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- The Supreme Court remained supreme. It was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court on July 24, 1974 that effectively ended the Nixon presidency by ordering the release of the Watergate “smoking gun” tape and other recordings.
- The Church Committee. Concerns surfaced during the Watergate hearings about the FBI investigating American citizens and others for political purposes.
- An era of legal reform. The Watergate scandal shined a negative light on the legal profession. Many of the participants in the scandal were attorneys and almost 30 of them faced some type of legal proceeding.
- The era of celebrity journalists. The sudden fame of two little-known reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, created what became known as the culture of celebrity journalists.
- The Watergate Break-In
- Nixon's Obstruction of Justice
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Investigate
- The Saturday Night Massacre
- Nixon Resigns
The origins of the Watergate break-in lay in the hostile political climate of the time. By 1972, when Republican President Richard M. Nixon was running for reelection, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and the country was deeply divided. A forceful presidential campaign therefore seemed essential to the president and some of his k...
It later came to light that Nixon was not being truthful. A few days after the break-in, for instance, he arranged to provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then, Nixon and his aides hatched a plan to instruct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to impede the FBI’s investigation of the crime. This was a more ser...
By that time, a growing handful of people—including Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, trial judge John J. Sirica and members of a Senate investigating committee—had begun to suspect that there was a larger scheme afoot. At the same time, some of the conspirators began to crack under the pressure of the cover-up. Anonymous w...
When Cox refused to stop demanding the tapes, Nixon ordered that he be fired, leading several Justice Department officials to resign in protest. (These events, which took place on October 20, 1973, are known as the Saturday Night Massacre.) Eventually, Nixon agreed to surrender some—but not all—of the tapes. Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts ...
Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crimes. In the face of almost certain impeachment by Congress, Nixon resignedin disgrace on August 8, and left office the following day. Six weeks later, after Vice President Gerald Fordwas sworn in as president, he pardoned Nixon f...
Jan 1, 2015 · One of the lingering questions from Watergate—the most far-reaching political scandal in modern American history—concerns how so many lawyers could have allowed themselves to get sucked into...
Aug 8, 2016 · On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced he would resign from office as a result of the Watergate scandal. But the effects of Watergate lingered on for years after the scandal.
Jun 8, 2022 · The years immediately following President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 are often seen today as an era of good government, reform, and transparency. Stung by the Watergate scandal and other perceived presidential excesses, both Congress and the White House put in place novel laws and norms aimed at curbing future crimes and abuses of ...
Apr 12, 2024 · Watergate scandal, interlocking political scandals of the administration of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon that were revealed following the arrest of five burglars at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. On August 9, 1974, facing likely impeachment ...
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Because Watergate involved so many lawyers, it had a great impact on the reg ulation of the legal profession.1 Although the twenty-first century has just started, the strongest contender for this century's most famous scandal is the Enron scandal.
