Forty five years ago today five men were arrested for breaking into an office. Almost nobody knew it at the time but it would begin a series of events that would end, two years later, with the unprecedented resignation of the President. On that date, June 17, 1972 I had just finished 6th grade and I honestly don’t remember when I first heard about it. But I soon became obsessed, and continue to be so to this day.

If you’re not aware of what I’m talking about, let me give you a (hopefully) brief background. In June of 1972 President Richard Nixon was running to be re-elected as President. In 1968 he received 301 electoral votes (needing 270) and by all accounts he was the favorite to enlarge his victory margin (and in November he received 520 electoral votes).

But Mr. Nixon was a man who worried constantly about his “enemies” and may well have been paranoid. His re-election committee, called the Committee to Re-elect the President, was abbreviated as the CRP to them, but as CREEP to nearly everyone else. They wanted to know what the campaign of his opponent, Senator George McGovern, knew about the Nixon campaign.

It was a dumb move because they broke into the offices of the Democratic National Convention (or DNC) in the Watergate Office Building, while the information they needed would have been found at Senator McGovern’s campaign headquarters.

In any case, security officers in the Watergate found and arrested five men: Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, James McCord, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis.

Nobody believes that President Nixon ordered the break in, or even knew about it in advance. But in the days after we later learned that he ordered his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman to pay money to the burglars in return for their silence. It didn’t work and over the next two years we learned that Mr. Nixon obstructed justice. This led to his resignation on August 7, 1974. I wrote about it here two years ago.