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How Did The Watergate Scandal Change The Way We View Our Presidents

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How the Watergate Scandal Changed the Way we View our Presidents In 1972 a president would need to be elected for the next term, the two candidates were Richard Nixon and George McGovern. Richard Nixon who had already been on his first term won the election. Nixon tried to get ahead of his opponent in every way possible and went to extreme measures to do so. Nixon went out and got a heist crew to do a high risk, high reward robbery against the Democratic party trying to get an advantage on McGovern. This event known as the Watergate Scandal, would change America's view on presidents for decades to come. In May 1972, members of Nixon’s committee broke into the Watergate building of the Democratic Committee, they stole top-secret files and …show more content…

Watergate affected how our presidents would be treated by the other branches of the government with the way Nixon acted and lied to the whole entire country of America. A weakened president seat would give the congress and house of representatives more power over how Americans rule until presidents can regain the trust that they had prior to Watergate (U.S. News Staff). Americans also feared that the two-party system would go away because people were becoming more independent. Nixon at first said that he had no involvement in the break-in of the Watergate building, which was a complete lie and would later get him into even more trouble. Nixon fired a special prosecutor who wanted to look into the tapes that he refused to hand over (President Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal). Eventually, when Nixon went to trial the judge asked him to hand over the tapes there were parts missing, which showed the country that he was covering up something. These tapes would show that Nixon had acknowledgement of the break-in a week before it even happened. The judge ended up convicting Nixon with three felonies, federal crime, abusing presidential powers, and keeping evidence. Furthermore, Nixon was forced to resign from the presidential seat and handing over the seat to Gerald Ford, who is the only president to not be elected as president

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On the domestic aspect, citizens were beginning a new chapter in which they did not trust the government. Stemming back to Lyndon B Johnson and the Credibility Gap of the Vietnam War, the most recent, most devastating attitude change surrounded the Watergate Scandal and the aftermath. During Nixon’s presidency, he was attempting to bug the Democratic Party headquarters located in the Watergate Hotel. While his henchmen were placing the bugs, they were caught, thus causing a huge controversy amongst Americans. Although Nixon attempted to cover up his ties to the break in, it eventually came out that he ordered it to be done.

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The Break-Ins And Some Of The Early Cover-Up Attempts May of 1972, the first break in at DNC’s (Democratic National Committee) Watergate headquarters occurs, as members of President Nixon’s C.R.E.E.P.(Committee to Re-Elect the President) break in stealing copies of top-secret documents and wire-tapping their phones and neither caught nor detected by guards or any other personal on duty. However, the burglars later realized that the bugs they placed in the phones were faulty so they sent a group of 5 men back that same year, on the seventeenth of June, to fix or replace them. But just as smoothly as the first break-in was the second break-in was just as much of a failure. The group was quickly spotted by one of the guards on duty that night

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Although it is debateable whether or not Nixon knew of the break-ins, he did behave very suspiciously. He became very secretive, resentful, and defensive towards his critics, even going so far as to make

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