You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [89]
NBC was shocked.
They never knew they had so many football fans and they were completely taken by surprise at the sudden turn of events.
The Daily News headline read, “Jets 32, Raiders 29, Heidi 14.”
You Broke In Where?
What really bothers people about this whole thing was how unnecessary it was.
PRESIDENT RICHARD M. NIXON
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1971
Laura Gilman
Richard Nixon was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1947, and held the office of vice president under Dwight Eisenhower for two terms before losing the presidential race to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and then finally won the presidency in 1968. His career, however, will be best remembered for five words: “I am not a crook!” With that statement Richard Milhous Nixon defended himself — ultimately, in vain — on national television against involvement in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.
Then-president Nixon’s guilt can and will doubtless be debated for years to come. What is beyond question, however, is that he was at the center of a scandal that changed how Americans looked at the presidency, transformed how the news media handled the White House, and left an imprint in the political landscape that echoes today when we add “-gate” to the current scandal in the news.
The events that led to Watergate “officially” began in 1971, when the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP, perhaps one of the most unfortunately chosen acronyms in the history of such things) was founded by Nixon’s aides. According to later allegations, CREEP existed for the sole purpose of ensuring that Nixon was reelected by any means necessary, including payment (with funds taken from campaign monies) for the illegal surveillance of political opponents, particularly Larry O’Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee. The means of that surveillance included illegal wiretaps and recordings, and the use of incriminating material to silence critics.
One documented example of the works CREEP funded occurred on September 9, 1971, when a group of men nicknamed “the plumbers” broke into the offices of a Washington psychiatrist in order to find potentially damaging information on Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked sensitive information known as the Pentagon Papers — the Defense Department’s “secret history” of the Vietnam War — to the press, giving rise to questions about Nixon’s handling of the war.
There were other less-than-legal excursions as well, all funded by CREEP, but the scandal really started almost a year later, on June 17, when five men were arrested during an attempted break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and office complex. It was soon revealed that one of the burglars was James McCord, the security director of CREEP. This connection was the first potentially incriminating link between criminal actions committed on the president’s behalf and the president himself.
Two days after the arrests, former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Nixon reelection campaign, denied that CREEP was in any way connected to the break-in. But the conspiracy was already starting to fall apart. It was discovered that the DNC headquarters had previously been bugged, and all the threads of evidence pointed toward the Nixon camp.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation eventually traced the money carried by the burglars back to CREEP, at which point Nixon ordered the CIA to call off the investigation, saying that national security was at stake. This, of course, merely heated up the rumors of Nixon’s involvement.
At first, the bungled Watergate burglary was shrugged off by most Americans as “just politics,” or the maneuverings of particularly overzealous and misguided supporters of the president. However, there were reporters who were not willing to let it rest, and their digging revealed that this was merely the latest in a series of events that could be tied back to CREEP — including the fact that James McCord could be linked