The Watergate scandal

This is where it all began. In the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Watergate hotel and office complex to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The head of President Nixon's re-election campaign denied any connections to the burglars. But within two years, the extent of the president's involvement became clear and eventually led to Nixon's downfall.

Before the Watergate scandal, Nixon was better known for his achievements abroad than for his domestic policies. He won the 1968 election and, after re-election in 1972, became the first US president to visit China. The historic visit, including a meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong, normalized relations between the US and China and was seen as a huge success.

The ripples caused by the case still hadn't reached Nixon several months after the Watergate break-in. In November 1972, Nixon was so popular with large swaths of the population that he took 49 out of 50 states in the presidential election, winning by a landslide.

But the Watergate scandal was far from over. Two journalists at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward (right), kept digging deeper and deeper into the connections between the five burglars who had broken into the hotel and the White House. Woodward received information from a secret source known as "Deep Throat" that the journalists used for their investigative reports.

The Nixon administration wasn't happy about the stories and launched a campaign against the Washington Post. Spokesmen for Nixon attacked the newspaper viciously in statements, claiming it was waging a personal war against the president. But the Post's stories started to stick and spurred action, despite the administration's claims that they were filled with lies.

Starting in 1971, Nixon began recording his phone conversations and meetings in the oval office, other White House rooms and Camp David. This practice was initiated by President Roosevelt in the 1940s. But when the existence of Nixon's recordings became public in July 1973 during the Watergate investigation, it marked a turning point in the case.

In May 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson (right) named Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal. Cox demanded Nixon hand over relevant White House tapes. Nixon refused and, in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," fired Cox, the very man who was investigating him, on October 20. Doubts about Nixon's innocence rose and calls for impeachment grew louder.

Nixon was eventually ordered by the Supreme Court to hand over the tapes, at which point investigators discovered an 18-minute gap in one of the recordings. Secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed to accidentally have deleted part of the recording when she took a phone call while transcribing the tape. The unlikely position she would have had to have been in became known as the Rose Mary Stretch.

Impeachment proceedings were initiated in February 1974 and examined whether, among others thing, Nixon had obstructed justice by refusing to hand over the complete tape recordings. To avoid impeachment Nixon stepped down in August. Despite the scandalous circumstances of his resignation, he didn't appear too contrite when he boarded the helicopter to leave DC and his political career behind.