Nixon recognized certain things about the implementation of the burglary that seemed very fishy. How could the bugging of the DNC headquarters be carried out by pros, but have so many amateur-ish and bungling maneuvers? He also thought…” A break-in at Democratic Party headquarters…on whom would that be blamed?” Well, who was running against a Democrat for reelection that fall? Why, Richard Nixon of course.

Nixon knew how this would play out publicly. Dick Nixon: ruthless, paranoid, vengeful. Wouldn’t this burglary be just the kind of thing that Dick Nixon…aka “Tricky Dick” (the “liberal media’s” version of him) ...would do? Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, made this charge repeatedly during the 1972 campaign.

Nixon knew everything he said was being recorded. Like Kennedy and Johnson who came before him, he had decided to install a taping system so that he could maintain a record of his administration. He was, in a way, dictating a file memo for future historians. There would end up being 3700 hours of tape recordings. There was a Tape with 18 minutes of missing content. What was on that tape??

Nixon never minced words. He swore. And he routinely called out the very people who he felt were against him and trying to bring down his presidency. In addition to the C_A, Nixon believed it to be the Askenazi Jews…though he specifically said “The Jewish Cabal is out to get me.”

Less than a week later, on June 23rd, 1972 Nixon suddenly learned more…and this gave him much to think about.

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, came into the Oval Office to give the president an update on a variety of topics, including the investigation of the break-in. Haldeman had just been briefed by John Dean, who had gotten his information from FBI investigators. Dean would eventually become a traitor.

HALDEMAN: …The FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA…..

NIXON: Of course, this is a…this is a [E. Howard] Hunt [operation, and exposure of it] will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.

This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves… This will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing…

In his memoirs, Nixon described how he learned about the “Watergate Break-ins” while vacationing in Florida, from the morning newspaper. He recalled his reaction at the time:

“It sounded preposterous. Cubans in surgical gloves bugging the DNC! I dismissed it as some sort of prank… The whole thing made so little sense. Why, I wondered. Why then? Why in such a blundering way… Anyone who knew anything about politics would know that a national committee headquarters was a useless place to go for inside information on a presidential campaign. The whole thing was so senseless and bungled that it almost looked like some kind of a setup.”

Nixon was actually suggesting not just a setup, but one intended to harm him.

In July, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution.

Nixon Resigned.

WOW

wow!!!

The Saturday Night Massacre

When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on October 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes.

Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. Here is the list of those sides and advisors:

A handful of Nixon’s aides, including White House counsel John Dean, testified before a grand jury about the president’s crimes; they also testified that Nixon had secretly taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office.

Nixon struggled to protect the tapes during the summer and fall of 1973. His lawyers argued that the president’s executive privilege allowed him to keep the tapes to himself, but Judge Sirica, the Senate committee and an independent special prosecutor named Archibald Cox were all determined to obtain them.

By that time, a growing handful of people—including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot.

Anonymous whistleblower “Deep Throat” provided key information to Woodward and Bernstein.