98 Fun Facts About Watergate

What on a door latch exposed the Watergate burglars?

A strip of tape: a night guard peeled it off, assuming a worker had left it, then found the latch taped again on a later round and called the police.

The Watergate break-in grew out of which covert campaign plan devised by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt?

Operation Gemstone: the first draft, pitched to the attorney general, included kidnapping protest leaders and hiring sex workers to entrap Democrats, and was sent back as too costly.

Where did Bob Woodward hold his late-night meetings with his secret Watergate source?

A parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia: Woodward says he asked for a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on his balcony, and a historical marker was later put up outside.

Who was Bob Woodward's reporting partner on the Watergate story at The Washington Post?

Carl Bernstein was 28 and Woodward 29 when the paper teamed them on the break-in story, and their reporting won The Washington Post the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

What nickname did Washington Post editor Howard Simons give Bob Woodward's anonymous Watergate source?

Deep Throat punned on 'deep background', the terms on which the informant spoke, and on a notorious 1972 adult film; his identity stayed secret until 2005.

Which FBI deputy, unmasked only in 2005, was Bob Woodward's key anonymous informant on Watergate?

Mark Felt had been passed over for the FBI's top job when J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972; he kept his secret for 33 years and admitted it at the age of 91.

Which attorney general appointed Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor?

Elliot Richardson had promised the Senate that the prosecutor would be removed only for cause; five months later, ordered to fire him, he resigned instead.

Who, as acting attorney general, carried out Nixon's order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox?

Robert Bork, the solicitor general, did the firing after his two superiors refused; in 1987 the Senate rejected his own nomination to the Supreme Court.

Who replaced Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor in November 1973?

Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawyer who had prosecuted Nazi war crimes for the US Army, took the fight for the tapes straight to the Supreme Court; Nixon resigned sixteen days after the ruling.

How did Richard Nixon leave the White House grounds after resigning on August 9, 1974?

By helicopter: after a farewell to his staff in the East Room, he flew off the White House lawn shortly before his resignation took effect at noon.

Which vice president resigned in October 1973 over a bribery and tax case unrelated to Watergate?

Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to tax evasion and quit ten days before the Saturday Night Massacre, leaving Nixon to choose the man who would soon take over the presidency.

In 1971 a White House team burgled the office of Lewis Fielding, psychiatrist to which famous leaker?

Daniel Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers; when the burglary came to light during his espionage trial in 1973, the judge dismissed every charge against him.

The White House "Special Investigations Unit" became known by what nickname?

The Plumbers: the unit was set up after the Pentagon Papers leak to stop government secrets reaching the press, which is the joke in the name.

G. Gordon Liddy gave the White House's secret investigations unit which code name, taken from a rumored Nazi SS network?

ODESSA: Liddy stamped the unit's papers with the German initials of a rumored escape network for former SS men, the one a best-selling thriller turned into The Odessa File.

Before Watergate, E. Howard Hunt had helped arrange a 1954 CIA coup in which country?

Guatemala: Hunt went on from that coup to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, where he worked with the Cuban exiles he would later recruit as burglars.

Despite the Watergate arrests, Nixon carried 49 states in November 1972 against which Democratic nominee?

George McGovern won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, a rout that inspired the bumper sticker 'Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts'.

Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis had once smuggled guns to, and fought alongside, which future enemy of the CIA?

Fidel Castro: Sturgis ran guns to his rebels and served in his revolution, then defected and spent years plotting against him with the Cuban exiles he joined at the Watergate.

Which night security guard discovered the Watergate break-in and called the police?

Frank Wills, 24 at the time, was hailed as a hero and played himself in All the President's Men, but he got no promotion and later struggled to find steady work.

Larry O'Brien, whose office the Watergate burglars targeted, later ran which sports league, whose championship trophy bears his name?

NBA: as commissioner from 1975 to 1984 he oversaw the merger with the rival ABA, and the trophy handed to each season's champions was named after him.

Nixon had which predecessor's White House recorders torn out?

Lyndon B. Johnson's recorders came out on Nixon's orders, but in 1971 he had his own hidden system installed, and its tapes supplied the evidence that ended his presidency.

Which White House aide revealed the existence of Nixon's secret taping system to Senate investigators in July 1973?

Alexander Butterfield, the deputy who had helped install the recorders, gave the secret away to committee staff behind closed doors, then repeated it on live television three days later.

Which North Carolina senator chaired the Senate Watergate Committee?

Sam Ervin liked to call himself a simple country lawyer, though he held a Harvard law degree and was regarded as the Senate's leading expert on the Constitution.

Which aide told Nixon there was "a cancer within" the presidency?

John Dean gave the warning on March 21, 1973; Nixon fired him nearly six weeks later, and that summer Dean told the televised Senate hearings that the president had approved the cover-up.

Which former attorney general went to prison for his part in the Watergate cover-up?

John Mitchell had personified Nixon's 'law and order' stance as head of the Justice Department; convicted over the cover-up, he served 19 months in a federal prison.

The wife of Nixon's campaign chief was cut off mid-call while phoning which UPI reporter in June 1972?

Helen Thomas heard her cry 'Get away' before the line went dead; when Martha reached her again days later, she told the reporter she was 'black and blue'.

What name stuck to the 1972 tape on which Nixon agreed to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry?

The smoking gun: recorded six days after the break-in, it proved Nixon had joined the cover-up from the start, and its release in August 1974 cost him his last support in Congress.

The 18-and-a-half-minute gap in Nixon's White House tapes erased his conversation with which aide?

H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, was talking with Nixon three days after the break-in; experts later found the gap came from at least five separate erasures, which no single slip could explain.

Which secretary to Nixon said she had accidentally erased part of a subpoenaed White House tape?

Rose Mary Woods showed how it might have happened, stretching for a phone with her foot held on a pedal, a pose the press mocked as the 'Rose Mary Stretch'; it could account for five minutes at most.

Which judge presided over the Watergate burglars' trial and later ordered Nixon to surrender his tapes?

John Sirica, nicknamed 'Maximum John', doubted the burglars had acted alone and handed down provisional sentences to make them talk; Time named him its Man of the Year.

Which Watergate burglar's March 1973 letter to the trial judge said that perjury had been committed and others were involved?

James McCord, a former CIA officer, wrote it days before sentencing, fearing a long prison term; the judge read it out in open court, and the cover-up began to come apart.

Who chaired the House Judiciary Committee during its 1974 impeachment inquiry into Nixon?

Peter Rodino, a congressman from Newark, recalled that once the committee had passed its articles of impeachment he went into a back room, called his wife and cried.

Which charge formed the first article of impeachment against Nixon, approved by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974?

Obstruction of justice passed by 27 votes to 11 after six Republicans crossed over to join every Democrat on the committee; two more articles followed within three days.

Which justice, a former Nixon Justice Department official, sat out the 1974 tapes case, leaving the Supreme Court to rule 8–0?

William Rehnquist stepped aside because he had worked in Nixon's Justice Department; the three other justices Nixon had appointed all ruled against him, and the chief justice wrote the opinion.

Who declared 'our long national nightmare is over' in an eight-minute East Room speech on August 9, 1974?

Gerald Ford had reached the vice presidency and then the presidency without a national election, so he told the country: 'I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers.'

Nixon's 1977 paid television interviews were conducted by which British journalist?

David Frost paid Nixon $600,000 and a share of the profits for the interviews, which the American networks had refused to touch, calling them checkbook journalism.

Which star of All the President's Men bought the screen rights and played Bob Woodward?

Robert Redford paid $450,000 for the rights, and the production rebuilt the Post's newsroom in California, down to boxes of real trash shipped from Washington; Alan J. Pakula directed.

Which phrase from the film All the President's Men, found nowhere in its source book, entered the American lexicon?

Follow the money is spoken in the film by the reporters' secret informant, yet it is nowhere in the book, and the screenwriter and Woodward each credited the other with inventing it.

Nixon's edited transcripts replaced profanity with which two-word phrase?

Expletive deleted appeared hundreds of times in the transcripts Nixon released in April 1974, and protesters outside the White House were soon waving signs that read 'Impeach the (expletive deleted)!'

Which Nixon 'hatchet man', jailed over Watergate, became a born-again Christian and founded Prison Fellowship?

Charles Colson, of whom it was said he would walk over his own grandmother for Nixon, served seven months in prison; in 1993 he won the $1 million Templeton Prize and gave it to his prison ministry.

Which Hollywood star appeared on the list of Nixon's political enemies that came to light during the Watergate hearings?

Paul Newman was nineteenth of the twenty names on the original list, put there for backing an anti-war Democrat, and he called making it his greatest accomplishment.

Which deputy attorney general, earlier the first head of the EPA, refused to fire Archibald Cox and lost his own job?

William Ruckelshaus went the same night as his boss, leaving the department's third-ranking official to carry out the order, in what the press called the Saturday Night Massacre.

Which Democrat defeated Nixon's successor in the 1976 presidential election, two years after the Nixon pardon?

Jimmy Carter, a former Georgia governor little known outside his state when the primaries began, ran as a Washington outsider and won with 297 electoral votes.

Which post-Watergate law declared White House papers the property of the public?

Presidential Records Act: a president's papers had been his private property, a custom Congress voted to end in 1978 after Nixon sought to destroy records of his time in office.

Which adviser convinced an initially unworried Nixon to fight publication of the Pentagon Papers?

Henry Kissinger argued that letting the leak pass would set a precedent for future secrets; it has also been suggested that he wanted distance from the leaker, a former colleague at RAND.

Which Nixon aide said the embattled nominee to head the FBI should be left to 'twist slowly, slowly in the wind'?

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, wanted the stalled confirmation left to drag on; he later served a year and a half in prison for his own part in the cover-up.

Which acting FBI director burned files from E. Howard Hunt's safe and later resigned over it?

L. Patrick Gray said he was told at the White House that the papers should never see the light of day; six months later he burned them in a fireplace at his Connecticut home.

Which CIA director was asked by White House aides, days after the break-in, to help block the FBI investigation?

Richard Helms was called to the White House with his deputy; five months later, after the election, Nixon told him he would not be kept on and sent him to Iran as ambassador.

Which Republican elder statesman led the delegation that told Nixon on August 7, 1974, that his Senate support had collapsed?

Barry Goldwater went in with the Republican leaders of the House and Senate to tell Nixon the votes to save him were gone; the next evening the president announced his resignation.

The undercover police who caught the Watergate burglars in June 1972 were dressed on duty as what?

Hippies was the disguise of the vice squad that answered the call, and the burglars' lookout across the street saw their unmarked car pull up and ignored it.

Which Tom Hanks character unwittingly exposes the Watergate break-in from a hotel room that Nixon arranged for him?

Forrest Gump stumbles into the scandal the way he stumbles into the rest of postwar American history, in a 1994 film that won six Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Which lip balm brand had its tubes fitted with tiny microphones that became evidence at the Watergate burglars' trial?

ChapStick tubes hiding two miniature microphones were Government Exhibit 133 in the case against G. Gordon Liddy and the burglars, and the National Archives has kept them ever since.

Which was the only state Richard Nixon failed to carry in his 1972 landslide, months after the Watergate arrests?

Massachusetts alone held out, joined only by the District of Columbia, and it is the one state Nixon never carried in any of his three runs for the White House.

Which future secretary of state worked as a young staff lawyer on the House inquiry into impeaching Nixon in 1974?

Hillary Clinton, then known as Hillary Rodham, joined the impeachment inquiry staff advising the House Judiciary Committee a year after she graduated from Yale Law School.

Which green ingredient gives Watergate salad, a fluffy mix of pineapple, marshmallows and whipped topping, its color?

Pistachio pudding mix reached stores in 1975, and its maker called the recipe Pistachio Pineapple Delight until customers began asking for it under the scandal's name.

Which star quarterback was the only athlete on the White House's master list of Nixon's political opponents?

Joe Namath of the New York Jets turned up among the politicians, journalists and actors when the list came out in 1973, and its compilers even put him on the wrong team, the New York Giants.

Which actor played Bob Woodward's reporting partner in the 1976 film All the President's Men?

Dustin Hoffman took the role after his co-star, whose company made the film, first picked Al Pacino for it and then changed his mind.

What did the press call the October 1973 evening when Nixon fired his special prosecutor and lost two top law officers?

Saturday Night Massacre was the label, and the backlash was instant: nearly half a million telegrams poured into Congress and more than twenty impeachment resolutions followed.

G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the Watergate break-in, reinvented himself in 1992 in which job that lasted twenty years?

Talk radio host turned out to suit Liddy, whose show was syndicated in 160 markets and ran until he retired in 2012.

Whose national headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate office building were the burglars caught inside?

The Democratic Party's national committee occupied the entire sixth floor of the 11-story building, where the intruders photographed campaign files and wiretapped telephones.

To which state did Richard Nixon fly home aboard Air Force One on the day his resignation took effect?

California was home: the Nixons flew to La Casa Pacifica, the San Clemente house whose publicly funded improvements had featured in a proposed article of impeachment.

The mocking acronym CREEP was pinned on which Nixon organization that funded the Watergate burglars?

His re-election committee was officially the CRP, the Committee for the Re-election of the President, a fundraising body that kept G. Gordon Liddy on its payroll as a lawyer.

The title of the Watergate book All the President's Men alludes to which nursery rhyme?

Humpty Dumpty could not be put together again by all the king's men, an echo Robert Penn Warren had already used for his 1946 novel about a corrupt governor.

All the President's Men, the film of the Watergate story, lost the Best Picture Oscar to which crowd-pleaser?

Rocky took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Editing, though the newspaper drama went home with four Oscars, tying Network for the most of the evening.

The Watergate complex, which gave the scandal its name, stands beside the Kennedy Center on which river?

Potomac views were part of the appeal: the curved buildings by Italian architect Luigi Moretti gave apartment dwellers an excellent outlook over the water.

Whose death in May 1972, six weeks before the Watergate arrests, left the FBI under an acting director?

J. Edgar Hoover had led the bureau since 1924, and the deputy passed over to succeed him was soon leaking details of the break-in investigation to a young reporter.

The Cuban exiles among the Watergate burglars were recruited by a CIA veteran they knew from which failed venture?

Bay of Pigs veterans answered the call of E. Howard Hunt, who had helped plan the 1961 invasion for the CIA and went back to his old contacts a decade later.

Which Washington Post publisher, later played by Meryl Streep, stood behind her paper's Watergate reporting?

Katharine Graham backed her editor and reporters when few other outlets would touch the story, and became the target of a crude threat from Nixon's former campaign chief.

Which Republican Party chairman, later president himself, urged Nixon to resign in August 1974?

George H. W. Bush had been handed the chairmanship by Nixon after the 1972 landslide, and joined other party leaders in urging him to go once the decisive recording became public.

Which Tennessee senator asked the Watergate hearings' most quoted question, about what the president knew and when?

Howard Baker, the committee's senior Republican, came across as almost non-partisan on television, and his question has been paraphrased in political scandals ever since.

Which White House spokesman waved away the Watergate break-in as a 'third-rate burglary attempt' days after the arrests?

Ron Ziegler had become press secretary at 29, the youngest in the job's history at that point, and he went on dismissing the Washington Post's reports until the cover-up fell apart.

Which actor earned an Oscar nomination for playing the president in Oliver Stone's 1995 film Nixon?

Anthony Hopkins led a biopic that drew four Academy Award nominations, including one for Joan Allen in a supporting role and one for John Williams's score.

Archibald Cox, the first Watergate special prosecutor, was a law professor at which university before and after the job?

Harvard had him back in the classroom after Nixon fired him, and he went on teaching there until two years past the university's mandatory retirement age.

E. Howard Hunt, a planner of the Watergate break-in, wrote fiction in which genre under an array of pen names?

Spy novels came naturally: the CIA once posted Hunt to Madrid with the task of creating an American answer to Ian Fleming's James Bond series.

Before joining The Washington Post, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward served five years as an officer in which service?

The Navy made Woodward a communications officer, and aboard the USS Wright he was one of two officers assigned to handle the nuclear launch codes the ship carried.

Which young television network replayed the Senate Watergate hearings gavel to gavel each evening in 1973?

PBS carried the hearings on more than 150 stations with Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer as commentators, while the three commercial networks showed them live by day.

Which 1999 comedy recasts Watergate with two teenage girls as the Washington Post's legendary secret informant?

Dick stars Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams as unworldly 15-year-old friends who wander into the scandal, with Dan Hedaya as the president.

The House Judiciary Committee rejected a proposed impeachment article over Nixon's secret bombing of which country?

Cambodia was dropped, its sponsor John Conyers said later, because condemning the bombing would have meant indicting earlier administrations and admitting that Congress had failed in its own duties.

Which label did the Watergate grand jury secretly attach to Nixon in 1974, in a sealed addendum to its indictments?

Unindicted co-conspirator was the special prosecutor's workaround: he hesitated to charge a sitting president, but the label let jurors hear Nixon's recorded voice as evidence.

Which Nixon chief of staff, later Reagan's secretary of state, blamed a 'sinister force' for a gap in a key recording?

Alexander Haig called it his devil theory when questioned in court, and he stayed on as chief of staff for the first month of the next administration.

Which Texas congresswoman won national fame for her televised opening statement at the 1974 impeachment hearings?

Barbara Jordan spoke for 15 minutes before the House Judiciary Committee on July 25, 1974, two days before it voted on the first article of impeachment.

Which Maine senator's 1972 White House bid never recovered from a speech in the snow prompted by a forged letter?

Edmund Muskie said the tears reporters saw were melting snow, and that October FBI investigators tied the forged 'Canuck letter' to a dirty-tricks drive by Nixon's campaign.

Watergate prosecutors probed $100,000 that Nixon's friend Bebe Rebozo took from which reclusive billionaire?

Howard Hughes had also lent Nixon's brother $205,000 years earlier, and one long-running theory holds that the break-in was a hunt for what the other side knew about such payments.

Virgilio Gonzalez, arrested inside the Watergate offices in 1972, was recruited to the burglary team for which trade?

Locksmith Gonzalez had to fly home to Florida for the right tools after one failed attempt, and on the last visit the team gave up on the lock and took the door off its hinges.

When they were arrested, the Watergate burglars were installing a new listening device disguised as which fixture?

Smoke detector was the cover for a new bug, three weeks after one of the phone taps planted on the team's first successful entry failed to transmit.

The Watergate complex was developed by a Rome-based property company whose investors included which religious body?

The Vatican held a stake in the developer, Società Generale Immobiliare, which built the complex on land that had housed a gas works for more than a century.

Which actor won an Academy Award for playing Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President's Men?

Jason Robards won again the very next year for playing Dashiell Hammett in Julia, making it two supporting-actor Oscars in a row.

Which 1976 sequel to All the President's Men, by the same two reporters, debuted atop the best seller list?

The Final Days traces Nixon's closing months in office, including the battles over his recordings, and its authors took a leave of absence from the newspaper to write it.

Which CBS correspondent read Nixon's enemies list live on air and came upon his own name as he went?

Daniel Schorr was number 17 on the list, and later said, as did one Hollywood actor named on it, that being included was his greatest accomplishment.

Which White House official quit in protest when Nixon's successor pardoned the former president in September 1974?

His press secretary, Jerald terHorst, was an old friend who had held the post for just a month, and the president's approval rating fell by more than 20 points after the pardon.

Which Washington think tank did Nixon aides plot to firebomb in 1971 so that burglars could empty its safe?

Brookings Institution files on the 1968 Vietnam peace talks obsessed Nixon, and one version of the scheme died only when the White House balked at the cost of a fire engine.

Which young lawyer ran the Nixon campaign's 'dirty tricks' against rivals, faking letters on a senator's letterhead?

Donald Segretti pleaded guilty in 1973 to distributing illegal campaign literature, forged letters included, and was sentenced to six months in prison.

Which hard-of-hearing Mississippi senator did Nixon propose to listen to his subpoenaed recordings and summarize them?

John Stennis was 72 and chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the special prosecutor's refusal to accept the arrangement brought on his firing the following day.

Dorothy Hunt, wife of a Watergate break-in planner, died in a December 1972 airliner crash while approaching which city?

Chicago's Midway Airport was where United Flight 553 came down, and the $10,000 in $100 bills she was carrying fed suspicions that it was meant for people tied to the break-in.

Which defense secretary reportedly told commanders in 1974 to check any nuclear launch order from Nixon with him?

James Schlesinger feared what an embattled president might do in his closing weeks in office, and by one account named the secretary of state as the only other person who could confirm an order.

Which Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid screenwriter won a second Oscar for adapting All the President's Men?

William Goldman said his crucial decision was to discard the second half of the book, and his first draft still left the star whose company made the film unhappy.

The Washington Post's Watergate investigation won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize in which category?

Public Service is the only Pulitzer that comes with a gold medal, and it is regarded as the most prestigious one a newspaper can win.

Which 1975 Senate panel, known by its Idaho chairman's name, investigated wrongdoing by the CIA and FBI after Watergate?

Church Committee investigators, led by Senator Frank Church, published a report on alleged plots to assassinate foreign leaders in what became known as the Year of Intelligence.

Nixon campaign funds found in a Watergate burglar's bank account had arrived as four checks drawn in which country?

Mexico was the route for $89,000 of the cash, and tracing those checks brought the FBI close to the real origin of the funds: contributions to the president's campaign.