Watergate scandal key players

Here are the most important figures from the biggest political scandal in American history.

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Howard Baker

As Tennessee's first popularly elected Republican senator, Baker served as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee. His position as investigator of the Nixon administration's misdeeds may have been a bit awkward — his 1972 campaign literature described him as a "close friend and trusted advisor of our President, Richard M. Nixon." During the committee's proceedings, he captured the essence of the committee's inquiry with a succinct question that became a Washington mantra: "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" Baker had a successful political career, serving three terms in the U.S. Senate from 1967-85, with stints as minority leader (1977-81) and as majority leader (1981-85). He was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. He also served as chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan in 1987-88 and later served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 2001 to 2005.

/ AP

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

A native of Washington, D.C., Bernstein, right, got a job at The Post in 1966 covering the local courts and police. In June 1972, he teamed up with colleague Bob Woodward, pictured left, whom he knew only slightly, to investigate the arrest of five burglars at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex. He and Woodward won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting in 1973 and wrote two books about the Watergate affair, “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.” Woodward, a Yale graduate who had served in the Navy, talked his way into a job as a reporter for the Metro section of The Washington Post in 1970 before working with Bernstein on the Watergate investigation. He is now an assistant managing editor of The Post.

Ken Feil / The Washington Post

Robert Bork

Bork, a Yale Law School professor of public law, was appointed solicitor general by President Richard Nixon in 1973 and became acting attorney general that October during the "Saturday Night Massacre." Nixon, worried by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox's demands for the tapes of his Oval Office conversations, ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus. Nixon then turned to Bork, the No. 3 official in the Justice Department, who carried out his wishes and fired Cox. Bork would defend his actions as within the scope of presidential authority. Nine months later, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon had to turn over the tapes. Bork went on to become a conservative hero. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 1987, Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court. After contentious hearings, Senate Democrats, still bothered by his role in the Saturday Night massacre and wary of his conservative philosophy, rejected his nomination. Bork resigned his judgeship in 1988 and joined the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, where he became a leading voice for neo-conservatism.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Benjamin Bradlee

The executive editor of The Post from 1965 to 1991, Bradlee oversaw the newspaper's prize-winning coverage of the Watergate affair. He came to journalism via Harvard and did a stint working for the State Department in Paris before becoming a reporter and editor at Newsweek and The Post. In 1971, he defied the Nixon administration by publishing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the Vietnam War and endured harsh criticism from Republicans during the early days of the Watergate scandal. In retirement he published a memoir, "A Good Life." He still serves as a vice president for The Washington Post Co.

Pat Buchanan

Buchanan began his career in journalism, then served speechwriter and special assistant to President Nixon. He did not have a major role in the Watergate scandal. In 1973, he testified before the Senate Watergate committee that he knew of no covert operations or dirty tricks campaigns against Democratic opponents. However, a 1972 memo, released many years later, shows that Buchanan endorsed activities designed to harass and embarrass Democrats during the campaign. He returned to the White House as an assistant to President Gerald Ford in 1974 and served as communications director for President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1987. Over the years, he emerged as a conservative political figure in his own right, as an author and as the pugnacious co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" talk show and other news analysis programs. He challenged George H.W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992. In 1996, he again sought the nomination, winning a surprising victory in the New Hampshire primary before dropping out of the race a month later. In 1999, Buchanan left the Republican Party for the Reform Party, winning its presidential nomination but garnering less than one percent of the national vote in the 2000 election.

/ AP

Archibald Cox

The first special prosecutor in the Watergate affair, Cox, left, had a long career in law and politics. He served as Solicitor General for President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s, and then returned to teaching at Harvard Law School. As the Watergate scandal grew in May 1973, Attorney General Elliott Richardson appointed Cox as an independent counsel to investigate. With revelations that President Nixon had taped many phone calls and conversations in the White House, Cox subpoenaed the key tapes. Citing executive privilege, Nixon refused to comply with the subpoenas and, on Oct. 20, 1973, ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Both Richardson and his top deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus resigned their posts rather than carry out the order. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork finally complied with Nixon's wishes. The firing of Cox and the resignations of Richardson and Ruckelshaus became known as "the Saturday Night Massacre." After Watergate, Cox returned to Harvard Law School, then, from 1980 to 1992, was president of Common Cause, an advocacy group that lobbies for campaign finance reform and ethics laws. He joined the legal team that defended the constitutionality of the 1974 campaign finance laws and later became chairman emeritus of Common Cause. On occasion, he argued cases before the Supreme Court. In a New York Times op-ed piece in 1996, Cox criticized what he described as overuse of independent counsel and special prosecutor activities. President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal for exemplary service to Cox in 2001, an award established by Nixon, in 1969. Cox died May 29, 2004, at his home in Brooksville, Maine. He was 92.

Bob Burchette / The Washington Post

Charles Colson

Known within the Nixon administration as an "evil genius," special counsel Colson played a leading role in some of Nixon's "dirty tricks" campaigns. His more notorious ideas included firebombing the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, and spreading false information about Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the media. Colson served seven months in prison in 1974 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice charges for his role in acquiring confidential FBI files on Ellsberg. In prison, Colson became a born-again Christian and in 1976, founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries, a Christian outreach group serving prisoners and their families. In 1993, he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, worth more than $1 million, for his work with the ministries. In 2000, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush restored Colson's civil rights, 25 years after his release from prison.

/ The Washington Post

John Dean

As counsel to President Nixon, Dean became famous as the first White House official to accuse the president of direct involvement in the Watergate cover-up. In dramatic testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973, the boyish-looking Dean recounted telling Nixon that the cover-up had become a "cancer on the presidency." He implicated many administration officials, including himself, in efforts to block investigation of the burglars' connections to the White House. Dean was later charged with obstruction of justice and spent four months in prison.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Bob Dole

In 1972, Sen. Dole (R-Kan.) moved into an apartment in Washington's Watergate complex — also home to offices of the Democratic National Committee. But Dole was in Chicago on the night of the break-in. As the national chairman of the Republican Party, Dole defended Nixon during the early stages of the Watergate investigation. In Oct. 24, 1972, he delivered an impassioned attack on The Washington Post, accusing editors and reporters of "the most extensive journalistic rescue-and-salvage operation in American politics" to boost George McGovern's failing presidential candidacy. He handed off his duties as party chairman to George H.W. Bush after the 1972 elections, but remained a Nixon loyalist. In September 1973, Dole introduced an unsuccessful Senate resolution to stop live television coverage of the Watergate hearings. "It is time to turn off the TV lights," he said. "It is time to move the Watergate investigation from the living rooms of America and put it where it belongs — behind the closed doors of the committee room and before the judge and jury in the courtroom." Watergate loomed as a major issue in Dole's difficult reelection campaign in the fall of 1974, but he survived and went on serve five terms in the Senate. He made three unsuccessful bids for the presidency, winning the Republican nomination in 1996, but losing in the general election to incumbent President Bill Clinton. Not long after the vote, Clinton presented Dole with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dole is an attorney and still lives in the Watergate complex with his wife, former senator Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.).

/ AP

John Ehrlichman

As President Nixon's assistant for domestic affairs, Ehrlichman was known for his fierce loyalty and combative style. He helped formulate Nixon's domestic political agenda, which included a plan for a guaranteed annual income to fight poverty and wage and price controls to limit inflation. At the same time, he directed the White House "plumbers," who, with the purported mission of preventing leaks to unfriendly reporters, used illegal methods to discredit Nixon's political foes. He directed burglars to break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the news media. He encouraged FBI Director L. Patrick Gray to destroy documents taken from Howard Hunt's White House safe that outlined plans to sabotage the Democrats. Amid revelations of the cover-up, Nixon forced Ehrlichman to resign along with White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman on April 30, 1973. Ehrlichman was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and perjury in the Watergate case and of conspiracy in the Ellsberg case. He served 18 months in prison. Ehrlichman died at his home in Atlanta on Feb. 14, 1999, of complications from diabetes at the age of 73.

Frank Johnston / The Washington Post

Sam Ervin

The folksy Democratic senator from North Carolina became a household name at age 76 when he served as chairman of the Senate's Watergate committee. His command of constitutional law and sense of humor captivated a national television audience that was following the burgeoning scandal. First elected to the Senate in 1954, Ervin sided alternately with liberals on civil liberties issues and with conservatives in opposing civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. As chairman of the constitutional rights subcommittee, Ervin clashed with the Nixon administration over its attempts to increase the federal government's police powers, calling Nixon's expansive 1970 anticrime bill a "blueprint for a police state." Ervin died in 1985 in Winston-Salem, N.C., at the age of 88.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Mark Felt

A top official at the FBI in 1972, Felt secretly served as a source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they investigated the Watergate burglary. "Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable," Woodward later wrote. "He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons." Identified only as "Deep Throat" in Woodward and Bernstein's 1974 book, "All the President's Men," Felt's role in the Watergate story remained a secret until 2005 when Vanity Fair revealed that he had told the story to family members. "I'm the guy they call Deep Throat," Felt said.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Katharine Graham

As publisher of The Washington Post, Graham faced the full wrath of the Nixon administration as the paper's reporters sought to piece together the story of the Watergate burglary. "The investigation of such a tangled web of crime, money, and mischief was made much harder given the unveiled threats and harassment by a president and his administration," she wrote in an excerpt from her 1997 memoir, "Personal History." At the end of 1972, Republican businessmen challenged the licenses of two Florida TV stations owned by The Washington Post Company, causing the company's stock price to drop by more than 50 percent. "Sometimes I wondered if we could survive four more years of this kind of strain," she said. Graham described her own role in the unfolding story as "a kind of devil's advocate, asking questions all along the way — questions about whether we were being fair, factual and accurate." She downplayed the notion that she had showed courage standing by her reporters and editors, saying she had no choice. "By the time the story had grown to the point where the size of it dawned on us, we had already waded deeply into its stream," she wrote. "Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back."

Charles Del Vecchio / The Washington Post

H.R. Haldeman

Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, spent 18 months in prison for his role in Watergate. A former advertising executive, Haldeman had gained a stern reputation as the gatekeeper to the Oval Office, dubbing himself "the president's son-of-a-bitch." From the start, Haldeman played a leading role in the Watergate cover-up. On June 23, 1973, six days after the botched break-in, Haldeman spoke with Nixon about using the CIA to divert the FBI's investigation of the burglars. When the White House released a recording of his June 23, 1972, conversation two years later, it was dubbed "the smoking gun" tape because it showed conclusively that Nixon had orchestrated the cover-up all along. Haldeman was forced to resign, along with John D. Ehrlichman, on April 30, 1973. He was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice the following year. He died of cancer at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Nov. 12, 1993 — six months before publication of "The Haldeman Diaries," recounting his White House experience. He was 67.

Bob Burchette / The Washington Post

E. Howard Hunt

A former CIA operations officer, Hunt helped organize the break-in at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate June 1972 on behalf of the Nixon White House. The discovery of Hunt's White House office phone number in an address book belonging to one of the burglars helped investigators — and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward — connect the break-in to the president and his reelection campaign. Hunt, a prolific novelist, began working for the CIA in 1949, serving until 1970. In 1971, he became one of the so-called White House "plumbers," a secret team assembled to stop press leaks and sabotage the president's political opponents. In 1971, he helped break into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to reporters. Hunt also sought to forge State Department cables purporting to implicate President Kennedy in the November 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. When Hunt's wife Dorothy was killed in a plane crash in Chicago in December 1972, she was carrying $15,000 in cash, fueling suspicions about whether Hunt had been paid to keep his silence. He had. While awaiting trial on Watergate-related charges, Hunt insisted the White House pay his legal and living expenses, a demand that John Dean and others described as blackmail. Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping in connection with the Watergate burglary. He served 33 months in prison. Hunt died at a Miami hospital on Jan. 23, 2007, at age 88.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Richard Kleindienst

Kleindienst, a Republican lawyer and loyalist, assumed the job of attorney general on June 12, 1972, just five days before the Watergate burglars were arrested. As the burglars and the White House resisted the FBI's efforts to investigate, Kleindienst was forced to choose between loyalty to the law and to the president. He chose to protect Nixon, effectively guaranteeing his tenure would be short. He resigned on April 30, 1973, the same day that Nixon forced his top two aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, to quit. A year later, Kleindienst's close personal friendship with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a fellow Arizonan, prompted Rehnquist to recuse himself when the Watergate tapes case reached the Supreme Court. Kleindienst died on Feb. 3, 2000.

Gerald Martineau / The Washington Post

G. Gordon Liddy

Liddy, the former FBI agent who orchestrated the Watergate break-in with E. Howard Hunt, was a member of the White House "plumbers" and served as general counsel for the Committee for the Re-election of the President. He was convicted for his role in the burglary, for conspiracy in the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist and for contempt of court. He spent four-and-a-half years in prison.

/ AP

Jeb Stuart Magruder

An aide to Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, Magruder directed the White House "plumbers" efforts to collect intelligence on Nixon's Democratic opponents. While serving as deputy director for the Committee for the Re-election of the President, Magruder ordered the first break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in May 1972. When the wiretaps did not produce satisfactory results, Magruder ordered a second break-in on June 17, 1972, that ended with the burglars' arrest. In 1973, Magruder began cooperating with federal prosecutors and eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. He spent seven months in prison.

/ United Press International

James W. McCord

McCord, a former CIA officer, was one of the first of the president's men to take the fall for Watergate. After leaving the infamous piece of tape on a door in the Watergate building that alerted a security guard to the break-in, he was arrested the night of the burglary along with the four other men. He was fired from his job as director of security for Nixon's reelection committee, pleaded guilty, and was convicted on six counts of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. In March 1973, he wrote a letter to Judge John J. Sirica claiming that he and four other burglars who had pleaded guilty, had been pressured to do so by White House officials, including John W. Dean III and John Mitchell. McCord's allegations that the White House knew of the burglary and attempt to cover it up were crucial in causing investigators to push for the truth.

John Mitchell

As President Nixon's former law partner, Mitchell served as Nixon's attorney general before resigning in 1972 to head the Committee for the Re-election of the President. In September 1972, stories by The Washington Post linked Mitchell to a secret campaign fund that paid for the Watergate burglary. When Post reporter Carl Bernstein called for a comment, Mitchell directed his response at the Post's publisher, saying "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's ever published." According to later testimony, Mitchell approved $250,000 for the break-in. Mitchell was later charged with conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice. He was convicted in 1974, the first time in U.S. history that an attorney general had been convicted of criminal activities. Mitchell served 19 months in a minimum-security prison in Alabama before being released on parole for medical reasons. He died at age 75 on Nov. 9, 1988.

James K.W. Atherton / The Washington Post

Richard Nixon

Born and raised in California, Nixon attended Whittier College and Duke Law School. He entered politics in 1946, winning a seat in Congress as a Republican. He made a name for himself as a member of House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1950, he was elected senator after a campaign in which he labelled his opponent, Helen Gahagan, a communist sympathizer. Two years later, Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower selected Nixon as his running mate. He served two terms as vice president, then ran for president himself in 1960, narrowly losing to Democrat John F. Kennedy. After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1962, Nixon's political career appeared to be over, but when conservative Barry Goldwater was decisively defeated in the 1964 race, Nixon began positioning himself as a more moderate Republican who could win a general election. He narrowly defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968 with a pledge that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. In office, Nixon continued the war in the face of a growing anti-war movement. Long known for his anti-communist views, Nixon rearranged U.S. foreign policy by established diplomatic relations with previously shunned China and eased the U.S. rivalry with the Soviet Union via the policy known as "détente." As he prepared to run for reelection in 1972, his aides organized the secret campaign organization to sabotage and harass his opponents that was exposed by the arrest of the Watergate burglars. He won a landslide victory in the 1972 election and resigned in disgrace 21 months later. He died on April 22, 1994.

Charles Tasnadi / AP

Donald Segretti

A former military prosecutor and civil lawyer, Segretti was an operative for the Committee for the Re-election of the President responsible for political sabotage of Democrats in 1971-72. In 1974, he pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature, including a letter written on the stationery of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine), a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, denigrating blacks and accusing other presidential candidates of sexual misconduct. He served four months in prison. Segretti briefly threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for Superior Court judge in Orange County, Calif., in 1995 but withdrew after a week, saying the shadow of Watergate hung over the campaign. "It was supposed to be a low-key campaign and a non-partisan office," Segretti said. "But it wasn't treated that way."

Douglas Chevalier / The Washington Post

Earl Silbert

As the chief prosecutor in Washington during Watergate, Silbert brought charges against many of the president's men. A Harvard law graduate, Silbert worked as a Justice Department lawyer and a federal prosecutor before taking the principal U.S. attorney job in Washington in 1974. He left the prosecutor's office in 1979 for private practice. Silbert served as the president of the American College of Trial Lawyers for 2000-2001.

/ AP

Hugh Sloan

The former treasurer of Nixon's reelection campaign, Sloan once said he never wrote a Watergate book because he thought it would be wrong "to make money off, in essence, sending people to jail." Sloan quit his job at the Committee for the Re-election of the President less than a month after the burglary. He later testified against his former co-workers and became a critical source to Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

Joanne M. Domka / The Washington Post

Maurice Stans

The Secretary of Commerce in the first Nixon administration, Stans became finance chairman for the Committee for the Re-election of the President in 1972. His fund-raising efforts brought in nearly $60 million for Nixon, some of which was used to finance the Watergate burglaries and political dirty tricks against Democrats. However, Stans maintained that he had no knowledge of how the money he raised was used. Stans was later indicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with his efforts to influence the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect Robert Vesco, an international financier and accused swindler. Through Stans, Vesco gave $200,000 in cash to Nixon's re-election campaign. Some of the money was used to finance the Watergate break-in. Both Stans and his co-defendant, former attorney general John Mitchell, were acquitted of the charges. Stans died on April 14, 1998, at the age of 90 in Pasadena, Calif.

/ AP

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