Watergate from the Inside
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2021
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
June 17, 1972. In the early morning hours, five men are caught after breaking into the Watergate building in Washington, DC. The failed break-in that night will eventually lead to the unraveling of a major American scandal that reaches the highest levels of government. Why did President Nixon and the men around him believe that they could get away with something so obviously illegal? And how - for one of our producers - did this episode hit close to home?
Thank you to our guest expert, Michael Dobbs, author of King Richard: An American Tragedy.
Thank you also to Ken Hughes and Michael Greco from The Miller Center at UVA for speaking with us for this episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:06.4 | History this week, June 17, 1972. |
| 0:11.8 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:17.0 | The graveyard shift at the Watergate Hotel. |
| 0:20.4 | 24-year-old security guard Frank Willes has been on duty for about 30 minutes |
| 0:25.4 | when he sees something strange. |
| 0:28.4 | A piece of tape is covering the latch on the door to the parking garage. |
| 0:33.0 | Willes rips it off, then goes across the street to the Howard Johnson's for a burger and fries. |
| 0:38.2 | It's his shift break. |
| 0:39.8 | When he comes back to the door, what should he find but another piece of tape? |
| 0:46.2 | Something is not right. |
| 0:48.2 | 147 am he writes in the building's logbook, Call Police. |
| 1:02.6 | Meanwhile, in Hotel Room 214 of the Watergate, two men are listening intently to a two-way radio. |
| 1:10.8 | Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt are part of an eight-man team that's at the Watergate that night |
| 1:16.6 | on behalf of President Nixon's re-election campaign. |
| 1:20.4 | Their plan is to bug the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. |
| 1:25.6 | Liddy is the case officer for the operation. |
| 1:28.6 | He and Hunt are manning the radio to keep in touch with a lookout across the street |
| 1:33.4 | and also with the five burglars who are up on the sixth floor of the Watergate, |
| 1:38.0 | busily bugging the place. |
| 1:40.4 | They're wearing blue surgical gloves and carrying, among other things, |
| 1:44.2 | lock picks, door jimmies, more than $2,000 in cash and several canisters of mace. |
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