The election marked the personal triumph of Richard Nixon. Winning in a landslide, he captured more than 60 percent of the popular vote and nearly all of the electoral votes. Democrats retained control of Congress but were trounced in their bid for the White House. However, Nixon would have little time to savor his victory, for within the next two years his conduct in the campaign would come back to destroy his presidency.

In the early hours of June 17, 1972, five men broke into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. What appeared initially as a routine robbery turned into the most infamous political scandal of the twentieth century. It was eventually revealed that the break-in had been authorized by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President in an attempt to steal documents from the Democrats.

Whether President Nixon knew about the break-in in advance and approved it remains in dispute, but he did authorize a cover-up of his administration’s involvement. Nixon ordered his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to get the CIA and FBI to back off from a thorough investigation of the incident by claiming that it would breach national security. To silence the burglars at their trials, the president promised them $400,000 and hinted at a presidential pardon after their conviction.

Nixon embarked on the cover-up to protect himself from revelations of his administration’s other illegal activities. Several of the Watergate burglars belonged to a secret band of operatives known as “the plumbers,” which had been formed in 1971 and authorized by the president. Their mission was to find and plug up unwelcome information leaks from government officials. On their first secret operation, the plumbers broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to look for embarrassing personal information with which to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The president had other unsavory matters to hide. In an effort to contain leaks about the administration’s secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969, the White House had illegally wiretapped its own officials and members of the press.

Watergate did not become a major scandal until after the election. The trial judge forced one of the burglars to reveal their backers. This revelation led two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to doggedly investigate the link between the administration and the plumbers. With the help of Mark Felt, a top FBI official whose identity long remained secret and whom the reporters called “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein succeeded in exposing the true nature of the crime. With the president still denying any knowledge of the offense, the Senate created a special committee in February 1973 to investigate the scandal. Televised hearings absorbed the public. White House counsel John Dean, whom Nixon had fired, testified about discussing the cover-up with the president and his closest advisers. His testimony proved accurate after the committee learned that Nixon had secretly taped all Oval Office conversations. When the president refused to release the tapes to a special prosecutor, the Supreme Court ruled against him. In the meantime, the hearings and investigations produced a number of political casualties. Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, and his closest advisers, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, resigned, and twenty-five administration members went to jail.

The eventual release of the tapes finally revealed the truth about Nixon’s cover-up, and the House Judiciary Committee voted to bring articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives. After concluding that the House would vote to impeach him and the Senate would very likely convict him, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. After receiving overwhelming support from the American electorate less than two years earlier, Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace.

Vice President Gerald Ford served out Nixon’s remaining term. The Republican representative from Michigan had replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew after Agnew resigned in 1973 following charges that he had taken illegal kickbacks while governor of Maryland. Ford chose Nelson A. Rockefeller, the moderate Republican governor of New York, as his vice president. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the nation now had both a president and a vice president who had never been elected to those offices.

President Ford’s most controversial and defining act took place shortly after he entered the White House. Explaining to the country that he wanted to quickly end the “national nightmare” stemming from Watergate, Ford pardoned Nixon for any criminal offenses he might have committed as president. Rather than healing the nation’s wounds, this preemptive pardon polarized Americans and cost Ford considerable political capital. Ford also wrestled with a troubled economy as Americans once again experienced rising prices and high unemployment.