the Soviet Union. No non-Soviet member had any access to nuclear weapons,
and the only seriously effective other member was believed to be the quite
small East German army. Western analysts believed the Soviet Union’s real
interest in the Pact was, in fact, to help control its satellites and, particularly in
the early days, to protect against any renewed threat from Germany, which the
Soviet regimes never ceased to fear.
Watergate
The Watergate is a complex of residential, office and hotel accommodation in
Washington, DC, where a suite of rooms had been rented by the Democratic
Party National Committee for the presidential election campaign of 1972.
These rooms were burgled by a group of people working under the orders of
senior members of the Republican Party, including some holding important
positions on President Richard Nixon’s White House staff. The aim of the
burglars appears to have been to gain information about Democratic campaign
plans. The discovery of the burglars and their subsequent trials unleashed a
massive burst of investigative reporting which ended by incriminating a host of
major and minor figures, not so much for having been involved in the initial
crime, but for attempting to cover up the White House connections, and
generally to impede the course of justice. Among these were officers as senior
as the Attorney-General and the president’s Chief of Staff.
At that level the scandal would have been serious but, as most of it became
public only after Nixon had won the 1972 election, it would not have
prevented his continuing in the presidency. It became increasingly clear,
however, that the president himself had been involved in the cover-up, and
members of the House of Representatives began to move for his impeachment.
At the same time secret tape recordings the president had made of conversa-
tions in the White House came to be revealed, and court proceedings were
instigated to force him to disclose them as vital evidence. Nixon’s attempts to
prevent this move, claiming that the tapes were covered by a doctrine of
executive privilege, were finally overthrown by the Supreme Court. The
culmination of these developments led, as impeachment began to seem
inevitable, to Nixon’s resignation in 1974; he was succeeded by the Vice-
President, Gerald Ford, who shortly after gave him a presidential pardon. The
crisis shook US politics; faith in executive leadership, already weakened by
Nixon’s style of government (sometimes called ‘imperial presidency’) and his
secret extension of theVietnam Warinto Cambodia, collapsed. The follow-
ing years saw Congress increase in power, relative to the presidency, and a series
of attempts to curtail presidential prerogatives (seepresidential government)
and control financial corruption in electoral campaigns. The name Watergate
Watergate