What actually happened at the Watergate hotel and what did it have to do with Nixon?
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The Watergate hotel was location of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The head office for the Democrats during the upcoming election.
Nixon was part of a conspiracy to break into the DNC headquarters to plant bugs and steal information to benefit Nixon during the election.
However the team that went in screwed up and had to return a second time and were caught.
The resulting scandal ended the Nixon Presidency with him forced to resign in disgrace or face certain impeachment.
During the presidential election campaign the Democratic party rented temporary office spaces at the Watergate Hotel and Conference center to serve as their headquarters. The Republican party used offices at the White House for the same purpose. The Republican election campaign, lead by Nixon, hired professional burglars to break into the offices at Watergate and copy secret documents from the Democratic campaign. This was only partially successful as they did not get into the most secret areas and they were spotted by security guards. The police managed to track them down after some time as well as some of their contacts within the Republican campaign. The police then managed to uncover even more illegal activities related to the election campaign. Eventually a number of people were sent to prison for this.
As for Nixon the police managed to uncover that he had secretly taped conversations and phone calls at the oval office. And these did include conversations about how Nixon’s first reactions to hearing about the brake inn at Watergate was to plot against the police and try to stop them from finding the culprits. These tapes themselves were first withheld from the courts, something which is also illegal. In the end Nixon stepped down as president and was immediately pardoned.
On June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic party’s national headquarters at the Watergate Office Building (not a hotel) in Washington, DC. The Justice Department eventually was able to connect those men to the Nixon reelection campaign. This led to investigations by congress. It eventually was revealed that Nixon was directly and personally involved in the effort to cover up the connection between the burglary and his campaign.
Two reporters for the newspaper The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, covered the matter extensively, relying on tips from a secret informant nicknamed “Deep Throat”, who was actually a deputy director of the FBI named Mark Felt.
Eventually, when it became clear the congress was going to impeach Nixon and was likely to remove him from office, he resigned.
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