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Five Arrests, One Cover-Up: How Watergate Became the Scandal That Named All Scandals
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On June 17, 1972, five men were caught inside the Watergate complex — and Richard Nixon survived the break-in. It was the cover-up, the secret tapes, Deep Throat in a parking garage, and the institutions that refused to bend that destroyed his presidency. This is the story of how it all unravelled.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what most people get wrong about Watergate. They think it brought down a president because of a burglary.
Nixon's first instinct wasn't to come clean. His first instinct was to contain.
When the story first broke, the White House called it a third-rate burglary attempt. That framing worked on most of the press.
While Woodward and Bernstein were piecing things together from the outside, a Senate committee was investigating from the other direction. The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, known as the Senate Watergate Committee, held televised hearings through the summer of nineteen seventy-three.
Before that ruling came, Nixon tried something more direct. Archibald Cox had been appointed as special prosecutor to investigate Watergate independently.
Watergate is sometimes told as a story about journalism, or about individual witnesses who chose conscience over loyalty. Those things mattered.
By the summer of nineteen seventy-four, the tapes were being released under court order. Most were damaging.
The word Watergate didn't stay inside this story. It escaped and became a suffix attached to every major political scandal that followed.
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