Richard Nixon And The 1972 Watergate Scandal

June 17, 1972. Five men were caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel and into the Democratic National Committee . These five men were caught, tried, and questioned in court. What the courtroom heard shocked all of America, and the shock is still felt today. The shocking event these five men were a part of was the great Watergate Scandal of 1972. From the five burglars all the way up the political “food chain” to Richard Nixon, there were many people involved in one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history. The major fact that stunned a large number of Americans was not that many of the people in Congress were a part of the scandal, but that their own president orchestrated the whole thing. These actions, and the sly sneaking around of the government,

The first event of the Watergate scandal took place in June 1971. In an attempt to plug security leaks, Nixon creates a Special Investigations Unit called “The Plumbers”. Whether Nixon knew what his men were planning on the night of June 15, 1972, is up for debate, but it was highly controversial. The five burglars on the night of June 15th broke into the Watergate Hotel for a second time. They had previously broken into the hotel to bug the Democratic National Committee office, but one of the wiretaps in the phone was faulty and required the “Plumbers” to replace

The burglary was just the tip of the iceberg, merely a cover-up. In the following months after the arrest of the “Plumbers”, Hunt and Liddy, a half-hearted investigation takes place concerning this incident in September of ’72. On November 7, 1972, Richard Nixon wins the Presidential election, while the nation was still oblivious to the fact that the election was rigged due to the events deep under the iceberg of the Watergate scandal. The scandal began to escalate on June 26 when John Dean, the former presidential counsel who was very closely intertwined in the White House, read his report out loud. Dean’s testimony was highly anticipated and as he read it out loud for seven hours straight, it was revealed that Nixon was indeed personally active in working to try and cover up the Watergate scandal. Proving that the President of the United States was directly connected to the burglary of the Democratic National Committee was a shock to all of America as a