number among the burglars’ belongings. The guard called the police, who arrived just in time to catch them red-handed. As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed someone had taped over several of the building’s door locks. ![]() The wiretaps failed to work properly, however, so on June 17 a group of five burglars returned to the Watergate building. Mark Felt, a former associate director of the FBI. ![]() Their reporting won them a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for their best-selling book “All the President’s Men.” Much of their information came from an anonymous whistleblower they called Deep Throat, who in 2005 was revealed to be W. ![]() In May 1972, as evidence would later show, members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP) broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters, stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones.ĭid you know? Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein deserve a great deal of the credit for uncovering the details of the Watergate scandal. Their aggressive tactics included what turned out to be illegal espionage. A forceful presidential campaign therefore seemed essential to the president and some of his key advisers.
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