The Watergate break-in that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon's resignation

happened 50 years ago.

In this episode of C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast, John Dean teaches a class about

Watergate and the discovery of the White House taping system.

During testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in discovery of the White House taping system. During testimony before the Senate

Watergate Committee in June 1973, John Dean implicated President Nixon and administration

officials, including himself, in the Watergate cover-up. They keyed the taping system to this,

to the locator, so that when he was in the room where

the taping system was employed and installed, it would trigger the taping system.

In other words, installing it in the Oval Office, unless Nixon was there and say the cleaning

crew is in there at midnight, it won't activate the system.

Mr. Dean later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for his role in Watergate and serve four months in prison.

This lecture originally aired in 2016 is hosted by Arizona State University.

Thank you. is hosted by Arizona State University. Discovering the taping system, was it lucky or inevitable, is what we're looking at in this sixth lecture.

The Nixon taping, the whole story of the Nixon tapes has been only partially told.

It's taken me years to gather and find out what happened.

And since it's one of the most important factors in the Watergate story, I think it's important to get that history straight.

And we're going to try to do that in a very summary fashion today.

Before I start, though, I'd like to remind you that other presidents did tape,

starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who used a, when they first went to talking movies and they had a soundtrack,

he had a system that was put in the Oval Office that recorded.

I'm going to try a very, very quick sample,

...