Introduction
It’s the only U.S. scandal that made a president resign from office. It turned every scandal after it — political or not — into a “-gate” (See: Bridgegate, Partygate, Deflategate… I could go on.) It was a burglary, it was a cover-up, it had extortion, wiretapping, tax evasion, blackmail, and a constitutional crisis or two thrown in for good measure.
When 5 people were arrested in June 1972 for breaking into and attempting to but the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex, President Richard Nixon’s press secretary dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary attempt [that c]ertain elements may try to stretch … beyond what it is.” The Washington Post did continue to pursue the story, but they weren’t stretching anything. In fact, other sources were slow to pick up the story. In 1973, this changed, as New York Times reporter Sy Hersh (he’ll appear again in this museum) reported that the Watergate burglars were getting paid to stay silent. After this, other media sources began reporting on Watergate, and the Senate created a committee to investigate Watergate.
This early caution by the press was somewhat at odds with lessons they learned from another major event of the administrations of Nixon and his predecessors: the Vietnam War. The inconsistency between the official line that the U.S. was winning the war and the reality reporters witnessed on the ground brought the phrase “credibility gap” into the political lexicon.
So then, at the start of what would become the Watergate scandal, the credibility gap wasn’t totally gone — the idea of this “third-rate burglary” turning into anything major seemed far-fetched at the time, so the media was inclined to take the Nixon administration at its word, even though this ended up being a mistake in hindsight. It wasn’t long ago that the President of the United States was a widely respected and trusted figure who was treated habgiographically by the press. (Take Time’s 1955 reporting on Dwight Eisenhower: “After 29 months at the most difficult job in the world, Dwight Eisenhower is a remarkable picture and package of health.”) It seems some of that mindset carried over to the initial response to the Watergate break-in. After Watergate, that completely changed, but to look into that would take a whole other museum.
This museum features 10 artifacts that tell the story of Watergate and the credibility gap, grouped into 4 rooms, grouped by time period, with 2–3 artifacts each. If you want to go to a specific room, you can use the navigation sidebar on the left. If you’re new here, just click the button below to view the rooms in order. I’ll see you inside the exhibition!
(Sources: lecture notes, AP Quotes, Niven)