Watergate Scandal: what exactly happened there that involves ex-US Pres. Nixon (no offense to him)? Facts pls?

Answer 1

Check out these sites:

"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."

Answer 2

Nixon wanted to get some dirt on some people, so he tapped some phones and planted some bugs. Unfortunately the dudes he hired to bug the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel got caught breaking in while on a mission to adjust some of the bugs and Woodward and Bernstein of the Washington Post blew the whole thing into proportion (if I can quote Jon Stewart!).

Nixon was about to be impeached, but since he had no defence whatsoever, he simply resigned. He was pardoned by Gerald Ford.

Nixon illegally wiretapped phones and was a "crook". Today it is now legal to illegally wiretap phones, or so it would seem.

Answer 3

You've already got the facts from several people. I'll just elaborate a bit more so that you might understand a bit more. G. Gordon Liddy lead a team of burglars, ( Mostly former Cubans who had it in for the Democratic Party because of JFK and the Bay of Pigs invasion)
who he had recruited from black ops groups trained by the CIA. Some of Nixon's top aids, ( Howard Hunt, John Dean ) were co-conspirators who orchestrated and authorized the break-in at the Democratic HQ that was in the Watergate Hotel in Wash. DC. U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell who was appointed by Nixon was also implicated in the burglary. Money transfers had been made through him to the team of burglars from the Republican Committee to Re-Elect the President. Nixon was surrounded with men that he had appointed who were plotting to get any information they could on Democrats to use as blackmail against them. They resorted to burglary and illegal wire-tapping. (They were basically looking to pry into the private intimate lives of any Democrats and use the information to create a scandal or force the Dems. to do what they wanted.) Nixon had his own office bugged and recorded everything that was said to him in there. When the burglars got caught by security guards and police, Nixon asked his aids if they were involved in this. They told him yes and what part they had taken in it. As pressure got put on them by the media, ( Two reporters for the Washington Post ) Nixon ordered a cover-up thus making him an accessory after the fact in the crime. He then lied to the press and to a Senate Investigative Committee. When ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over the tapes from his office to the Senate Committee, Nixon erased some of the material on the tapes. During the incident the two reporter's homes were bugged and their lives put in jeopardy. Many of the men involved in the burglary were convicted and sent to prison. Nixon was about to be impeached so as a final resort, he appointed Gerald Ford as his Vice-President and resigned his office. Gerald Ford then gave a Presidential pardon to Nixon so that he could not be brought to justice for his part in the crime. The U.S. then had a President that had not been elected by the people even as a Vice-President on the ballot. ( Nixon's vice presidential running mate Spiro T. Agnew had already resigned after being investigated on tax fraud. )

Hope this clears it up for you. If you get a chance read: All the President's Men. By the way....... G. Gordon Liddy? He is still a voice for the Republican Party today as a talk show host. Some of his better idea's were to destroy the Democratic Party and make the U.S. a one party country. ( Like Germany under Hitler, or Communist U.S.S.R. ) He also wanted to spray marijuana fields covertly in Mexico with a poison that would not kill the pot but kill the people who smoked it.

READ WHAT MARGIE DOWN BELOW HAS FOR INFO. I was shooting from the hip. She has the offical story about one of the darkest periods in U.S. History. Republicans exposed in an attempt to take over the government entire. Oh and you want a peek into Gerald Ford and the kind of character he was? His brother was killed on the Interstate one night and Ford didn't even bother to come to the funeral. He said they weren't that close.

Answer 4

A group of men from the Republican Party got caught burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic Party. The burglars were the sort who would never be seen without an expensive suit on. I don't know what they were looking for.

The president had a little Sony tape recorder in his office and he recorded everything that went on. When the sh it hit the fan he started erasing tapes, erasing them many times over, just to try and be sure, but some of the tapes were stored where he couldn't get at them. Everybody including the president started lying about everything, and getting caught at it, and some of them went to prison. The president's single most loyal man wouldn't tell anybody anything and he got ten years. He is now a radio announcer. The president was forced to resign, but for some reason he was allowed to choose his successor, who gave him a pardon for things he had not even been charged with yet.

Answer 5

Check out http://www.watergate.info/
It tells you everything (almost) you want to know about the Watergate Scandal that led to Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974.
On the famed Deep Throat, try http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053100655.html
ps: it's the web version of the story published in the Washington Poston June 1, 2005 in case you missed it.

Cheers!!!

Answer 6

Taping systems were found at the headquarters of the "Democratic Party". After intensive investigation, people suspected of planting them there claimed President Nixon gave them the order to do so. So he resigned.

Answer 7

The real problem was not the break-in but the fact that Nixon knew about it and tried to cover it up. Refer to this Yahoo answer...http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=1006053006669

Answer 8

from Encarta, 2004 -

" Watergate, designation of a major United States political scandal that began with the burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic Party's campaign headquarters, later engulfed President Richard M. Nixon and many of his supporteres in a variety of illegal acts, and culminated in the first resignation of a U. S. President

The burglary was committed on June 17, 1972, by five men who were caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate apartment and office complex in Washington, D.C. Their arrest eventually uncovered a White House-sponsored plan of espionage against political opponents and a trail of complicity that led to many of the highest officials in the land, including former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Counsel John Dean, White House Chief Of Staff H. R. Haldeman, White House Special Assistant on Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, and President Nixon himself.

On April 30, 1973, nearly a year after the burglary and arrest and following a grand jury investigation of the burglary, Nixon accepted the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and announced the dismissal of Dean. US Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned as well. The new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, appointed a special prosecutor, Harvard Law School professor Archibald Cox, to conduct a full-scale investigation of the Watergate break-in.

In May 1973 the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities opened hearings, with Senator Sam Ervin of NOrth Carolina as chairman. A series of startling revelations followed. Dean testified that Mitchell had ordered the break-in and that a major attempt was under way to hide White House involvement. He claimed that the president had authorized payments to the burglars to keep them quiet. The Nixon administration vehemently denied this assertion.

The testimony of White House aide Alexander Butterfield unlocked the entire investigation. On July 16, 1973, Butterfield told the committee, on nationwide television, that Nixon had ordered a taping system installed in the White House to automatically record all converstaions; what the president said and when he said it could be verified. Cox immediately subpoenaed eight relevant tapes to confirm Dean's testimony. Nixon refused to release the tapes, claiming they were vital to the national security. US District Court Judge John Sirica ruled that NIxon must give the tapes to Cox, and an appeals court upheld the decision.

Nixon held firm. He refused to turn over the tapes and, on Saturday, October 20, 1973, ordered Richardson to dismiss Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork discharged Cox.

A storm of public protest resulted from this Saturday NIght Massacre. In response, Nixon appointed another special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawyer, and gave the tapes to Sirica. Some subpoenaed conversations were missing, and one tape had a mysterious gap of 18 1/2 minutes. Experts determined that the gap was the result of five separate erasures.

In March 1974 a grand jury indicted Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and four other White House officials for thier part in the WAtergatge cover-up and named Nixon as an "unindicted co-conspiritor." In April the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the tapes of 42 White House conversations. At the end of that month, NIxon released edited transcripts of the White House tapes. The conversations revealed an overwhelming concern with punishing political opponents and thwarting the Watergate investigation. The Judiciary Committee, however, rejected Nixon's edited transcripts,saying that he did not comply with their subpoena.

In April 1974 Sirica, acting on a request from Jaworski, issued a subpoena for the tapes of 64 presidential converstaions to use as evidence in the criminal cases agianst the indicted officials. Nixon refused, and Jaworski appealed to the Supreme Court to force Nixon to trun over the tapes. On July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8-0 in the United States v. Nixon that Nixon must turn over the tapes.

On July 29 and 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment, charging Nixon with misusing his power in order to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, obstructing justice in the WAtergate affair, and defying Judiciary Committee subpoenas. .........

Throughout this period of revelations, Nixon's support in Congress and popularity nationwide steadily eroded. On August 5, 1974, three tapes revealed that Nixon had, on June 23, 1972, ordered the Federal Bureau of INvestigation (FBI) to stop investigating the Watergate break-in. The tapes also showed that Nixon himself had helped to direct the cover-up of the administration's involvement in the affair.

Rather than face almost certain impeachment, Nixon resigned on August 9, the first U.S. president to do so. A month later his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him for all crimes he might have committed while in office. Nixon was then immune from federal prosecution."

This is a paraphrase of the article in Encarta. Hope it helps.

Answer 9

organs of his reelection campaign broke and entered the opp parties office to place bugs, and were caught...he was aware, and later took steps to interfere with the investigation.