Watergate Scandal
One of the topics covered by Paul Johnson in his book “A History of American People” (Johnson, np), is the Watergate scandal of 1972, which dealt with high scale abuse of power by the high standing officials in the conservative party, to the detriment of privacy of the Democrats.
It has been a major political event of the time, which called for a massive shift in the public perception of corruption and exceeding authority. Being widely supported by close to three fourths of the United States society prior to the notorious events, President Nixon lost this remarkable asset, together with the reliance he enjoyed in the Congress.
One of the remarkable societal opinion makers was mass media, which had big part of the credit for developing the underlying events into the subsequent resignation of then-president Richard Nixon. Paul Johnson, as an author repeatedly accused of pro-conservative bias, gives quite a questionable account of the above happenings, hardly providing a complete and accurate picture.
In an attempt to portray the appealing to him American leader of the past in most favorable light, he on numerous occasions abandons the track of historical objectivity.In general, events described in this part of the book took place in 1972, and commenced with a break-in into the headquarters of the Democratic Party, Democratic National Committee (DNC), situated in the Watergate office complex in the city of Washington D.C. It was an attempt to look for private information of the officials from the Democrats, performed by five burglars who were suspected to have been hired by the Republicans.
Administration of the President Richard Nixon, in its turn, tried to cover up its involvement in the matter, executing pressure on the prosecutors through the Solicitor General. Primary participant of this situation, Robert Bork, who then served as a Solicitor General, claimed in a 1987 interview to The New York Times (Noble, np) that Nixon did ask him to deprive of his office Archibald Cox, who played a primary role in revealing the discreditable tapes to the Court and wider public (as well as Senate did). Also, it has been universally claimed that what called for strongest public outrage in the US was not the events themselves, but rather Nixon administration’s actions undertaken in order to conceal the situation and hamper the state investigation which was looking into this case.
Society was widely disappointed by the newly discovered traits of Nixon and the dirty methods he used in political competition.Among major illegal actions of the President and his team revealed in the court proceedings were bugging residencies of the opponents of Conservative Party in power, harassing political groups and influential individuals, and other similar power abuses. Later on, further evidence was brought to light, such as the tapes of the illegal audio recording system which had been placed in Nixon’s offices, making records of multiple conversations which were held with the highest ranked officials. On August 8, 1974, President made a pre-resignation speech, …
