Keystone Cops: The Watergate Break-In

Thinking back, the Keystone Cops had nothing on the five Watergate burglars who, this week (June 17) in 1972, broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel office complex in Washington, D.C. Their break-in, which was amateurish bordering on cartoonish, led to their arrest and set in motion the “Watergate Scandal” that eventually forced the resignation of our 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon.

To begin with, their break-in that day was necessitated by the failure of their earlier break-in of three weeks prior. Wiretaps they had planted in the earlier break-in were not working so they had to return to fix or replace them. Where was the quality control?

What’s more, putting tape on the locks of the doors they had burgled so that those doors would stay unlocked always ran the risk of being spotted by the security guards that roamed the place — which is exactly what happened. But when Frank Wills, one of those guards, spotted a taped door lock he just assumed that a cleaning crew had put it there, so he simply removed the tape and continued on his rounds. It was only when he again passed that door an hour later and saw that tape had once again been put on its lock that he became suspicious and called the police. Did not one of the burglars wonder who had removed the first piece of tape?

Also, if they were going to burglarize the headquarters of the DNC it probably was not a good idea to have easily traceable connections to the party running against the Democrats in that election year, namely the Republicans under President Nixon. Yet that night one of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, was carrying the telephone number of E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the Nixon White House. Even more amazing, James McCord, another of the burglars, was chief of security for Nixon’s primary political organization, the Campaign to Re-Elect the President!

Finally, if the trial for those burglaries was to be presided over by Judge John Sirica — famously known as “Maximum John” for his short fuse and long sentences — it was probably a bad idea to refuse to cooperate. Sirica, who suspected the burglars were directed by the White House, was so incensed by their silence and lack of cooperation that he threatened them with 30-year sentences.

Thirty years for burglary certainly put things in perspective for James McCord, who then wrote a letter to Judge Sirica suggesting that the burglary was part of a White House-directed undercover campaign and that the defendants had been paid off for their silence.

His letter transformed a “third-rate burglary,” as Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called it, into the most famous and far-reaching political scandal in modern American history.