Watergate Break-in 52 Years Later and Parallels Between Nixon and Trump

In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, “Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but when he went on the next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building. And so it began,” wrote historian Heather Cox Richardson, describing the two-plus year saga of scandalous revelations that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. Less than a month later, President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. The pardon has been widely praised even by political partisans who hated Nixon but in retrospect agreed that not prosecuting him allowed the country to move on and heal after a period of deep division rather than continue to obsess and argue about Nixon’s guilt.

And yet there was a negative consequence to Ford’s pardon. It allowed “those who thought like Nixon could come to think they were above the law,” Richardson wrote. Read her full piece.