What if a security guard hadn't noticed tape on a door latch outside Democratic headquarters at the Watergate office building? Forty years of investigation, reporting, trials, debate and historical research have yielded no simple answer to the central riddle of how a clumsy raid that Nixon's spokesman termed a "third-rate burglary" became a titanic constitutional struggle that ultimately expelled him from office. [...] Watergate would never have happened had officials at Nixon's re-election campaign committee not responded to his ceaseless demands for dirt on the opposition by hiring E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. The ex-CIA and ex-FBI operatives presented an outline ?codenamed Operation Gemstone ? that included bugging and rifling the files at Democratic National Committee headquarters. While there's no evidence Nixon knew of the burglary plot beforehand, within days he was neck-deep in a conspiracy to hide the burglars' ties to his campaign and the White House. Following the money trail eventually led investigators to the truth ? and began a more than two-year legal war involving grand juries, Congress and the Supreme Court and ending when Nixon, facing certain impeachment, resigned from office on Aug. 8, 1974. With the remove of four decades, it's hard to remember or even imagine the hysteria and high drama of those months, with each twist and turn unleashing a flurry of subpoenas and headlines. Another: the day a White House aide told a televised congressional hearing that Nixon had a recording system that taped phone calls and meetings in the Oval Office and elsewhere. [...] 43 people, many of them senior officials, were either indicted, tried or went to jail because of Watergate. Egil "Bud" Krogh Jr., who led the White House "Plumbers" unit and did jail time for the 1971 Ellsberg caper, is convinced that break-in (also carried out by Hunt and Liddy) was the real secret Nixon sought to cover up during Watergate. [...] the best ? and only ? explanation for why Watergate led to his downfall may be the president's brooding personality.
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