eli5: What was watergate?
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Nixon was paranoid he was going to lose, again (well, he was paranoid about a LOT of things). He got his staff and reelection campaign to break into the opposing political party’s headquarters and steal/copy all their info and playbook. Unfortunately for Nixon, the crooks got caught. He busted his butt to cover things up, but just like Trump’s taxes, the paperwork led back to the Oval Office. Two reporters from the Washington Post named Woodward and Bernstein kept following the trail, and when they had evidence that proved Nixon was behind the whole thing, and destroyed the incriminating evidence (18 minutes of tape recordings), Nixon’s own political party said he needed to go. The next day, he resigned, still the only President who has ever done that. It was a huge betrayal of trust and added to the National trauma of the Vietnam War. It also led many people to (in this case, rightly) believe politicians are crooks.
The Democratic party rented space at the Watergate hotel and conference center to act as presidential campaign offices. This is where they organized the national election campaign. There was a break inn at these offices which were run off by a night guard. While investigating this break inn the police were able to tie it to several members of the Republican election campaign and the Republican party. Some of whom were very senior. They also found several other crimes related to the election campaign. Things pointed to president Nixon being involved as well. As they were interviewing staff at the White House they found out that Nixon was doing illegal wiretapping of the oval office and his phone. Especially one of these tapes were of interest which were taken shortly after the break inn at Watergate where Nixon sounds like he already knew who were behind it and were discussing how they had to stop the police from investigating further. After a lot of back and forth between Congress and the White House the tapes were finally leaked to Congress. This caused Nixon to resign and were quickly pardoned by the new president.
Watergate was a major political scandal during the Richard Nixon administration, generally considered the biggest political scandal in American history, or at least the most well known. In 1972 Richard Nixon, a Republican, was running for reelection and was paranoid that he was going to lose the election. This wasn’t a particularly realistic fear, Nixon was almost certain to win re-election. The Democratic party, his opposition, had their headquarters in an office building in a development called Watergate, best known for the Watergate hotel, a luxury hotel in the development. In the summer of 1972 individuals broke into the Democratic party headquarters and stole documents related to the campaign and tapped the phones, giving them a massive and unfair advantage. Nixon cruised to re-election, winning 49 states.
Despite Nixon’s win people were very curious about the break in, especially as the criminal investigation into the burglars revealed that they had been paid by the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Investigation into the incident revealed that high ranking members of the Nixon administration had ordered the break-in, and that, at the very least, Richard Nixon approved plans to cover it up. It is generally believed that Nixon ordered the break in, or at the very least knew about the plan before it happened, though we don’t know that for sure. Nixon was paranoid and because of that he secretly recorded all conversations that were had in the Oval Office. When transcribing some of these conversations Nixon’s long time personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, deleted 18.5 minutes of these tapes. Woods claimed that it was an accident, but very few people believe that. It is generally believed, based upon context, that those 18.5 minutes likely contained discussion of the break in that would have been very damaging to Nixon.
As part of the investigation the Department of Justice (DOJ) appointed a special prosecutor, which is an outside lawyer that you bring in to do an impartial investigation into things involving the executive branch, named Archibald Cox. Cox’s investigation revealed a great deal of wrongdoing by the Nixon administration and high ranking officials within it, both related to Watergate and not related to Watergate. Eventually Cox found out about the tapes of Oval Office conversations, and attempted to get the Nixon Administration to give him copies of the tapes. A court eventually ordered Nixon to hand the tapes over. A few days after that order, on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Richard Nixon ordered the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, the head of the DOJ, to fire Archibald Cox. Richardson refused and resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who was made the acting head of the DOJ when Richardson resigned, to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork, now the acting head of the DOJ, to fire Cox. Bork complied and fired Cox. This became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” It was long believed, and later confirmed by Bork in a book published after his death, that Nixon promised Bork that he would appoint him to the Supreme Court if he fired Cox. Bork was later nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan, but the Senate did not confirm him.
The Saturday Night Massacre was very damaging for Nixon politically. The timing was terrible as well, it came just 10 days after his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, pled guilty to crimes related to corruption and resigned. The combination of the blowback from Agnew’s scandal and the Saturday Night Massacre caused Nixon’s approval rating to collapse, and the House of Representatives began impeachment proceedings. On July 30, 1974 the House Judiciary Committee voted on articles of impeachment and sent them to the House of Representatives as a whole, who prepared for impeachment. On August 5, 1974 a tape from Nixon’s office, from just a few days after the break in, was released. This tape was a “smoking gun” that proved that Nixon, who had denied any involvement in the scandal, knew from the very beginning and had been lying to the American people, and even his own lawyers, for two years.
This caused the already tenuous public support for Nixon to evaporate. Fearing that he would be impeached and removed from office Richard Nixon resigned from the office of the Presidency, the first and only time the President has resigned. He was later pardoned by Gerald Ford, his Vice President at the time.
Because of how major the scandal was, and some of the specifics of how the investigations, both government and media, played out “Watergate” became synonymous with scandal. The media then began to attach the suffix “gate” to major scandals as a way to compare them to Watergate, resulting in scandals like “Debate-gate” in 1980.
TL;DR: In 1972 people paid by the President’s re-election committee broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate Office Building and stole documents and tapped the phones, which was used to help Republican Richard Nixon run for re-election. After investigations into the break in and cover up Richard Nixon resigned as president.
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