Richard Nixon - the first and only US President ever to resign while in office as a result of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. The scandal resulted from five men breaking into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington DC in June 1972. Soon after the incident, the FBI connected money found on the burglars with the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. Yet the Nixon administration denied any involvement in the affair - and even attempted to cover it up. Nixon and his aides were even found to have ordered the harassment of political figures by the FBI, CIA and International Revenue Service in order to get the investigation dropped. "Watergate" came to be the term used to encompass all of the secretive, clandestine and - in some cases - illegal operations performed by Nixon's administration. The scandal proved to be a death-knell to Nixon's presidency - he had abused his position of power, he was served with articles of impeachment by the US House of Representatives, and he was eventually forced to become the first-ever president to resign his office on August 9, 1974. Watergate is so infamous, in fact, that any scandal that occurs nowadays is annoyingly given the suffix "gate" afterwards. Which other historical deceptions belong on this list? Share your thoughts below in the comments thread.
NUFC editor for WhatCulture.com/NUFC. History graduate (University of Edinburgh) and NCTJ-trained journalist. I love sports, hopelessly following Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons. My pastimes include watching and attending sports matches religiously, reading spy books and sampling ales.
