50 YEARS ON FROM The bungled burglary that changed history
How a sharp-eyed night watchman brought down a President
It was a relatively simple burglary and, had everything gone to plan, no one would ever have known. But instead, the botched breakin at the Watergate complex, 50 years ago this week brought down President Richard Nixon and changed US politics forever.
And all it took was a piece of tape and an astute night watchman.
It wasn’t just Nixon’s life which would be for ever changed by that balmy night in June 1972.
The futures of all those pulled into the subsequent Watergate scandal – from the blundering burglars to the two dogged journalists who stumbled on the story – would be drastically altered.
Sadly the man who suffered the most was the hero security guard.
Frank Wills was making his rounds when he spotted duct tape over the latch of the basement door.
Thinking a workman had left it, he removed the tape. But around 2am, he saw the door was taped again and called police.
Officers found five intruders in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, all in suits, with expensive cameras, eavesdropping equipment and 40 rolls of unexposed film. One, James McCord, was a retired CIA agent working on the campaign to secure a new term for Nixon.
The ragtag group were in a secret White House unit called the “plumbers”, created by Nixon to stop the leak of classified information to the media, and discredit his “enemies”.
They were engaged in a range of criminal acts, including phone tapping and burglary, but their missions rarely went to plan.
This was their third attempt at bugging the DNC. The first time they didn’t have the right locksmith, the second they bugged an unused room, and on the last McCord left that tape on the door.
Their lookout tried to warn them he’d seen police, but McCord had turned down his walkie talkie.
When Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis, Martinez and McCord later turned up in court in immaculate business suits, a young reporter for The Washington Post, Bob Woodward, had a “holy sh** moment” – this was no normal break-in. He said: “The judge asked the lead burglar, James McCord, where he worked. McCord whispered something inaudible, and the judge said, ‘Speak up’.
“Then McCord said, in a way I could hear from the first row: “CIA”.
And that was that, the beginning of the end for Nixon and start of the biggest political scandal to date.
Woodward and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein, began to dig deeper, publishing information from a secret informant named Deep Throat, later unmasked as FBI associate director Mark Felt.
Nixon instructed his lawyer, John W Dean, to cover up his involvement. Tapes from the Oval Office later revealed he had approved hush money for the burglars. Nixon won re-election in 1972 with a huge margin. But cracks appeared in the cover-up when McCord admitted lying to court, and FBI director Patrick Gray quit after it was revealed he’d burned incriminating papers.
Nixon famously went public to insist: “I’m not a crook.”
But when the investigating Watergate Senate Committee won the right to demand the release of all tape recordings made in the Oval, the game was up.
In one Nixon discussed plans to block investigations by involving the FBI. Facing impeachment, he made a live address to the nation on August 8, 1974, and resigned.
The scandal resulted in 69 government officials being charged and 48 being found guilty, including
some of Nixon’s top aides, such as chief of staff Bob Haldeman, jailed for 18 months.
As for the others. Their fates are mixed. Nixon never did time – he was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and proclaimed his innocence right up to his death in 1994.
Of the burglars, Barker, Sturgis, Gonzalez and Martinez admitted charges involving conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in January 1973 and all served more than year in prison.
Ringleaders McCord, and G Gordon Liddy, a White House staffer involved in organising the crime, were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping.
While Liddy spent 52 months in jail, McCord served four months after his sentence was cut after he cooperated with investigators.
After their release, the lives of those involved took very different directions. McCord kept a low profile, running his own security firm until he died from pancreatic cancer in 2017, aged 93.
Gonzalez returned to his career as a locksmith. In 1977 he received $200,000 from Richard Nixon’s campaign fund to settle a civil suit in which he and three others claimed they were tricked into participating in the burglary. He died last year, aged 98.
Barker, meanwhile, worked as a building inspector in Miami, and took early retirement in 1982 after he was dismissed for “loafing and taking three-hour coffee breaks”. He died of cancer in 2009 aged 92.
Former CIA agent Sturgis became a Miami police informant and in 1979 went to Angola to help rebels fight the communist government. Later he helped train the US-backed Contras in Honduras. He died of lung cancer aged 68 in 1993.
Cuban Martinez worked as an estate agent and car salesman, and became known as Musculito, or Little Muscle, for continuing to work out on Miami Beach into his 90s.
E Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who helped organise the burglary, served 33 months in prison. He moved to Florida, started a new family and wrote spy novels. He declared bankruptcy in 1997 after he won a libel suit against a newspaper which linked him to John F Kennedy’s killing. He died in 2007.
Liddy became a talk show host, and started acting on shows such as Miami Vice. He died last year aged 90.
Woodward and Bernstein became household names, immortalised by reporters Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar-winning All the President’s Men.
Woodward stayed on The Washington Post and is associate editor. Married three times, he has written 21 books on American politics and current affairs, 13 of them bestsellers.
Bernstein left the paper in 1977 and works at various American news channels as a political commentator, including CNN.
Following his heroics in catching the burglars, security guard Wills received a raise of just $2.50 per week. He quit in protest before going home to care for his ageing mother, who had suffered a stroke.
Increasingly destitute he was convicted of shoplifting and when his mother died in 1993 donated her body to medical research because he had no money to bury her. He died from a brain tumour in 2000 aged 52.