Watergate

In June of 1972, a break-in occurred at the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington D.C. The building that was broken into was called the Watergate office complex and the men who broke in were paid by Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. The story did not break immediately, but two young reporters from the Washington Post caught on to the scandal. They soon discovered that it was part of a vast, secret, and illegal effort to sabotage the Democrats' hopes of defeating Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. The persistence of the two reporters and the Washington Post's leaders led to the uncovering of Nixon's entire twisted political agenda and his eventual downfall at the hands of the two other branches of government besides the Executive.

The Post seemed to know from the beginning that they were onto something. Not only did they place the original story about the burglary on the front page, but they also assigned two reporters to dig deeper. Bob Woodward was 29 and had graduated from Yale before attending the navy and then deciding to pursue a career in journalism. He joined the Post in 1971. Carl Bernstein was 28 and had dropped out of the University of Maryland. He joined the Post in 1966.

Over the course of the summer and fall of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered piece by piece the biggest and most deeply embedded political scandal in recent American history. They started by tying the burglary to staff members at the White House. Then they reported that the burglars had been paid with Nixon campaign funds. They discovered that the former U.S. Attorney General was also involved. They figured out that the goal of Nixon's secret maneuvers was to upset the Democrats' hopes of winning the election through dirty political moves and slander. The even tied funding of the espionage to Nixon's chief of staff.

Woodward and Bernstein worked tirelessly to get to the truth. They searched people out, went to their homes, spoke to them many times over, and they pushed them for facts. They even broke the law to get the names of jurors hearing the grand jury case against White House officials with regard to the burglary. The most important source of insider information was an anonymous source known as Deep Throat, named after the famous 1970s pornographic film.

By Employee(s) of Bryanston Pictures or a subsidary [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As it turned out, Deep Throat was the second highest official in the FBI and he had a great understanding of the president's covert actions. The secret source only revealed his identity in 2005, at the age of 91.

Oddly, the Washington Post was the only major media outlet to run the stories. They suffered ridicule from other newspapers who claimed that they were overplaying the story. It didn't catch on like other stories at the time (i.e. Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement). CBS, at least, acknowledged the importance of the story, but other than that, most newspapers just repeated whatever the White House press secretary was saying. And despite the efforts by the Post to reveal Nixon's transgressions, he was still reelected in a landslide and much of the public was unaware of what had really happened at Watergate.

Executive editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham have been credited with forging ahead, even when running the Watergate Scandal in their newspaper led to vengeful action by the president. Much like Boss Tweed did one hundred years earlier, Nixon used coercion and power to hurt the Post financially and socially. At the same time, the Post had to respond to an inadvertent error committed by Woodward and Bernstein. They indicated that something had been said before a grand jury, when in reality it wasn't. Because of this, Bradlee and Graham were forced to defend their entire newspaper from both the political arena as well as other media outlets. Momentum was on their side though. The story just got bigger and bigger and soon Nixon displayed retaliatory behavior in public and tapes of him attacking the Post were released. Even so, stock in the Post dropped dramatically during this period.

By Daniel X. O'Neil from USA (Washington, DC, June 2011: The Washington Post) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By September of 1972, the burglars were indicted and one of them eventually testified that much of what Woodward and Bernstein reported was true. The Senate joined the fight the next year, creating a committee to investigate charges of corruption. They, eventually impeached the president for his actions. Also in 1973, the Attorney General appointed someone to investigate the charges and Nixon was forced to deny a federal judge the opportunity to hear recordings. Nixon kept trying to avoid producing the tapes and had to resign despite his efforts.

Woodward and Bernstein, Bradlee and Graham, were all credited with shifting the tides of American history and helping to protect the sanctity of Democracy. Their story has been turned into a major motion picture with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. Here's a link to the trailer for the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLdCZm7qgs

In no small way, these two young men brought down the most powerful man in the world.