On June 17, 1972, five burglars were arrested during a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. According to news reports of the time, the men wore surgical gloves, carried a walkie-talkie and short-wave police scanner, 40 rolls of unexposed film and $2,300 in crisp $100 bills. They also possessed two sophisticated listening devices, and had removed several ceiling panels in the office. The men emerged from the room with their hands up.
While there was no immediate explanation of their motives, the crime turned out to be the tip of a very dirty iceberg—one that would barrel through the White House over the next two years and ultimately topple the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Below, a look at some of the key players in the Watergate scandal and how their lives unfolded in the shadow of a national disgrace. Many wrote books and a few found religion.
James McCord
HIS ROLE: A former CIA officer and FBI agent, McCord was one of the five burglars arrested at the Watergate complex, and the “chief wiretapper” of the operation. During the burglary, McCord, then security director of the Committee to Reelect the President (or CREEP), left a piece of tape on the latch of a stairwell door, inadvertently alerting a security guard to the burglary in progress.
THE UPSHOT: McCord was convicted on charges of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping, but only served four months of his original sentence of one to five years. His sentence was reduced after he implicated White House officials in the cover-up. “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent,” McCord stated in the March 19, 1973 letter to Judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate trials. “Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the very structure, orientation and impact of the government’s case, and to the motivation and intent of the defendants.”
POST-SCANDAL: McCord kept a low profile following his release from prison. In 1974, he published a book about his involvement in Watergate, titled A Piece of Tape—The Watergate Story: Fact and Fiction. He died in 2017 at age 93.
Virgilio Gonzalez
HIS ROLE: A Cuban refugee and locksmith by trade, Gonzalez was one of the five burglars arrested at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. He had been recruited in Miami by E. Howard Hunt, who had played a key role in the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
THE UPSHOT: Gonzalez, an anti-Fidel Castro activist, insisted during his trial that he had been told the Watergate operation would advance Cuban liberation. “I keep feeling about my country and the way people suffer over there,” Gonzalez told Judge John Sirica. “That is the only reason I did my cooperation in that situation.” He spent about a year in prison.
POST-SCANDAL: After Watergate, Gonzalez returned to Miami and his career as a locksmith. In 1977, he and three other men known as the “foot soldiers” of Watergate—Bernard L. Barker, Eugenio Martínez and Frank Sturgis—received $200,000 from Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign fund. The payment served as settlement for the four men’s civil suit, in which they claimed they had been tricked into participating in the Watergate burglary. He died in 2021 at age 98.
THE ORGANIZERS
E. Howard Hunt
HIS ROLE: A former CIA operative, Hunt was a member of the so-called “Plumbers,” an informal White House team tasked with preventing and repairing information “leaks” such as the 1971 release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers. After investigators found his phone number in address books belonging to the Watergate burglars, they connected the dots between the burglary, President Nixon and his re-election campaign.
THE UPSHOT: As Hunt told the Senate Watergate committee during the investigation in 1973, “I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do.” He was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, and served 33 months in prison.
POST-SCANDAL: After Hunt was released from prison, he moved to Florida, started a new family and continued to write spy novels—as he had been doing for years—totaling about 80 over the course of his life. He won $650,000 in a libel suit in 1981, after a right-wing newspaper linked him to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, yet received none of the money when the suit was overturned several years later. Weighed down by legal fees stemming from Watergate, he declared bankruptcy in 1997. He died in 2007, months before the publication of his co-written memoir, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond.