A Piece of Tape on a Door Latch
Shortly after midnight on 17 June 1972, a 24-year-old security guard named Frank Wills was making his rounds at the Watergate office complex in Washington DC. The job paid $80 a week. He worked the midnight-to-seven shift, alone, patrolling eleven floors of one of the most prestigious addresses in the American capital.
On his first sweep of the underground car park, Wills noticed a small piece of duct tape stretched over the latch bolt of a stairwell door. Someone had taped it open to stop it locking. He pulled it off, made a mental note, and continued his patrol.
Thirty minutes later, he came back. There was fresh tape on the same door.
Wills went to the lobby telephone and called the Second Precinct police. Officers arrived, turned off the lifts, locked all exits, and accompanied him on an office-by-office search. On the sixth floor, inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, they found five men with cameras, bugging equipment and crisp, uncirculated hundred-dollar banknotes. The notes were traceable to the Nixon re-election campaign.
Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would dismiss it the following morning as “a third-rate burglary attempt.” He was right about the burglary. He was catastrophically wrong about what it would become.
What the Country Was Told
The White House’s position was consistent, clear and repeated across two years: the president knew nothing. The break-in had been carried out by low-level operatives acting on their own. There was no connection between the Watergate burglars and the Nixon administration.
In August 1972, six weeks after the arrests, Nixon announced that his White House counsel, John Dean, had completed an internal investigation into the incident. The investigation had found, Nixon stated publicly, no evidence of White House involvement.
Dean had conducted no such investigation.
Nixon was re-elected in November 1972 in the largest Republican landslide in American history, carrying 49 of 50 states. The cover-up appeared to be working. The Watergate story was running in the Washington Post, but most of the country had not caught up with it.
For most Americans, Watergate was a minor incident involving men who had been caught, charged, and would face justice. The president was not implicated. The system was working. There was nothing more to know.
The Cancer Growing
The Washington Post was the first institution to understand that there was considerably more to know.
Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, guided by a secret source operating under the codename Deep Throat, had begun following the money almost immediately after the arrests. By August 1972, they had published the first story connecting a $25,000 cheque from Nixon’s re-election fund directly to one of the burglars’ bank accounts. Through the autumn of 1972 and into 1973, their reporting mapped a network of illegal surveillance, political sabotage, and covert funding that ran directly from the Watergate complex to the Committee to Re-Elect the President — CREEP — and from CREEP to the White House.
The cover-up was also beginning to fray from the inside. Watergate burglar James McCord, facing a substantial prison sentence, sent a letter to the trial judge in March 1973 stating that he had been pressured to commit perjury and that the conspiracy reached far beyond the seven men in the dock.
In July 1973, a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield, appearing before the Senate Watergate Committee, disclosed something the investigators had not known: since 1971, Nixon had been secretly recording every conversation in the Oval Office. Every meeting. Every phone call. Every private discussion of what to do about the burglars and the inquiry that was closing in.
There was suddenly a tape of everything.
Then, on 25 June 1973, John Dean — sacked as White House counsel two months earlier, now cooperating with investigators — sat before the Senate Watergate Committee and delivered a 245-page opening statement that took six hours to read. He detailed how he had shredded documents, laundered money, coached witnesses, and worked to suppress evidence of White House involvement in the cover-up. He described a meeting with Nixon in March 1973 in which he had told the president directly:
“There was a cancer growing on the Presidency, and if the cancer was not removed, the President himself would be killed by it.”
Nixon’s response, as Dean testified, had been to ask how much the hush money payments would cost to sustain for another year.
Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973 rather than hand over the tapes Cox had subpoenaed. The Attorney General and his deputy both resigned rather than carry out the order. The event became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. What had looked like a containment operation now looked like something else.
The 18½-minute gap did not help. A White House aide revealed in November 1973 that a recording of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on 20 June 1972 — three days after the break-in — had a mysterious erasure at a critical moment. Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, demonstrated for photographers how she might have accidentally held down the wrong pedal while transcribing the tape, her body contorted into what reporters immediately named the Rose Mary Stretch. The explanation satisfied almost no one.
“Play It Tough”
The tapes the Supreme Court ultimately forced Nixon to release told the story without ambiguity.
White House tape 741-002, recorded in the Oval Office on the morning of 23 June 1972, was the recording that ended the Nixon presidency. The conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman took place six days after the break-in, at a moment when FBI investigators were already tracing the burglars’ uncirculated cash back through a Mexican bank to the Nixon campaign finance committee.
Haldeman laid out the problem: the FBI investigation was “leading into some productive areas” and moving in “directions we don’t want it to go.” The plan was to have the CIA’s deputy director contact the FBI and instruct them to back off, on the false grounds that the investigation was about to expose classified CIA operations.
Nixon’s response, in the words of tape 741-002, as documented by the Miller Center of Public Affairs Presidential Recordings Program:
“You call him in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That’s the way they play it, and—”
Haldeman then outlined the mechanics. The CIA would tell the FBI it was stepping on a covert operation. The FBI would stand down. The investigation would stall. The connection to the White House would never be established.
It is worth pausing here. The president of the United States had just instructed his chief of staff to use the CIA to obstruct an FBI investigation into a crime his own campaign had commissioned. He had done this six days after the break-in, before any external inquiry had reached him, while publicly maintaining that he knew nothing.
That same tape, in the same conversation, records Haldeman discussing FBI associate director Mark Felt — who thirty years later would be revealed as Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein’s secret source — and describing him as someone who “wants to cooperate, because he’s ambitious.” The man Nixon’s chief of staff was counting on as a cooperative asset in the cover-up was simultaneously passing everything he knew to the Washington Post.
The grand jury named Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator in March 1974 — the first time in American history that designation had been applied to a sitting president. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in July 1974 that Nixon had no grounds to withhold the tapes. The smoking gun recording was released on 5 August 1974. The eleven Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment read the transcript and announced they were changing their votes.
Nixon resigned four days later.
The Men Who Walked Away, and the One Who Didn’t
Richard Nixon boarded a helicopter from the South Lawn of the White House on 9 August 1974, gave a two-armed wave to the assembled staff, and became the first and only president in American history to resign. Gerald Ford was sworn in as his successor minutes later.
On 8 September 1974, thirty days after taking office, Ford granted Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes he might have committed while president. Ford’s own press secretary resigned in protest the same day. Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon — legally, under the 1915 Supreme Court precedent Ford carried in his wallet, an acceptance of guilt — was the closest thing to an admission the public would receive. Nixon told a television interviewer in 1977: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” He appeared to mean it.
The prosecutions that followed reached deep into the senior ranks of American government. Attorney General John Mitchell — the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury, and served 19 months in prison. Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and domestic adviser John Ehrlichman were both convicted and imprisoned. White House counsel John Dean, who had turned state’s evidence, served four months. Hunt and Liddy, who had planned the break-in, served time. In total, 41 people received criminal convictions in connection with Watergate. Sixty-nine were charged.
The Presidential Records Act of 1974 transferred ownership of all presidential documents to the public. The Ethics in Government Act followed in 1978. Both laws were direct products of Watergate.
And then there was Frank Wills.
The man whose methodical patrol of the Watergate corridors triggered the entire sequence received a raise of $2.50 per week. He resigned shortly afterwards, having been offered nothing meaningful for what he had uncovered. He found himself unable to get steady work — convinced, with good reason, that he was being blacklisted across Washington. He moved back to South Carolina to care for his mother, the two of them surviving on her $450-a-month Social Security payments. When his mother died in 1993, Wills was so destitute that he donated her body to medical research because he could not afford to bury her. He told reporters he regretted discovering the break-in because of what it had done to his life. He died in September 2000 of a brain tumour, aged 52, in a hospital in Augusta, Georgia. In 1995, the United States Postal Service had put Richard Nixon’s face on a stamp.
The Precedent That Wasn’t Set
Watergate is frequently described as proof that American democracy works — that no one is above the law, that institutions held, that the system corrected itself. It is a reassuring story.
The evidence is more complicated.
The president who ordered an obstruction of justice within days of a crime his own campaign had commissioned was never prosecuted. The pardon ensured that. The legal and political question of whether a president could be held criminally accountable for acts committed in office was left unanswered — deliberately, by a man who understood that leaving it unanswered was the safest outcome for everyone involved.
The reforms that followed were real. The laws passed. The precedents were established. Iran-Contra happened twelve years later, and the people responsible for it largely walked free. The pattern — executive lawbreaking, incomplete accountability, a pardon or its equivalent, and the slow rehabilitation of the people involved — has recurred with enough regularity to raise questions about whether Watergate changed anything fundamental, or merely established a template.
Nixon needed a pardon to avoid prosecution. Fifty years later, the Supreme Court ruled that he might not have needed one at all.
The Documents
- Nixon White House Tapes — Tape 741-002, “Smoking Gun,” 23 June 1972. Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes/741
- Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Final Report. 1974. National Archives DocsTeach. docsteach.org
- Articles of Impeachment — House Judiciary Committee. 27 July 1974. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu
- Woodward, Bob and Bernstein, Carl. “FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats.” The Washington Post, 10 October 1972.
- Dean, John W. III. Senate Testimony Before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. 25–29 June 1973. Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy. levin-center.org
- United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683. Supreme Court of the United States, 1974. supreme.justia.com
- Wills, Frank. Security guard duty log entry, 17 June 1972, 1:47 a.m. National Archives, Watergate Special Prosecution Force Records. Physical archive record.
- Brown, DeNeen L. “The Post and the Forgotten Security Guard Who Discovered the Watergate Break-In.” Washington Post, 2017. postandcourier.com
- Felt, Mark W. and O’Connor, John. A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being “Deep Throat,” and the Struggle for Honor in Washington. PublicAffairs, 2006.
- Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon. Norton, 1992.
Go Deeper
The break-in was only the beginning. All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — written while the scandal was still unfolding — remains the definitive account of how two reporters, a secret source, and a trail of uncirculated banknotes brought down a presidency.