what was the reason for the watergate break-in?

Answer 1

Creep, the committee to re-elect the President, broke into the Democratic headquarters at Watergate to plant listening devices.

Predident Nixon, the Republican incumbent, was ahead in the polls and didn't need this illegal activity to occur in order to win.

As someone mentioned, he resigned because it was discovered that he tried to cover-up the incident. He did not know about the incident at the time it occurred.

Answer 2

Nixon was the best puppet that the controlling military, and bankers, and arms producers ever had. In short the CIA. That was set up, by these power brokers, in 1947.Its now known,JFK, was going to disban them. He had already fired dellus, and started printing money. in order to dump the federal reserve. They killed JFK, see dark legacy, Howard hunt admitted all this on his deathbed. The FBI actualy set Nixon up, they knew what happened in Dallas in 1963. But had no proof, and even if they did. It would have toppled the government, at a time that USSR would have taken full advantage of it. TO RISKY.Thats what they were looking for at Watergate! The FBI were the good guys.

Answer 3

The Republicans sought to turn the American system into a fake two party system that was actually a single party system with them in total control. They didn't want to leave Vietnam, but ultimately they wanted total control of all of America's military and financial power.

It didn't work, and the cold war ended, so they decided to make shady voting machines instead.

This plan is working much better because not enough people can believe that they are so evil.

Answer 4

Nixon felt the DNC has some dirt on him for shady dealings in the past (and he had lots of it) and wanted to find out what they had to counteract their strategies for the 1972 Election year

Answer 5

The committee to re-elect the president CREEP broke into to the democratic headquarters to spy on them, Nixon didn't have anything to do with it but he did try to cover it up.

Answer 6

B. CREEP wanted to spy on the Democratic Party

Answer 7

hoping for some damaging evidence on the democratic party.

Answer 8

because you can't fool all the people, all the time.

Someone forgot to remember the century old saying!

Answer 9

The term "Watergate" refers to a series of events, spanning from 1972 to 1975, that got its name from burglaries of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington, D.C.. Though then-President Nixon had endured two years of mounting political embarrassments, the court-ordered release of the "smoking gun tape" about the burglaries in August 1974 brought with it the prospect of certain impeachment for Nixon, and he resigned only four days later on August 9. He is the only U.S. president to have resigned from the office. On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard working at the office building of the Watergate complex of office space, residential buildings, and a hotel noticed a piece of tape on the door between the basement stairwell and the parking garage. It was holding the door unlocked, so Wills removed it, assuming the cleaning crew had put it there. Later, he returned and discovered that the tape had been replaced. Suspicious, Wills then contacted the D.C. police.

After the police came, five men — Bernard Barker, Virgilio González, Eugenio Martínez, James W. McCord, Jr., and Frank Sturgis — were discovered and arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The men supposedly had broken into the same office three weeks earlier as well, and had returned intending to fix wiretaps that were not working and, according to some, to photograph documents.

The need to break into the office for a second time was just the highlight of a number of mistakes made by the burglars. Another, the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt in McCord's notebook, proved costly to them — and the White House — when found by the police. Hunt had previously worked for the White House, while McCord was officially employed as Chief of Security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), later commonly referred to as CREEP. This quickly suggested that there was a link between the burglars and someone close to the President. However, Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the affair as a "third-rate burglary". Though the burglary occurred at a sensitive time, with a looming presidential campaign, most Americans initially believed that no President with Nixon's advantage in the polls would be so foolhardy or unethical as to risk association with such an affair.

At his arraignment before Judge John Sirica, burglar McCord identified himself as retired from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Washington D.C. district attorney's office began an investigation of the links between McCord and the CIA, and eventually determined that McCord had received payments from CRP. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was at the arraignment, and he, along with his colleague, Carl Bernstein, began an investigation into the burglary. Most of what they published was known to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other governmental investigators — these were often Woodward's and Bernstein's sources — but they helped keep Watergate in the spotlight. Woodward's relations with a principal inside source added an extra layer of mystery to the affair. This source was codenamed "Deep Throat", and his true identity was kept from the public. He informed them that White House Officials had hired 50 agents to sabotage the Democrats' chances in the 1972 election. Decades of speculation on who "Deep Throat" was, ended on May 31, 2005, when W. Mark Felt, the No. 2 official at the FBI in the early 1970s, revealed that he was Deep Throat — a claim later confirmed by Woodward.


ChapStick microphones used by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy during the burglaryPresident Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman were tape-recorded (a standard, but secret practice that Nixon carried on from past presidents) on June 23 discussing use of the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-ins. Nixon followed through by asking the CIA to slow the FBI's investigation of the crime, claiming that national security would be put at risk. In fact, the crime and numerous other "dirty tricks" had been undertaken on behalf of CRP, mainly under the direction of Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. The pair had also worked in the White House in the Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed the "Plumbers." This group investigated leaks of information the administration did not want publicly known, and ran various operations against the Democrats and anti-war protestors. Most famous of their activities was the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, a former employee of The Pentagon and State Department, had illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and, as a result, was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy. The Pentagon Papers were military documents about the Vietnam War and helped increase public opposition to the war. Hunt and Liddy found nothing useful, however, and trashed the office to cover their tracks. The break-in was only linked to the White House much later, at which time it caused the collapse of Ellsberg's trial due to evident government misconduct.

There is still much dispute about the level of involvement of leading figures in the White House, such as Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff Haldeman, leading aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, and Nixon himself. Mitchell dubbed these events the White House horrors. As the head of CRP, along with campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder and Fred LaRue, Mitchell approved Hunt's and Liddy's espionage plans, including the break-in, but whether it went above them is unclear. Magruder, for instance, gave a number of different accounts, including that he had overheard Nixon order Mitchell to conduct the break-in in order to gather intelligence about the activities of Larry O'Brien, the director of the Democratic Campaign Committee.

On January 8, 1973, the original burglars, along with Liddy and Hunt, went to trial. All except McCord and Liddy pleaded guilty, and all were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. The accused had been paid by CRP to plead guilty but say nothing, and their refusal to allocute to the crimes angered the trial judge, John Sirica (known as "Maximum John" because of his harsh sentencing). Sirica handed down thirty-year sentences, but indicated he would reconsider if the group would be more cooperative. McCord complied, implicated CRP in the burglary and the payoff for the burglars' silence, and admitted to perjury.