Less than twenty percent of today’s Americans are old enough to remember the Watergate scandal and constitutional crisis of 1972-74.
Watergate was a hotel/office complex where a group of Republican operatives burglarized an office of the Democratic National Committee looking for dirt.
In November 1972 and just as the burglary was coming to light, Richard Nixon was re-elected president with over 60% of the popular vote, the biggest popular vote victory of any Republican president to that point. Voters in November of 1972 paid no attention to news of the Watergate burglary, assured by the White House that it was executed by renegade supporters without the president’s knowledge or consent. That narrative turned out to be false, and as a result, less than two years after his historic re-election, Nixon was forced by leaders of his own party to resign the presidency, the only person ever to do so.
Nixon supervised and approved the burglary and later tried to cover it up. He was preoccupied with his place in history and had an audio taping system installed in the Oval Office. Among the thousands of hours of tapes in the White House audio vault were tapes of Nixon discussing the Watergate burglary with his aides. The tapes also revealed a vindictive president who frequently used foul language to curse his opponents and vowed to punish them by unlawful means. It was a congressional investigation that unwittingly uncovered the existence of the White House taping system, without which Nixon’s lies would likely never been exposed.
Our system of constitutional checks and balances worked.
"The History of Our Freedoms" is produced by KEDT-FM in Corpus Christi. Dr. Bill Chriss is a historian and legal scholar. For more on history and the constitution, check out his blog at https://drbillchriss.substack.com/.
