Thursday, October 8, 2015

Writing Exercise: Richard Nixon and Watergate

     Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. He was Dwight D. Eisenhower's Vice President and ran against Kennedy after Eisenhower termed out. Nixon lost but went on to run 8  years later and won the presidency. He went through his first term with a great approval rating, and did some really good things that benefited the economic scale such as take the U.S. off the gold standard.
     He had a good reputation until June 17th, 1972 when 5 burglars underwent 'Mission Impossible' and proceeded to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the famous Watergate hotel and stole information, bugged the offices to overhear conversations going on. This was a big deal but it didn't strike heavy controversy until the evidence linked to Nixon's staff and found they were covering this up.
     Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were the chief architects that were bold and courageous enough to follow the evidence and it was their reporting and investigating that led to the mainstream attention Nixon's office was now getting.
      This left the nation angry yet torn on the issue, because Nixon was widely admired and heavily supported, but they even caught him on tape in the 'Smoking Gun' tape where he was making legitimate attempts to cover up the break-in and made plans to have the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved, and to block them out of the investigations.
     This was a huge deal because it opened some people's eyes as to the corruption going on in politics and how dirty the game was, and the aftermath of the Watergate scandal led to the the ultimate resignation of the President of the United States, also 69 trials occurred in which 48 led to convictions and incarcerations. Campaign finance and political reform was heavy in midst of this scandal and it changed the dynamic of politics as they knew it.
     Nixon was and still is the only person to have ever resigned as President of the United States.

\President Nixon's resignation of the office of Presidency after Watergate

   
Link to article: http://watergate.info/

4 comments:

  1. There were so many events that dropped the nationalism of Americans during this war. It seemed like nobody even wanted to be in this war but we were stuck in it without an escape plan. I think President Nixon's scandal was a huge event that lead to Americans hating the war, the soldiers and everything to do with the government.

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  2. I think the Nixon Watergate Scandal is one of the biggest events of the time, but I wonder, if Nixon never got caught and had won the election, what would have happened? There would be no scandal, everything would've went according to his plan, so what was Nixon's true gain behind his motives?

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  3. It's worth noting that almost all of Nixon's White House tapes have been released online. If anyone's interested, you can actually go and listen to some of the tapes (including the infamous Smoking Gun tape) here: http://nixontapes.org/

    In addition, I did a little more research and found (unsurprisingly) that Nixon wasn't the only president who taped his White House conversations. Several other presidents, including Kennedy, Roosevelt, and Truman, all taped their conversations. The only difference between them and Nixon was that Nixon's taping system was activated by voice instead of manually through a switch. Several of these audio tapes can be found online as well: http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/

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  4. Watergate and Nixon was the beginning of the end for people trusting the government. I think that Watergate and Nixon was also the tipping point for people hating the Vietnam war also. To this day nobody can trust the government. Everyone thinks that they are lying to us all the time because of Nixon and the Vietnam war scandals.

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