Watergate Crisis Term Paper

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Watergate Crisis

The Watergate scandal began with some confidential papers, bungling burglars, a preeminent hotel complex in Washington, D.C., and a trail of fraud leading directly to the Committee to Re-Elect President Richard M. Nixon. The scandal didn't stop at inept White House staffers, but went all the way to the Oval Office and the president himself. Watergate was the ultimate political crisis brought about by one man's ruthlessness and paranoia. In the end, Richard M. Nixon's own worst enemy was himself.

When former defense analyst for the Rand Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, leaked the Defense Department's secret history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times, Nixon wanted information to discredit Ellsberg. Nixon aide, G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a shadowy figure rumored to be a CIA agent, agreed to place a wiretap on the telephone line of Ellsberg's Beverly Hills psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. When the wiretap didn't provide the necessary incriminating evidence, Liddy came up with another plan. Ellsberg's actual files could prove to be of immense value. (Liddy 218)

The White House Plumbers, so named because they were hired to stop information leaks, included Liddy and Hunt. Seven men took on the task of breaking into Fielding's office to find the Ellsberg files. However, the plumbers didn't find any information on the former Pentagon worker. But nearly a year later, their break-in skills were put to use when the plumbers were hired to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972.

A laid it out for [Jeb] Magruder, telling him that five of our men had been arrested in DNC headquarters in the Watergate early that morning and that it could compromise the committee," Liddy wrote in his autobiography, Will. (Liddy 343) Magruder was Nixon's special assistant and the committee Liddy refers to is the Committee to Re-Elect the President, headed by former attorney general John Mitchell.

Mitchell called a press conference to deny any link from the committee to the Watergate break-in.

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However, the money that was used by the burglars to post bail was eventually traced back to funds from the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

By September 1972, it was discovered that Mitchell, while serving as Nixon's attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats.

Nixon exercised control over the situation from the start. 'Track down Magruder and see what he knows,' he had ordered [H.R.] Haldeman... The cover-up and the destruction of evidence began at once. Then he met with [John] Ehrlichman. Watergate was discussed, although no tape of the conversation has ever been produced." (Summers 428)

Nixon had ordered the installation of a concealed tape recording system in the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building, and Camp David. "As late as April 25, 1973, well after the smoking-gun conversations about stonewalling and hush money, Nixon was still congratulating himself on the secret system. 'I'm damn glad we have it, aren't you?' he crowed." (Carlson 1991)

Despite his glee at having his secret taping system, the recordings eventually brought about Nixon's downfall. According to Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Secretary of State, the president was at his best writing policy memoranda or when jotting down marginal notes on the work of others. "But these have been overshadowed by the tapes, which - at least those chosen for publication - show Nixon at his worst: manipulative and grandiloquent all at once. Second, the tapes bring out the worst in Nixon's interlocutors as well." (Kissinger 65)

The FBI determined through its investigations that the Watergate break-in was just the tip of the iceberg in a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee. Although the FBI's investigation focused on key White House staff, the president was re-elected in one of the largest landslides in American political history. Nixon won by more than 60% of the vote and crushed the Democratic nominee, Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

In January 1973, Liddy and James.....

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