LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Richard Nixon: Watergate Scandal
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Like some third-world conflict that flares up just when you thought everything was settled, Richard Nixon is back again. Played by Frank Langella in a Tony Award-winning performance (opposite Michael Sheehan's David Frost) in Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," he's the toast of Broadway. And just in time to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, bookshelves are inundated with Nixon lit.
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The economy responded in time for the 1972 campaign, in which Nixon played up his foreign-policy achievements. Played down was the burglary on June 17, 1972, of Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington. The Nixon–Agnew reelection campaign cost a record $60 million and swamped the Democratic ticket headed by Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota with a plurality of 17,999,528 out of 77,718,554 votes. Only Massachusetts, with 14 electoral votes, and the District of Columbia, with 3, went for McGovern.
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Nixon always imagined that he was hiding his pain from the world, whereas in fact it was on global display. His nervous little laugh at moments of emotional crisis was so false, so gut-wrenchingly inappropriate, that the onlooker could catch a glimpse of the man's tortured soul. Hopkins captures the wretched laugh with devastating effectiveness, both in the scene where Nixon is confronted by a hostile man in the TV studio audience, and when he solemnly promises that none of the president's men will go to jail. In the "Checkers" broadcast and the presidential TV address on Watergate, Nixon tries to assure the camera that he is not a crook, and on both occasions he has the exact opposite effect, confirming to the viewer that that is precisely what he is. Nixon seems incapable of examining his own conscience: there is a hard core which his rational mind cannot penetrate. Maybe that is why Stone has him referring to himself in the third person throughout the film.
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Nixon's last 16 months in office were punctuated by legal defeats and personal humiliations. After it was learned that he had taped conversations that later proved incriminating to himself and others, Nixon fought without success in the courts to keep the tapes from the prosecutors. During hearings conducted by a Senate committee investigating Watergate, Nixon was linked to the cover-up by his former counsel John Dean. Senator Howard Baker (Repub., Tenn.) repeatedly asked the question that worried the nation for the next year: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
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In a political career that spanned three decades, Nixon earned a reputation for controversy and deceit. He has been denounced a liar and a hypocrite, but he has ... been praised for his brilliant foreign policy tactics and enviable political acumen. By the time of his death in 1994, Nixon had earned a measure of begrudging respect as an elder statesman, although his name will forever be linked with the Watergate scandal.
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Soon after his reelection Nixon's popularity plummeted as the growing revelations of the Watergate affair indicated pervasive corruption in his administration, and there was widespread criticism of the amount of government money spent on his private residences. Further problems ensued when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) found that Nixon's donation of papers to the federal government, which had been taken as a deduction on his federal income tax returns, had been made after a law went into effect disallowing such deductions. The IRS assessed (1974) Nixon for the back taxes plus interest.
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Watergate Scandal