THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN SCANDAL

Fifty years ago, the US government was embroiled in a conspiracy that became a constitutional crisis - eventually toppling a president. Clifford Williamson charts the fallout from the 1972 Watergate affair

- Clifford Williamson

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.