At 2.30 am on 17 June 1972, police officers arrested five men burgling the Democratic Party offices in Washington DC's Foggy Bottom neighbourhood. The building complex in which the offices were based had gained a reputation for crime, but these men were not as an FBI agent later noted - "ordinary knuckleheads". They were well-dressed, with expensive cameras, eavesdropping equipment and rolls of sequentially numbered $100 bills. As it soon transpired, they didn't seem like typical burglars precisely because they weren't. One of the men, retired CIA agent James McCord, was head of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President - known by its abbreviation CRP or, more mockingly, Creep. He worked, in other words, for Richard Nixon's campaign to secure a second term in that November's presidential election.
Nixon's press team distanced the president from what they termed a "third-rate burglary". Despite the denials, however, the incident and its unlikely protagonists set in motion a chain of events that caused a national scandal, and eventually forced Nixon to resign the presidency. This long national nightmare took its name from that soon-to-be infamous building complex: Watergate.
この記事は BBC History UK の July 2022 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は BBC History UK の July 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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