Today in History—June 17: The Day “Watergate” Became Synonymous with Scandal

On June 18, 1972, The Washington Post published its first story about a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that had occurred a day earlier at the Watergate complex.

Over the next nearly 800 days—until The Post published a front page that proclaimed “Nixon Resigns”—two reporters worked virtually nonstop on a story that would change history, the presidency, and journalism itself. Today, their names—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—are synonymous with Watergate specifically and a new type of investigative reporting generally.

As hard as it is to believe all these years later, many of their Post colleagues were more likely to accept White House press secretary Ron Ziegler’s dismissive assessment that the story was a “third-rate burglary” as opposed to the tip of the iceberg that would lead to the first—and, to date, only—resignation of an American president.

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“We were alone,” Woodward recalled in a 2024 interview with Encyclopædia Britannica. “Our colleagues at The Post doubted us. We did these stories that no one believed.”

In all fairness, the idea that five disgruntled political operatives had staged a botched burglary made far more sense than to imagine a government conspiracy that ensnared the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, and the head of the CIA. And yet that is exactly what happened.

Watergate is in history books (and encyclopedias) because Woodward and Bernstein, who were not yet 30 when their first story was published, did the relentless work of tracking down sources (including knocking on doors late at night and meeting in underground parking garages), cajoling them to talk, and protecting their identities—all the while incurring the wrath of the federal government and a deeply cynical president.

Woodward and Bernstein would become household names, portrayed in the Oscar-winning film based on their book All the President’s Men by no less than Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. But the work they did wasn’t significantly different from what journalists do every day.

Not much of it is glamorous, but it is important.

Important enough to be protected by the First Amendment.

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