What was the scandal?

The Watergate scandal involved a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the cover-up of the involvement of President Richard Nixon's White House and reelection campaign. Around 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills noticed tape on door latches at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and called police. Officers arrested five men inside the sixth-floor offices of the Democratic National Committee. The men were carrying cameras, lock-picking tools, and electronic surveillance equipment. They turned out to be James McCord, security coordinator for Nixon's reelection committee, along with four Cuban-American operatives: Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis.

Two former White House aides, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, had organized the operation as part of a broader effort to gather intelligence on political opponents and protect Nixon's reelection. The break-in was the second time the burglars had entered the offices, having installed wiretaps in late May that were not working properly.

Within days of the arrests, White House aides began the cover-up. They paid hush money to the burglars, lied to investigators, ordered the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation by claiming national security concerns, and destroyed records. Nixon himself directed the cover-up in conversations recorded on the secret White House taping system, telling Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman on June 23, 1972, just six days after the break-in, to have the CIA tell the FBI to back off. That conversation later became known as the smoking gun tape.

As reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the Washington Post pursued the story and the Senate Watergate Committee held televised hearings in 1973, the cover-up unraveled. The scandal expanded to include other illegal acts by the Nixon White House, including a 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, an enemies list of political opponents, the use of the IRS to harass critics, and obstruction of the Watergate investigation itself. The Senate hearings, the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, and the Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Nixon in July 1974 forced Nixon to release the tapes proving his involvement. He resigned on August 9, 1974.