In the midst of the 1972 presidential campaign, in the early-morning hours of June 17, five men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Campaign at Washington's Watergate apartment and office building complex. Their intention was to plant wiretaps in the Democrats' office. Police arrested the five along with two others, who had supervised the break-in. Denying any connection with the burglary, President Richard M. Nixon was reelected by a wide margin.

Subsequent investigative reporting by two reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, revealed that the interlopers had been on a secret payroll of the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP). Operating with clues supplied by an anonymous White House insider (code-named "Deep Throat"), Woodward and Bernstein began to unravel a pattern of illegality and "dirty tricks," of which the break-in was only one example. In 1973, the burglars went on trial before Judge John Sirica, whose close questioning of the defendants revealed their connections to the president's personal staff. A subsequent televised senatorial investigation, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, led to the testimony of John Dean, special counsel to the president, which indicated the president's knowledge of the cover-up that followed, although not necessarily of the break-in. Further testimony directly involved the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, his domestic adviser, both of whom were forced to resign and later served prison terms for perjury and obstruction of justice.

The next significant revelation in the hearings came when a witness casually mentioned that the president had installed a taping system in his office, which recorded all of his conversations. When the special prosecutor investigating the scandal, Archibald Cox, sued to have access to the tapes, Nixon fired him, whereupon his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, resigned in protest. Forced to name a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, the president continued to deny any guilt, proclaiming at one point, "I am not a crook." In July 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the tapes to the special prosecutor. Facing impeachment as well as conviction, he relinquished the tapes, some of which implicated him in the cover-up. On August 8, 1974, he resigned from the presidency. A month later, the new president, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.

The Watergate legacy was twofold: On the one hand, the revelations and the subsequent pardon deepened the skepticism of many about the nature of politics and the integrity of government. On the other hand, the scandal also demonstrated the power of a free press, the strength of constitutional law, and the basic stability of a nation that could experience the deposition of its leader without a shot being fired.

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