ABSTRACT
On 17 June 1972, five men broke into the offices of a building called the “Watergate” in Washington, DC. Over the next two years, the US President, Richard Nixon, would attempt to cover up the involvement of himself and his men in this deed. What unfolded during those two years, instead, was the recognition that corruption in the White House ran deeper than anyone had imagined possible: the attempt to bug the Democrats’ offices in Watergate was one in a series of criminal offences that included a plan to firebomb a liberal think tank called The Brookings Institution, the illegal bugging and burglary of people connected with the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and a whole host of presidential campaign “dirty tricks” (see the 1976 film All the President’s Men). The investigations that followed led President Nixon to resign – the first President to do so – rather than face
impeachment, in August 1974. A whole host of Nixon’s closest advisers – the most senior men in government – were eventually charged with criminal offences and imprisoned. With Gerald Ford’s speech, as he took over as the thirty-eighth President of the United States, it could be argued that this damaging scandal was over; other “gates” have followed – Iran-, Iraq-and Whitewater-gate – but, as Fred Emery notes, Watergate “is still the mother of all ‘gates’” (Emery, 1995: xiv). The Watergate narrative can be summarized succinctly: a burglary ruptures the pretence that the government in charge of a Capitalist democracy is actually law-abiding; the scandal of a government going “off the rails” and the attempted cover-up is gradually made public, until the nation’s legal processes take over, removing or destroying the corrupt men in office, so that democracy is once again restored.
