Richard Nixon: Watergate Was Only the Doorway

Most people think they know Watergate. They don't. They know the headline. The break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the wave from the helicopter on the South Lawn. They know the word. They've seen the photograph. What they don't know is that the burglary was never the story. It was the doorway.In this episode of Disturbing History, we walk back into the White House for another stop on our tour of presidential history you wish we'd forgotten.onight, we open the door at 1:30 in the morning on 6/17/1972, where a young security guard named Frank Wills pulls a piece of tape off a stairwell latch for the second time and decides it's worth a phone call. Five men in surgical gloves are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Across the street, two of their handlers watch through binoculars and run.The story has begun, but only by accident. Richard Nixon had already been building the machine that produced it for years.We pull the camera back from the burglars and walk you through the building behind them. A White House that wiretapped journalists without warrants after the Cambodia bombing leaked in 1969. A secret unit called the Plumbers that broke into a psychiatrist's office in Beverly Hills on 9/3/1971 to dig through the medical files of Daniel Ellsberg.A Committee to Re-Elect the President that ran a nationwide campaign of political sabotage they called, in their own words, ratfucking. A formal list of American citizens marked for harassment by the IRS, journalists and actors and senators and labor leaders whose only crime was disagreeing with the man at the desk. Hush money carried in cash. Tape machines hidden inside the walls of the Oval Office that the staff didn't know about.An 18 and a half minute gap on a tape that nobody to this day can explain.We sit with John Dean's testimony, the Sam Ervin hearings that stopped the country for a summer, Alexander Butterfield's quiet answer that revealed the recording system on 7/16/1973, the Saturday Night Massacre on 10/20/1973, the unanimous Supreme Court decision on 7/24/1974, the smoking gun tape that ended it all on 8/5/1974, and the helicopter that lifted off the South Lawn on 8/9/1974.Brian closes the episode where he started it. With the question that Watergate forces us to live with for the rest of American history. Was Nixon uniquely paranoid, or did the office itself produce a man who couldn't sit in it without breaking something. Was the scandal the disease, or just the diagnosis. Public trust in the federal government collapsed during the Watergate years and has never returned to where it was before. That's the deeper damage. Not the resignation. The belief. This is the kind of story we built Disturbing History to tell. The headline you think you know, taken apart slowly, until you see the architecture underneath.Settle in, and walk through the doorway with us.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [email protected] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.