Watergate Day by Day and the Republicans Who Told Nixon It Was Over

The whole thing started with a strip of tape on a door latch. A night security guard at the Watergate office complex in Washington noticed the tape holding a lock open, pulled it off, and then, when it reappeared, called the police. That is how a third-rate burglary became the scandal that ended a presidency. Remember that detail the next time someone tells you big historical events need big causes.

Here is the other thing to remember, and it is the reason this post lives on a Republican site. Watergate gets told, on television and in classrooms, as a story about what Republicans did. Fair enough: the burglars were tied to the president's re-election committee and the cover-up ran out of the president's own circle. But the second half of the story, the half that rarely gets told, is about what Republicans did next. A Republican judge pressed the burglars. Republican officials resigned rather than obey an order they thought was wrong. A Republican senator asked the question that framed the hearings. A Nixon-appointed Chief Justice wrote the opinion that took away the tapes. And in the last week it was Republican leaders who walked into the Oval Office and told the president the votes were gone.

I'll lay it out by the calendar, with a line after each date on why it mattered. Judge the party by the whole sequence, not by the first chapter.

The ground rules for reading this timeline

Three things before the dates start.

First, nobody on this site is defending what Richard Nixon's aides did. Burglary, hush money, lying to investigators and using the CIA to stall the FBI are crimes, and men were convicted of them. A conservative, of all people, believes the law binds the people who run the government. If we do not hold that line for our own side, we have no right to demand it from the other.

Second, the timeline is long on purpose. Watergate did not end in a day. It took more than two years from the break-in to the resignation, and the delay has a fair explanation and a less flattering one. We will look at both near the end.

Third, I am sticking to the public record: indictments, hearing dates, court rulings, committee votes. Where the accounts of participants differ, I will say so.

1972: the break-in and the landslide

June 17, 1972. Five men are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in the early hours of the morning. One of them, James McCord, is the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-elect the President.

Why it mattered: It connected the crime, from the first hour, to the president's own campaign organization. Later investigators spent two years following that thread.

September 15, 1972. A federal grand jury indicts the five burglars and two more men, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who had helped plan the operation.

Why it mattered: The indictment stopped at seven names. Prosecutors had not yet found anyone above the operational level, and the White House wanted it to stay that way.

November 7, 1972. Nixon is re-elected in a landslide, carrying 49 states and 520 electoral votes to George McGovern's 17. How that coalition was built is told in Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican.

Why it mattered: The voters did not know what the hearings would later reveal, and the size of the win made the cover-up feel safe to the people running it. Landslides have a way of making men careless.

January to May 1973: the cover-up starts to crack

January 1973. The burglars go on trial before Judge John Sirica. Five plead guilty; Liddy and McCord are convicted by the jury on January 30. Sirica, an Eisenhower appointee, is not satisfied that the trial has told him everything and says so from the bench.

Why it mattered: Here is the first Republican in the story who refused to take the easy ending. A judge with no stake in the politics decided the case did not add up.

February 7, 1973. The Senate votes 77 to 0 to create a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a Democrat, is chairman. Howard Baker of Tennessee, a Republican, is vice chairman.

Why it mattered: Look at that vote again. Not one senator opposed an investigation touching a Republican president's campaign. Baker's job was to make sure it was fair, and he chose to make sure it was thorough, too.

March 23, 1973. Sirica reads in open court a letter from McCord saying that political pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and keep quiet.

Why it mattered: It was the first crack in the wall of silence from inside the group of convicted men.

April 30, 1973. H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the president's two closest aides, resign. Counsel John Dean is dismissed. That evening Nixon goes on television and says he takes responsibility.

Why it mattered: The cover-up had reached the president's inner staff, and the White House could no longer call this a campaign prank.

May to October 1973: the hearings and the tapes

May 17, 1973. The Ervin Committee opens televised hearings. Days later Elliot Richardson, the Republican nominee for Attorney General, announces Archibald Cox as special prosecutor, a post with the independence the Senate had demanded as the price of confirming Richardson.

Why it mattered: Americans watched it live, day after day. A public that had been told to look away spent that summer looking.

June 25 to 29, 1973. John Dean testifies that the president knew about the cover-up. It is his word against the president's, with no proof either way.

Why it mattered: Without more evidence, it might have ended as a stalemate. In those hearings Baker kept asking the question that put the case in a sentence: what did the president know, and when did he know it?

July 13 and 16, 1973. Fred Thompson, the committee's Republican minority counsel, asks a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield during a staff interview whether the president's conversations were recorded. Butterfield says yes. He repeats it in public three days later.

Why it mattered: It is the hinge of the whole affair. A man on Baker's own side of the table asked the right question of the right witness, and from that day the case was about tapes.

July 23, 1973. Cox subpoenas the tapes. Nixon refuses, citing executive privilege.

Why it mattered: This started the constitutional fight that ended at the Supreme Court a year later. Our post on United States v. Nixon and What the Court Really Said About Executive Privilege explains the legal reasoning in full.

October 10, 1973. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns and pleads no contest to a tax charge, in a separate corruption investigation. Two days later Nixon names House Republican leader Gerald Ford to replace him.

Why it mattered: It put a man in line for the presidency who had no part in the cover-up, which later made a change of president possible without a constitutional crisis.

October 20, 1973. The Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon orders Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson, a Republican, refuses and resigns. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, also a Republican, refuses and is fired. Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in line, carries out the order.

Why it mattered: Two Republican officials gave up their jobs rather than obey an order they thought violated their oath. The public reaction was so fierce that within days Nixon agreed to hand over tapes and the House began serious work on impeachment. A new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was appointed on November 1.

Early 1974: the House takes up impeachment

February 6, 1974. The House votes 410 to 4 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate whether grounds for impeachment exist.

Why it mattered: It was close to unanimous, and it was bipartisan. How the process works from here to a Senate trial is the subject of How Impeachment Works, Step by Step, From the House Floor to the Senate Trial.

March 1, 1974. A grand jury indicts seven former White House and campaign aides, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman and former Attorney General John Mitchell, on conspiracy and obstruction charges.

Why it mattered: The cover-up was no longer an allegation. It was a criminal case against the president's inner circle.

April 30, 1974. Nixon releases edited transcripts of some tapes instead of the tapes themselves.

Why it mattered: The transcripts were full of gaps, and the effort to avoid giving up the tapes made things worse. A number of Republicans who had stood by him said later that this was where their patience wore thin.

July 1974: the Court and the committee

July 24, 1974. In United States v. Nixon the Supreme Court rules 8 to 0 that the president must turn over the tapes. Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom Nixon had appointed, writes the opinion. Justice William Rehnquist, another Nixon appointee, takes no part. Executive privilege exists, the Court says, but it cannot be used to withhold evidence needed in a criminal trial.

Why it mattered: It settled that no one is above the law, and it came from a Court on which Nixon had placed several of his own picks. Judges who owed him a job decided the law owed him nothing.

July 24 to 30, 1974. The House Judiciary Committee debates in public, on live television. On July 27 it adopts the first article, obstruction of justice, by 27 to 11. On July 29 it adopts a second article, abuse of power, by 28 to 10. On July 30 it adopts a third, contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas, by 21 to 17.

Why it mattered: The committee had 21 Democrats and 17 Republicans. Do the arithmetic on the first vote: 27 yes votes minus 21 Democrats leaves six Republicans who voted to charge a Republican president. These Republicans cast that vote in a hearing room with the cameras on.

August 1974: the last ten days

August 5, 1974. Nixon releases a transcript of a conversation recorded June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in. On it he directs aides to ask the CIA to tell the FBI to hold back its investigation. He acknowledges he had withheld it.

Why it mattered: It is known as the smoking gun, because it showed him taking part in the obstruction in the first week. The Republican members of the Judiciary Committee who had stood by him announced that they would now vote to impeach.

August 7, 1974. Barry Goldwater, Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott and House Republican leader John Rhodes meet Nixon at the White House. They tell him he does not have the votes to survive in Congress. Participants have given somewhat different accounts of how many Senate votes Goldwater said the president still had, but all agree on the message.

Why it mattered: This was the moment the party told him. They were not enemies. Goldwater had been a conservative hero and a Nixon ally, and he was among those who delivered the news.

August 8, 1974. Nixon announces on television that he will resign.

August 9, 1974. Nixon leaves the White House. Gerald Ford takes the oath and says that "our long national nightmare is over."

Why it mattered: The Constitution worked, and no tanks were needed. A month later Ford pardoned his predecessor, and the cost of that decision is in Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box.

The objection, stated fairly

Here is the strongest critique of everything above. It says the Republican story is a flattering edit. Republicans defended Nixon for the better part of two years. The Senate's 77 to 0 vote in February 1973 was cast when no one knew what was coming. Nixon's men were not stopped by the party, the critic says; they were stopped by the press, by prosecutors, by a tape recorder and by a few brave officials. By the time Goldwater walked into the Oval Office, the president was already finished, and the party's elders were reading the room.

There is truth in that, and I won't wave it away. Many Republicans were slow, and some stayed loyal to the end. Loyalty to a leader is a human instinct and not always a vice.

But three answers stand. One, the key acts of resistance came from inside the party and from appointees of the president, not from outsiders: Richardson, Ruckelshaus, Sirica, Burger, Thompson and Baker. Two, the party leaders' final act cost them something real. Goldwater and Scott and Rhodes were choosing between the president of their party and the integrity of the office, and they chose the office. Three, the alternative to the system working is the system not working. A party that shielded its own president forever would have damaged itself far more than the scandal did.

What it teaches a Republican today

A conservative's whole argument about government rests on a premise: power must be limited, and those who hold it must obey the rules. Watergate is the best case study of that premise being tested in our own house. Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge makes the principle; Watergate is the proof that it can be kept.

There is a second lesson, about the cover-up versus the crime. The break-in was bad. The cover-up was fatal. The pattern recurs in scandal after scandal: the mistake can often be survived, the lie rarely can. If you work for an elected official of either party, your best act of loyalty is to tell the boss the truth on day one.

There is also a lesson about how the Senate should treat an investigation. In 1973 senators of both parties voted unanimously to look. They did not wait for the other side to be in the dock. A party that wants to be trusted with the gavel needs to be the party that is willing to turn the gavel on its own.

The bottom line

• Watergate was a Republican scandal, and the way Republicans in Congress, the courts and the Justice Department finished it is part of the party's record, too.
• Teach your kids the full sequence: the break-in, the hearings, the tapes, the Court, the committee, and the visit that ended it. Each date has a lesson in it.
• When you hear that one party cannot police itself, point to August 1974. Then ask whether that standard is being applied equally to both sides.
• Demand the same from your own representatives: when the facts turn against someone in your party, you want them to say it before the voters have to.
• Read the primary sources yourself: the Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. Nixon and the House Judiciary Committee's articles are public and readable.