APRIL 30

On this date in 1973, President Richard M.Nixon announced that he had fired his counsel, John Dean and that two other aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman had resigned.  This was in the midst of what is known as the Watergate Scandal.  Here's my recollection of the scandal.

In 1972, five men were arrested for a break-in at the Democrat National Headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C.  They were stealing money and information and bugging the phones; ostensibly to help Nixon in his re-election bid.  Nixon was elected to his second term in November 1972. 

The five plead guilty or were convicted in early 1973 and sent to jail. They implicated two people, G Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, in the Nixon Administration as being in charge.  Those two had called them "the plumbers." 

The story almost ended there but an 'unknown person' they called "deep throat" kept feeding more information about the "burglary" to two young reporters on the Washington Post.  The stories they wrote caused the FBI to put pressure on those involved to implicate more and more of Nixon's White House staff.  The White House's resistance to the story and attempt to cover it up, faltered when it was learned that Nixon had secret tapes of all his conversations that took place in the Oval Office.  They were subpoenaed and new charges were brought against White House staffers for their attempts to cover up the situation.  Eventually, tapes were released that showed that Nixon, himself, had tried to cover up the matter.  He resigned in the Summer of 1974 and turned the Presidency over to Gerald Ford.  Ford eventually pardoned Nixon to avoid a messy trial. 

That's the standard story.  Information about this scandal is still being released.  I heard a thought this week that we have the story all wrong.  Those five 'burglars' were called "plumbers" because they were meant to stop 'leaks'.  Nixon had almost no challenge from Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 election.  Nothing was needed in the way of information for him to win the election.  The real reason for the break-in was to find out who was 'leaking' classified information out of the White House.  Nixon's people thought that the Russians had infiltrated the Justice Department, the FBI and/or the Democrat party.  Further, when the break-in went awry, the "deep throat" who supplied information to the reporters was actually a Russian agent intent on bringing down the Nixon Administration. 

What do you think?  The scandal changed forever the way the public looks upon the Presidency.