The Watergate complex, with 12 buildings along the Potomac River, achieved worldwide infamy 50 years ago, a symbol of abuse of power in Washington. In the early hours of June 17, 1972, five burglars were arrested for installing electronic wiretaps and stealing documents at the Democratic Party headquarters.
Two reporters for The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, soon realized that there was more to crime than a local police case. One of the prisoners had been identified as a former CIA agent and security officer in Republican President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Three days after the break-in, Bob Woodward stood before his anonymous source, dubbed the Deep Throat in the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of reports.
Three decades later, Deep Throat was identified as Mark Felt, then FBI No. 2, who had previously been used as a source by Woodward. Felt detested Nixon and had already faced attempts by the White House to use its federal agents for political ends.
The Watergate break-in turned out to be just one phase of the illegal campaign launched by Nixon to secure the defeat of Democratic candidate George McGovern in November of that year. A henchman of the president had already helped take the most centrist Democrat and the most likely against Nixon out of the race in February. The publication of a fake letter attributed to candidate Edmund Muskie, with an offensive reference to Americans of Canadian descent, forced Muskie to withdraw from the race.
The Watergate scandal, initially followed closely by the Post, was slow to develop the historical gravity it later acquired. Nixon was handily re-elected. But in May 1973, Senate investigative committee hearings began with the participation of star witness John Dean, Nixon’s legal adviser, who had resigned in February and started offering a detailed award-winning indictment of the effort to cover up the crimes. of the president.
The other turning point to force Nixon’s resignation, on August 9, 1974, was the revelation at the hearings that the president had installed a recording system of the conversations he held in the White House. Nixon delivered edited recordings, claiming executive privilege, but ended up forced to hand over the tapes that proved the purchase of silence from those involved in the scandal.
The American media was flooded with specials about the 50th anniversary of Watergate. Watching the documentaries or the film with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman based on the book “All the President’s Men” by Woodward and Bernstein makes you nostalgic.
This is the sentiment expressed by historians, protagonists of that era, and people old enough to have witnessed the fall of the Nixon presidency. THE Sheet spoke to a group of Americans who were 11 to 31 years old in June 1972.
“I was a graduate student in law, and in 1971 I had chosen an obscure topic for my dissertation,” recalls Robert Hammel, 75, a former federal prosecutor and former law professor at New York University. The topic was executive privilege, which made him an avid monitor of any Watergate-related news.
Hammel has more personal reasons to be shocked by the country revealed in the Donald Trump era. In the 1980s, he was part of the team of prosecutors led by then-mafioso hunter and future New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, now involved in the coup attempt staged by Trump in January 2021.
Hammel says that Watergate reinforced the distrust of the political establishment, but it also showed that the system could make a course correction. “Today, I’m already more pessimistic about it.”
“From the beginning, the break-in seemed suspicious to me,” says conductor and composer Bill McGlaughlin, 78, who was a trombonist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania. He remembers his daughter, then 5, who watched a Nixon interview on TV and asked if he was lying. “When Watergate broke, I was already opposed to Nixon because of the war in Vietnam, but what I discovered with the scandal made me not trust the government anymore”, says the musician.
“We had plenty of reason to hate Nixon before Watergate,” says Robert Stam, 80, a film professor at New York University. “Not only the war in Vietnam, but the repression of racial militancy and Nixon’s nuclear policy revolted me. But compared to today’s Republicans, the conservative establishment at the time was a paradise”, says the professor, remembering that Nixon had a progressive side — he founded the federal environmental protection agency, tried to implement a universal income plan for needy families and opened the US to China.
“My youthful regret was that I didn’t follow Watergate as I should have,” recalls writer Julia Michaels, 67. She was out of high school when her father, a Republican disgusted with Nixon, listened to the Watergate hearings in his car in Boston and complained. of her daughter’s lack of attention, saying: “This is a historic moment!” Julia now lives in Rio and does not miss an investigative hearing, either in the Brazilian Congress or in Washington.
The lawyer and politicized mother soon brought Watergate to the dinner table at the home of New Yorker Just Spring, who was 11 years old in 1972. “The following year”, recalls the art historian and biographer, “I went to a summer camp , and we were glued to the TV, watching the hearings”.
In the summer of 1973, the Senate sessions reached 85 million spectators. “I feel perplexed today,” says Spring. “I witnessed so much outrage. There was more moral clarity with Nixon. We didn’t realize that Trump attempted a coup because we didn’t think it could happen here.”
