More than 45 million Americans turned on their televisions with bated breath on the evening of 4 May 1977, waiting to see disgraced former US President Richard Nixon interviewed by English journalist David Frost. Across four 90-minute episodes broadcast that month, the titanic interview covered Nixon’s five-year presidency, the Vietnam War and his personal life. But there was only one topic everyone was really watching for. ey wanted to hear Nixon’s thoughts on the political scandal that had caused his fall from power almost three years earlier: Watergate. On 9 August 1974, Nixon became the first, and to date only, US President to resign from o ce. e unprecedented move was the result of events two years’ before, when five men had been arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. Nixon, a Republican, was seeking re-election in November 1972, for which his Committee to Re-elect the President (mockingly known as CREEP) stole top-secret documents from the DNC and bugged their phones. When the wiretaps didn’t work properly, the five burglars went back to finish the job. at was in June 1972. In August of that year, Nixon gave a speech denying all knowledge of the break-in and declared that no one in the White House was involved. He won the election in a landslide. It later transpired that Nixon’s o ce had paid the burglars hush money and instructed the CIA to interfere with the FBI investigation into the crime – clear obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power. At the trial of seven indicted men, all but two pleaded guilty.
“Nixon eventually released the tapes and resigned before he could be impeached, but he escaped trial”