Watergate & Its Shockwaves

No single decade in American history produced a greater concentration of documented corruption at the highest levels of government than the period from 1968 to 1980. The Vice President of the United States was accepting cash bribes in his White House office. The President of the United States was running a criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office. And when congressional investigators finally turned their attention to the intelligence agencies, they discovered decades of illegal surveillance, assassination plots, and domestic spying that made Watergate look almost quaint by comparison.

The Watergate scandal did not begin with the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972. It began with the Nixon administration's systematic abuse of government power: the creation of a secret "enemies list," the use of the IRS to harass political opponents, the wiretapping of journalists and government officials, the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and the establishment of the "Plumbers" unit to plug leaks by any means necessary. The break-in was merely the blunder that exposed the entire apparatus.

The aftermath was transformative. Forty-eight people were convicted of crimes related to Watergate. A vice president and a president were forced from office. Congress passed landmark reforms including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Ethics in Government Act, and expanded Freedom of Information Act protections. For a brief period, the American system of checks and balances actually worked as designed. But the reforms would prove fragile, and many of the patterns Watergate exposed, executive overreach, political espionage, obstruction of justice, would recur in subsequent administrations.

Spiro Agnew: The Bribe-Taking Vice President

Before Watergate consumed the Nixon presidency, a separate and equally stunning corruption case was unraveling in the Office of the Vice President. Spiro Theodore Agnew, elected as Richard Nixon's running mate in 1968, had been accepting cash bribes since his days as Baltimore County Executive in the early 1960s; and he continued accepting them as Governor of Maryland and even as Vice President of the United States.

The scheme was remarkably straightforward. Engineering firms and contractors seeking government contracts would pay Agnew a percentage of the contract value, typically 5 percent, in cash, delivered in plain white envelopes. The payments continued even after Agnew entered the White House. According to prosecutors, Agnew received at least $100,000 in cash bribes while serving as Vice President, with envelopes of cash passed to him in his Executive Office Building suite.

The investigation began in early 1973 when federal prosecutors in Baltimore, investigating corruption in Maryland politics, discovered that the trail led directly to the sitting Vice President. As the evidence mounted, Agnew attempted to invoke executive privilege and argued that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted. On October 10, 1973, just ten days before the Saturday Night Massacre, Agnew pleaded no contest (nolo contendere) to a single count of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dismissal of bribery, extortion, and conspiracy charges. He resigned the vice presidency the same day and was sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation and a $10,000 fine. In 1974, a Maryland court disbarred him.

Agnew Timeline

Nixon and Watergate: The Full Scope

The Watergate scandal remains the benchmark against which all subsequent American political corruption is measured; not because the underlying crime was the most serious, but because the cover-up reached the highest office in the land and because, for once, the system of accountability actually functioned.

The Break-In and the Cover-Up

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. They were carrying electronic surveillance equipment and had been hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). The burglars were quickly linked to E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer working for the White House, and G. Gordon Liddy, general counsel to CREEP and a former FBI agent.

The break-in itself was a relatively minor crime. What followed was not. Within days, Nixon and his senior aides began an elaborate cover-up. They arranged for hush money payments to the burglars (ultimately totaling over $500,000), attempted to use the CIA to block the FBI's investigation, destroyed evidence, and lied to investigators, Congress, and the American public. The White House tape recordings, which Nixon had installed in the Oval Office, would ultimately prove that the President personally directed the cover-up from its earliest stages.

Broader Abuses of Power

Watergate was not an isolated incident but the exposure of a systematic pattern of political corruption:

• The Enemies List: The White House maintained a list of political opponents to be targeted through IRS audits, government contracts, and other official harassment. The list included journalists, academics, politicians, and entertainers.
• The Plumbers: A secret White House unit created to stop security leaks. Members burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in September 1971 seeking material to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.
• Wiretapping: The administration authorized warrantless wiretaps on 17 journalists and government officials suspected of leaking information.
• Campaign Finance Violations: CREEP raised millions in illegal corporate contributions and cash, some of which was laundered through Mexican banks.
• The Saturday Night Massacre: On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than carry out the order. Solicitor General Robert Bork ultimately fired Cox.

Nixon Timeline

The Watergate Convictions

Forty-eight people were convicted of crimes related to the Watergate scandal. The most senior figures included:

The Church Committee Revelations (1975)

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, operated from January 1975 to April 1976. Its findings were devastating. The Committee documented abuses spanning decades and multiple agencies:

CIA Abuses

• Assassination plots against foreign leaders including Fidel Castro (Cuba), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam), and Rene Schneider (Chile).
• Operation CHAOS: Domestic surveillance program that compiled files on 7,200 Americans and indexed 300,000 names.
• MKUltra: Mind control experiments on unwitting human subjects using LSD and other drugs.
• Mail opening (HT/LINGUAL): Interception and photography of over 215,000 letters between 1952 and 1973.

NSA Abuses

• Operation SHAMROCK (1945–1975): Major telegraph companies (Western Union, ITT, RCA) secretly provided the NSA with copies of international telegrams sent to or from the United States. At its peak, the NSA was reviewing 150,000 messages per month.
• Operation MINARET (1967–1973): NSA surveillance of Americans involved in the anti-war movement and civil rights activities, based on "watch lists" provided by other agencies.

FBI Abuses

• COINTELPRO (1956–1971): Systematic disruption of domestic political organizations through infiltration, disinformation, harassment, and provocation of violence. See Chapter 8 for full details.
• Illegal break-ins ("black bag jobs") conducted without warrants against domestic targets.
• Campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. through surveillance, anonymous letters, and attempts to prevent his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Koreagate (1976)

In 1976, investigations revealed that the South Korean government, through businessman and intelligence operative Tongsun Park, had conducted a systematic campaign to influence U.S. foreign policy through bribery and gifts to members of Congress. Park, acting with the knowledge of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), distributed between $500,000 and $1 million per year to approximately 30 members of Congress between 1970 and 1975. The payments were intended to ensure continued U.S. military support for South Korea.

Park testified before Congress under an immunity agreement in 1978. The House Ethics Committee investigated 14 members; three were reprimanded, including Representatives Charles Wilson (D-CA), Edward Roybal (D-CA), and John McFall (D-CA). Former Representative Richard Hanna (D-CA) pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government and served one year in prison. The scandal revealed the vulnerability of Congress to foreign influence campaigns; a vulnerability that persists to the present day.

Post-Watergate Reforms

The revelations of the Watergate era produced a wave of legislative reforms designed to prevent future abuses:

• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 1978: Established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review government requests for surveillance warrants in national security cases, creating a legal framework intended to replace the warrantless wiretapping exposed by the Church Committee.
• Ethics in Government Act, 1978: Required financial disclosure by senior government officials, established the Office of Government Ethics, and created the mechanism for appointing independent counsels to investigate executive branch misconduct.
• Freedom of Information Act Amendments, 1974: Strengthened FOIA by limiting exemptions, establishing time limits for agency responses, and allowing courts to review classified document withholding claims. Passed over President Ford's veto.
• War Powers Resolution, 1973: Required the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and prohibited armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days without congressional authorization.
• Intelligence Oversight Act, 1980: Required the executive branch to keep congressional intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of all intelligence activities, including covert operations.
• Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments, 1974: Established the Federal Election Commission, set limits on campaign contributions, and created the public financing system for presidential elections.

Era Timeline: 1968–1980