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The Break-In at Dawn: Frank Wills, Five Burglars, and the Night It All Began
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On June 17, 1972, a piece of tape on a door latch and one alert security guard set the Watergate scandal in motion — unravelling Richard Nixon's presidency from the inside out. From the five arrested burglars to Deep Throat in a parking garage, this is where the cover-up began.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
One piece of tape on a door latch. That's where this ends up if you trace the fall of an American presidency back to its earliest visible point.
Three plainclothes officers responded to the call. They moved through the Watergate Office Building and found five men inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
The Nixon administration's first response was dismissal. Press secretary Ron Ziegler called the break-in a "third-rate burglary attempt." The framing was deliberate.
Woodward had a source inside the FBI. A senior official who understood what the bureau was finding and who was willing to share it, in carefully limited ways, through a channel that could not easily be traced.
The Watergate break-in didn't happen in isolation. It was part of a pattern that had been running inside the Nixon White House for years.
Senate hearings on Watergate began in nineteen seventy-three. The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, held televised proceedings that drew large audiences.
The special prosecutor investigating Watergate was Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor appointed to ensure independence from the Justice Department. In October of nineteen seventy-three, Cox demanded the White House tapes.
The legal battle over the tapes reached the Supreme Court in nineteen seventy-four. Nixon argued executive privilege.
On the evening of August eighth, nineteen seventy-four, Richard Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office and announced his resignation, effective the following day. He did not admit guilt.
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