Watergate in twelve dates and the one that finally ended it

A night watchman noticed a strip of tape. That is how the biggest political scandal of the twentieth century began, with a man doing his rounds in an office building, spotting adhesive tape across a door latch so the door would not lock, peeling it off, and then, when he came back and found a fresh strip, calling the police. His name was Frank Wills. He did not know that he had just started the clock on a presidency.

Everything that followed came from one decision, and it was not the decision to break in. It was the decision, made by people who were comfortable in power, to hide it. The burglary was a crime. The cover-up was a catastrophe, because it turned a story about five men with cameras into a story about whether the President of the United States would obey the law. If you want a short lesson in how scandals work, here it is: the first mistake you can sometimes survive. The lie is what kills you.

Let me give you the dates. Twelve of them, in order, with a sentence or two on why each mattered. I'll tell you at the end which one I think finished it, and you can argue with me. This is the Republican version of the story, in the sense that it is about what Republicans in Congress did when the country needed them to choose between a President and the rule of law.

The first six dates: the crime and the cover-up

1. June 17, 1972: the arrests

In the early hours of Saturday, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. They were carrying cameras and electronic equipment. Within days, investigators had linked them to the Committee to Re-elect the President, the Nixon campaign organization. At that moment it was a "third-rate burglary," as the White House spokesman put it, and the Nixon team's strategy was to keep it that way.

2. November 7, 1972: the landslide

Five months later Richard Nixon won re-election by one of the largest margins in American history, carrying 49 states and losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. I put this date on the list because it is the saddest one. The voters had not been told the truth, and the man who won in a landslide would be gone in less than two years. The White House's cover story had worked long enough to reach the ballot box.

3. March 23, 1973: the letter

At the sentencing stage of the burglars' case, James McCord, Judge John Sirica announced in open court that he had received a letter from McCord. In it McCord said that there had been political pressure on the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had been committed at the trial, and that others involved had not been identified. A federal judge had just made it public that the official story was false. From then on, the case was not about who broke in, it was about who knew.

4. May 17, 1973: the hearings begin

In February of that year the Senate had voted unanimously to create a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina, with Republican Howard Baker of Tennessee as vice chairman. On May 17 its hearings opened, carried live on television. Baker became famous for a question he put to witnesses again and again: what did the President know, and when did he know it? Notice that the man asking it was a Republican, and that he asked it of his own party's White House. I tell his story in Howard Baker asked what the president knew and why oversight is conservative.

5. July 16, 1973: the tapes

A former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield, asked by committee staff whether there was any recording system in the White House, said yes. On July 16 he said so in public session. Every conversation in the Oval Office had been taped. Overnight the case changed, because now there was a record, and every investigator in Washington wanted to hear it.

6. October 20, 1973: the Saturday Night Massacre

The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had subpoenaed the tapes, and Nixon had offered a compromise that Cox refused. On Saturday night, October 20, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson, a Republican who had promised the Senate that Cox would be independent, resigned instead. The deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, also refused and was dismissed. The Solicitor General, Robert Bork, then became acting attorney general and carried out the firing. Three men in a row had been presented with an order, and two of them put their jobs ahead of it.

The public reaction was a flood of telegrams to Congress. House members introduced impeachment resolutions in the days that followed. Weeks later Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first Republican senator to call publicly for Nixon to resign, a story I cover in Edward Brooke won Massachusetts as a Republican and changed public housing. The Republican exits had begun.

The last six dates: the tapes, the Court and the party

7. February 6, 1974: the House authorizes the inquiry

The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly, with a large majority of both parties, to give the Judiciary Committee formal authority to investigate whether grounds for impeachment existed. The chairman was Democrat Peter Rodino of New Jersey. I want you to notice the process. The House did not simply rush to judgment. It voted to investigate, and it did so by an overwhelming bipartisan margin, which gave the findings a credibility that a party-line vote could never have had. If you want to see how impeachment works under the Constitution, step by step, read How Impeachment Works, Step by Step, From the House Floor to the Senate Trial.

8. July 24, 1974: the Supreme Court

The special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who had replaced Cox, had subpoenaed sixty-four White House tape recordings. Nixon refused to hand them over, claiming executive privilege. On July 24 the Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon, ruled unanimously among the eight justices who took part, with William Rehnquist recused, that the President had to comply. Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, wrote the opinion. The Court held that executive privilege exists but is not absolute, and cannot be used to withhold evidence needed in a criminal trial. You can read the reasoning in United States v. Nixon and What the Court Really Said About Executive Privilege.

9. July 27, 1974: the first article

Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee adopted its first article of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice. It passed with the support of Democrats and a number of Republican members. Two days after that it adopted a second, on abuse of power, and on July 30 a third, on contempt of Congress for defying committee subpoenas. A few Republicans on the committee, including Caldwell Butler of Virginia and William Cohen of Maine, voted for impeachment after hearing the evidence. These were not liberals. Some had begun the inquiry inclined to defend the President.

10. August 5, 1974: the smoking gun

Under the Supreme Court's order Nixon had to release the tapes, and one of them, from June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in, recorded him agreeing with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that the CIA should tell the FBI to back off its investigation of the burglary on the pretext of national security. On August 5 Nixon released the transcript. It was proof that he had taken part in the cover-up from the first days. Republican members of the committee who had voted against impeachment said they would now vote for it on the House floor.

11. August 7, 1974: the visit

This is the date at the heart of the post. On the morning of August 7, three Republican leaders went to the White House: Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the party's 1964 presidential nominee and the hero of the conservative movement; Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania; and House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona. They told Nixon candidly that his support in Congress had collapsed and that he faced almost certain impeachment in the House and a very hard time in the Senate. They brought no threats, only the news. The news was enough.

12. August 9, 1974: the resignation

Nixon addressed the nation on the evening of August 8 and announced he would resign. At noon on August 9 his resignation took effect, and Gerald Ford took the oath of office as the 38th President, saying "our long national nightmare is over." He became the only person to hold the presidency without having been elected either President or Vice President, because Ford had replaced Spiro Agnew, who had resigned as Vice President in October 1973 over a separate matter involving bribery and tax charges.

Which date finally ended it?

I promised a verdict. Here it is.

If you ask what produced the evidence, the answer is July 24, when the Court ordered the tapes released. If you ask what proved the case, the answer is August 5, the day the smoking-gun transcript came out. But if you ask what ended it, the date is August 7.

Here is why. By August 5, the case against Nixon was overwhelming. But a President facing an overwhelming case can still fight, and Nixon had been fighting for two years. What changed on August 7 was that the people he needed most told him it was over, and they were not Democrats. They were the leaders of his own party, including the man who had been the conservative movement's standard-bearer ten years earlier. When Goldwater walked out of that meeting, the last of Nixon's political firewall was gone. What I find striking is that Goldwater's visit was not a betrayal. It was loyalty to something older than Nixon: the party's, and the country's, interest in a government that follows the law.

That is the point I would underline for any Republican reader. The Watergate cover-up did not end because a hostile press cornered a President. It ended because Republicans in Congress, on the committee, in the Senate and in the Cabinet, one by one, put the Constitution ahead of the man. For a day-by-day look at who said what in those final days, see Watergate Day by Day and the Republicans Who Told Nixon It Was Over.

The best defense of Nixon, stated fairly

I owe you the other side, and it has its points.

The defenders of the President's reputation say three things. First, that political dirty tricks were a bipartisan tradition and that Nixon was being held to a standard his predecessors had not been. Second, that he had real achievements, including the opening to China, which I take up in Nixon went to China and what the 1972 trip teaches about hard bargaining, and that the scandal swallowed everything else. Third, that the press and his political enemies were out to get him from the start.

There is something to the first two. Presidents before Nixon had misused government power, and Nixon did accomplish serious things. And there is no doubt he had enemies who wanted him gone.

But the answer is the one the Judiciary Committee, the Supreme Court and his own party came to. The question was never whether others had done wrong. It was whether the President had used the powers of his office to obstruct an investigation of a crime, and the tape of June 23, 1972, in his own voice, said that he had. Nobody was out to get him on that tape. He was talking to his own chief of staff. The principle that no one is above the law applies to Presidents we like, and it applies to Presidents we wish had done better.

What it means for your family

This all happened a half century ago, but I think it matters for a particular reason. The system worked, and the way it worked is a template for the future.

A grand jury and a federal judge did their jobs. A special prosecutor, once removed, was replaced. A Senate committee with members from both parties held public hearings. The Supreme Court ruled that nobody is exempt from a subpoena. The House acted by a bipartisan process, and the President's own party told him to go. No tanks, no emergency decrees, no mobs. The institutions that Madison designed, covered in Madison Built a Government Where Ambition Fights Ambition, and It Works, did what they were built to do.

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you the checks and balances are fiction. They are not fiction. They are made of people, and people decide whether they work. It took a night watchman, a federal judge, a special prosecutor, a handful of principled officials and a group of Republican members of Congress who were willing to say no to their own President. For the sequel, in which Gerald Ford made his choice about Nixon, see Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box.

The bottom line

• Watergate was a burglary, but the presidency ended over the cover-up. The lesson for any official, in either party, is that hiding a mistake turns it into a disaster.
• Of the twelve dates, August 7, 1974 is the one that finished it, because Republican leaders told Nixon that his own party had run out of votes.
• The Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in United States v. Nixon settled that executive privilege has limits. That rule protects you from every President.
• Loyalty to a party is honorable only as long as it is not loyalty against the Constitution. The Republicans who put law first in 1974 are examples worth teaching to your children.
• Read the primary sources. The United States v. Nixon opinion and the Judiciary Committee's articles of impeachment are public, readable and short.