Five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex at half past two in the morning on 17 June 1972. They were carrying bugging equipment and sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills.
The burglary was a minor operation and the president had not ordered it. What destroyed him began six days later.
On 23 June 1972, in a conversation recorded by the White House taping system, H. R. Haldeman proposed to Nixon that the CIA be used to tell the FBI to limit its investigation on national security grounds. Nixon agreed and instructed him to proceed. That conversation, released on 5 August 1974, is the smoking gun tape, and it establishes obstruction of justice in the sixth day.
Between those two dates the administration spent two years and enormous political capital on a concealment that was always more dangerous than the thing concealed.
Two mechanisms explain the trajectory, and both are documented in the transcripts.
Escalation of commitment, in Barry Staw's sense. Each additional act of concealment — the hush money, the perjury, the firings — increased the cost of eventually admitting the earlier ones. The rational move at every point, assessed against the sunk investment, was another increment. There is no natural stopping point in a sequence like this, because stopping is the moment at which everything becomes visible, which is exactly the finding of chapter 148.
And groupthink, in Irving Janis's sense — an insulated decision group, an illusion of invulnerability, self-appointed mindguards who filter dissenting information, and pressure toward unanimity that makes doubt socially expensive. John Dean's March 1973 warning to Nixon that there was a cancer growing on the presidency is the exception that shows how late internal dissent arrived.
Exposure came through three routes the group could not control.
An audit trail. Nixon had installed the taping system himself, and it recorded everything including the concealment. Alexander Butterfield disclosed its existence to the Senate committee almost by accident in July 1973.
Defection. Dean testified. McCord wrote to Judge Sirica. The number of people who had to remain silent kept growing, and each one had an independent incentive to be first.
And asymmetry of effort. A lie requires continuous maintenance and must be consistent with every subsequent statement by every participant. A record requires none.
The Supreme Court ordered the tapes released on 24 July 1974. Nixon resigned on 9 August.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Audit Trails as Defence