There’s an old book titled something like “It Didn’t Start With Watergate,” and though I don’t like that kind of defense, it’s true. Dems have had scandals to sink ten Pub administrations, especially FDR and LBJ. Only we don’t know about them because no one seems to want to “speak truth to power” to them. Plus, we were stuck with an inconveniently weak one—at least by today’s standards of decency—with Clinton, which reflected poorly back upon Nixon. Even though Clinton’s lying “about sex” was done to weasel out of the sort of civil suit Dems usually care about, while Nixon’s coverup was a burglary in furtherance of an electoral contest that was like the Yankees versus the little league world champs.
Actually, I’m still not sure what Watergate was all about. Not that I believe any conspiracy theory, but I’m open to there having been some ulterior motive.
Watergate was still in court a couple of years ago. I haven’t been following it lately.
The Dems kept pictures of the “escort girls” they used for big donors at their offices in the Watergate Hotel. Somehow, they acquired an inappropriate picture of one of Nixon’s staff and the staff member wanted it. So he put together a team to steal it back. These were the men who were caught breaking into the hotel.
Eventually the radical left (or as they were known at the time, the new left, including a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham) that ran the Dem party thought they could turn this into something that would give them a political advantage. Nixon could’ve given his staff up and let them take the fall, but it seemed like such a trivial thing he thought he could just stall until it went away.
The Dems broke the impasse by illegally accessing phone records. This eventually led them to enough information to make Congressional Republicans believe that they could be in trouble. So they were willing to give Nixon up and put this behind them, especially after Agnew’s, Tim Geithner-like tax problems.
Not sure what Gerald Ford’s role was, but Ford wanted to be president.
The other “crimes” the Dems were trying to pin on Nixon were nothing that LBJ, Kennedy or Ike didn’t do nearly every day. And they were all Boy Scouts compared to FDR.
Anyhow that’s my take on it.