Watergate

No scandal more dangerous to nation than Watergate

Twenty-five years ago this week, a group of burglars was caught breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. The rest, as they say, is history, but it is history that many Americans are insufficiently familiar with.

Watergate, the mother of all political scandals, was not just a "third-rate burglary," as Richard M. Nixon called it. The burglary led reporters and investigators to a host of heinous crimes committed by President Nixon and his men: break-ins, illegal wiretaps, conspiracy to obstruct justice, attempts to use the Internal Revenue Service to punish political opponents and liberal critics in the press, political dirty tricks and corruption of the FBI and CIA.

Recently released tapes from the Nixon White House reveal Nixon ordering even more crimes, orders his subordinates wisely chose to ignore.

Nixon went to his grave as an elder statesman. Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, went from being a third-rate burglar to being a top-rated radio talk show host, a reminder that few political misdeeds in Washington go unrewarded.

The rehabilitation and later success of so many Watergate figures may have led younger Americans to think the scandal must not have been that bad, but they would be wrong. The years of investigations and months of congressional hearings shook the government to its constitutional roots.

The scandal was so pervasive it contributed a volume of words and phrases to popular discourse: cover-up; smoking gun; stonewall; "I am not a crook"; and "those statements are no longer operative," not to mention the"-gate" suffix that will be forever appended to every Washington misstep.

Perhaps the only positive

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