THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN SCANDAL
At 2.30am on 17 June 1972, police officers arrested five men burgling the Democratic Party offices in Washington DC’s Foggy Bottom neighbourhood. The building complex in which the offices were based had gained a reputation for crime, but these men were not – as an FBI agent later noted – “ordinary knuckleheads”. They were well-dressed, with expensive cameras, eavesdropping equipment and rolls of sequentially numbered $100 bills. As it soon transpired, they didn’t seem like typical burglars precisely because they weren’t. One of the men, retired CIA agent James McCord ❶, was head of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President – known by its abbreviation CRP or, more mockingly, Creep. He worked, in other words, for Richard Nixon’s campaign to secure a second term in that November’s presidential election.
Nixon’s press team distanced the president from what they termed a “third-rate burglary”. Despite the denials, however, the incident and its unlikely protagonists set in motion a chain of events that caused a national scandal, and eventually forced Nixon to resign the presidency. This long national nightmare took its name from that soon-to-be infamous building complex: Watergate.
to the weekend of 12 June 1971. President Nixon’s eldest daughter, Tricia, had married in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, which was covered by newspapers around the United States, including in a front-page story in the the next day. But that same edition also ran a piece that painted the White House in a much less favourable light, reviewing the findings of a study of American military involvement in Indochina between 1945 and 1968. The research suggested not only that the US
