Watergate Scandal: Downfall of Richard Nixon

Hello folks, in today's episode of "How greed makes a man blind", which is also based on a President's desperate attempts of winning an election. Hereby I present to you, The Watergate Scandal.

What is Watergate Scandal?

Watergate scandal is a series of interconnected scandals, mainly carried out to lower the chances of the Democratic Party in the upcoming elections of 1972 by the ruling President Richard Nixon. Well, of course, the democrats were the targets in these scandals, because President Nixon, who was a Republican party member, wanted to secure the Presidency for the second time as well.

When it started?

It is hard to say since when this dirty work had been going on by Nixon's administration. Richard Nixon won the Presidential election in 1968 & became the 37th president of the USA. Theories started emerging when on 17th June 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in D.C.

At first, everybody thought this incident was a "Third Rate Burglary". At least, the Republicans "thought" so. 

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Why DNC?

The break-in happened amidst the election campaigns. Why DNC??? Well, President Nixon wanted to score one more time for which his administration came up with the idea of finding out all the dirt and negativity the Dems may have. The five burglars had successfully broken into the DNC office, but Frank Will, a security guard, saw some tapes stuck to the doors. He sensed something's fishy and immediately called the cops. Unlike the movies, cops arrived just in time and made the arrests. At the time of the arrests, burglars had got bugging devices, numerous rolls of films, thousands of dollars, etc. Of course, the whole motive of this "Third Rate Burglary" was to bug the Dems' offices.

The "Burglars"

The five men later identified as Bernard Barker, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis, and James McCord were charged for attempted interception communication. Among these five, three were undercover CIA operatives. But, McCord caught the limelight, because McCord was Security chief for the committee to re-elect President Nixon at that time. The very first concrete link that connected President Nixon to this break-in.

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FBI found a name H. Hunt from one of the burglar's address books in few hours. H. Hunt turned out to be a Howard Hunt, also an Ex-CIA operative & had recently been hired at the White House, under the Nixon administration. Many experts believe that Hunt was hired to carry out similar kinds of dirty works in the White House, one of them was known as "White House Plumbers". This was the second link.

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Woodward & Bernstein

Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein, reporters from the Washington Post, suspected that there's something else going on here and the incident's not just a regular burglary. Both of them kept digging deeper. Among the many sources that they had, one know as "Deep Throat" suggested they keep looking for all of the money trails. 

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Eventually, they found out that a 25$ check went into one of the burglar's bank account, which was originally contributed to Nixon's re-election campaign funds. Now that's the direct connection between President Nixon's re-election committee and the burglars. It's all clear, on the tables. The people were watching this. After almost three decades, "Deep Throat" identified as Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, at the time of the Watergate incident. Well, apart from being the deputy director, he turned out to be a whistle-blower and we can say that he single-handedly took President Nixon down, not directly, but still.

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What happened next?

The purpose of that whole scandal was to re-elect Nixon once again and surprisingly, he did win the elections in 1972, that too, by a landslide. Somehow, with enough efforts of people like Woodward & Bernstein President Nixon kept getting in trouble and had to go through trials for whatever dirty works he had been doing. At last, under the fear of possible impeachment, Nixon resigned on 9th August 1974 becoming the only President that had to end his tenure in between and the current Vice President Gerald Ford became the President.