The Waterwate was the political scandal that finished the career of President Richard Nixon in the United States of America.
In the early morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested while breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C.
They were there to plant hidden microphones and photograph documents. It emerged that they were connected to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), the organization running Nixon’s re-election campaign.
At first, the White House tried to dismiss it as a minor, isolated burglary with no government connection. But two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, aided by an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” (revealed in 2005 to be Mark Felt, associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ), gradually uncovered a much broader scheme: political espionage, bribery, illegal campaign funds, and a systematic cover-up effort originating from the White House itself.
The Senate formed a special committee to investigate, and its televised hearings in 1973 captivated the country. A key turning point came with the discovery that Nixon had secretly recorded all conversations in the Oval Office, which triggered a long legal battle over access to those tapes.
When the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to hand over the recordings in 1974, one of them — the so-called “smoking gun” tape — proved that the president had personally participated in the cover-up just days after the break-in. Facing near-certain impeachment and having lost virtually all support Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, becoming the only U.S. president to ever resign from office.
His vice president, Gerald Ford, took over the presidency and, weeks later, granted Nixon a preemptive pardon for any crimes he might have committed.
Watergate transformed the relationship between the press, political power, and the public in the United States. It strengthened the role of investigative journalism, led to new laws on campaign finance and government transparency, and the suffix “-gate” became a permanent fixture in the language for naming political scandals ever since.
El caso Watergate fue el escándalo político que terminó con la presidencia de Richard Nixon en Estados Unidos, y sigue siendo uno de los episodios más significativos de la historia política estadounidense del siglo XX.