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Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein, Saturday Night Massacre – just some phrases associated with the biggest political scandal in history. Here’s everything you need to know about Watergate 40 years on.

Advertisement More Stories Watergate What was Watergate? Here are 14 facts that explain everything Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein, Saturday Night Massacre – just some phrases associated with the biggest political scandal in history. Here’s everything you need to know about Watergate 40 years on. 9.15am, 24 Jun 2012 728k 16 Share options Copy link Email Facebook X FORTY YEARS AGO last Sunday, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC in a botched operation that would spark a chain of events that two years later would see Richard Nixon resign as the 37th president of the United States. The Watergate scandal is widely considered to be the biggest in political history anywhere in the world but trying to explain it is not easy. There are many names, many dates and many events. But in an attempt to do so we’ve managed to boil it down to these 14 key points: 1. Richard Milhous Nixon (AP Photo/John Duricka) To understand Watergate you must to some degree understand the mind of Richard Nixon. He was a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy during World War II before he became a Californian congressman and senator. He was vice president to Dwight D Eisenhower for eight years until 1960 when he himself ran for election against John F Kennedy, the youthful and idealistic Democrat, who he lost to in one of the closest elections in US history. Nixon was deeply hurt by this, blaming the media for favouring his opponent and he long resented the success of the Kennedy clan, a resentment which lasted all the way to the White House which he was elected to in 1968. But his administration’s early years were hampered by the unpopularity of the Vietnam war which the US had been bogged down in since the late 50s. Tackling the unpopularity of the conflict was just one of many of Nixon’s ‘wars’. 2. White House Plumbers, Nixon’s Enemies List and Rat F***ing In marking the 40th anniversary of Watergate recently, the two journalists who were pivotal in helping uncover much of the scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, wrote that during his five-and-a-half-years in power Nixon waged five overlapping wars – on the anti-war movement, the media, Democrats, the US justice system and history itself. From the beginning of his presidency Nixon sought to undermine anyone who he considered an enemy. People such as the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, whose psychiatrist’s office was broken into by members of the so-called ‘White House Plumbers’. This was a group set up within the White House and tasked with stopping the leak of classified information to the media. Ex-CIA officer E Howard Hunt and behind him ex-FBI officer G Gordon Liddy were both ‘White House Plumbers’ (AP Photo) The ‘plumbers’ eventually branched out into other covert and illegal activities, working for the appropriately named CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President [Nixon]) and engaging in activities known as rat-f***ing – dirty tricks – where opposition groups would be infiltrated at campaign events. These tricks undermined Democratic presidential candidates such as Edward Muskie and included everything from forging the infamous Canuck letter – which torpedoed Muskie’s presidential hopes - to stealing campaign workers’ shoes. 3. The Watergate break-in As part of these illegal activities, in the early hours of 17 June 1972, five men attempted to break-in to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex, about a mile from the White House. When a security guard discovered tape on a door latch outside the DNC HQ he called the police and the five men were arrested. YouTube: Newseum Initial investigations by the FBI were able to establish a connection between one of the burglars and E Howard Hunt, an ex-CIA officer who it later transpired was one of Nixon’s ‘plumbers’ tasked with fixing leaks and who in turn was connected to Charles Colson, special counsel to the president. Once this link was established, and leaked to the media, the uncovering of the true extent of the scandal began. 4. The cover-up It is important to note that Nixon never ordered the break-in at the Watergate complex – the approval for that came from Nixon’s former Attorney General and chair of CREEP John Mitchell – but he colluded in its aftermath to distance his administration from it. “I can say categorically that… no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident,” he told a White House press corp in the immediate aftermath of the break-in. In reality he was urging his lawyer John W Dean to cover-up the White House’s connection to the Watergate break-in. Six weeks after the break-in, he had told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman of the burglars and their leaders: “They have to be paid. That’s all there is to that.” The cover-up began. 5. Re-election Having denied his administration’s involvement i...