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"It's not the crime that kills you, it's the cover-up," President Nixon later acknowledged.

As President, Nixon was already intensely unpopular after failing for four years to end the war in Vietnam (despite a campaign promise in 1968). Nixon had barely won that election, beating his Democratic opponent by a tiny 512,000 votes. Fierce demonstrations from the counterculture left an already-insecure Nixon feeling that the White House was under a "state of siege."

And then he realized White House information was being leaked to the press.

This led to the seeds of the Watergate crisis, when Nixon organized "The Plumbers", a "special investigations" team whose job, of course, was to fix leaks. Their first covert (and illegal) mission was breaking into the psychiatrist's office of a man named Daniel Ellsburg. (Ellsburg had leaked a 7,000-page top secret report which revealed that Nixon and his predecessors expanded the country's involvement in Vietnam without Congressional authorization.) The Plumbers hoped to find information that would discredit Ellsburg, though ironically, it had the opposite effect. (Discovery of the break-in later caused a judge to drop all criminal charges against Ellsburg.) The group focussed on political tasks like researching Nixon's political rivals.

Unfortunately, the Plumbers included adventurous former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy as well as Howard Hunt, one of the planners behind the CIA's disastrous "Bay of Pigs" operation. With the blessing of Nixon's advisors, they launched their plan of breaking into the Democratic headquarters to gather information on the upcoming election of 1972. With some careful investigative work, the burglars were soon connected to the White House payroll. Two reporters for the Washington Post - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - delivered the shocking news to Howard Hunt, and describe his reaction in their book "All the President's Men."

"Howard Hunt here... Yes, what is it? Good God! I have no comment..."

It was revealed that the burglars had been paid with money for Nixon's re-election campaign. Nixon's chief of staff and chief counsel both resigned, implicated in the growing scandal, as Congressional investigators tried to determine whether Nixon himself had been involved. "What did the President know," asked Republican Senator Howard Baker - "and when did he know it?"

Crucial evidence existed on audio tapes that Nixon had secretly made of his Oval Office conversations. One tape was eventually

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