All the President's Men

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s story begins early in the morning of June 17, 1972. That morning five men were arrested trespassing in the Watergate Hotel, a fortress-like complex built almost exactly at the center of Washington DC. Most of the residents of the Watergate lived permanently in their lavish rooms. Other sections of the mammoth complex were packed with office space, some of which had been rented out as the central headquarters for the Democratic National Convention. The DNC was in the throes of an intense but increasingly hopeless attempt to replace Republican President Richard Nixon with South Dakota senator and Democratic nominee George McGovern. A guard noticed the locks on one of the hotel’s doors had been taped open and called the police, who investigated the building and found the five men in the DNC’s offices on the sixth floor. The men were all dressed in similar suits, giving them a uniform appearance. They all wore rubber surgical gloves to hide their fingerprints, possessed two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, lock picks, pocket-sized tear-gas guns, and listening devices for both phones and conversations in each room. Each burglar also carried a large sum of cash, approximately $2,300 (about $15,000 today) in sequential $100 bills (9).