It was the year 1972. The year of the Munich Terrorist Attack and the release of the Copernicus Satellite. One was the dawning of the many massacres that would soon become a normalcy and the other was a pioneer is space exploration, an aid in the cold war. You probably won't recognize either of these events because they paled into comparison of the real aspersion of the year. Both of these were influential for the years to come but this case shook the political world like nothing else before it. The event of the greatest american political scandal to date.
It all began the morning of June 17th, where two men were arrested for breaking into the hotel area where the Democratic National Committee took place. They were accounted for charges of trying to wiretap the phone lines and steal secret documents. They had tried this once before on May 11th of the same year, both attempts in relation to the Richard Nixon's election the republican candidate across George McGovern the democratic representative. The name of the hotel? Watergate.
In the re-election he had won in a landslide victory and pledged to his voters that he had played no part in the scandal and would cruelly punish the culprits who had committed this felony. It was really the opposite as he had paid them off in hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to keep them quiet. The Congress suspected something larger was at hand, and slowly the walls that held the white house afoot began to crack.
A handful of aides testified before a grand jury and information was brought up of Nixon's various crimes and the fact that Nixon taped every conversation of white house grounds, obviously causing them to want to see these tapes. It was a given that most of the tapes would simply be about the normal day to day facts about the government officials lives, but a few of them were deemed to be about Nixon.
At first Nixon declined to hand over the tapes but later he was subpoenaed, a formal letter declaring he had to give them over, so he did. Funnily enough, the day before he had to give them up, five government officials who held high places of power had all resigned. Nixon had asked them all to cover for him, and they refused and stepped down from their positions. As a president could not be charged with a crime he was impeached on the counts of obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover up, and several violations to the cover up. He resigned from office and his vice president took up his position.
What happened to him in the aftermath? Well the president has a special power, the only power that goes unchecked by the government, presidential pardon. And so, on the historic day of August 9th we saw the president of the U.S. cry on national television, get a free pass, watch his step onto a helicopter and wave at the american people as he raised up and flew away, with no charge at all.
This one loophole from the Constitution allowed one president who thought he was above the law, and discovered he wasn't, but still be forgotten of all wrongdoing. This might be a loophole or a verbal technicality but regardless of the order of what it was, it affected the order of how everything was.
Writing is an important aspect of the order in our lives, and even one small technicality, purposely or accidentally can have an effect on the entire meaning. A simple choice of a comma or a phrase can alter the whole thing. I could have used "a" instead of "one" in the first sentence, but I decided not to, because it would changed the entire tone. The point is that you should keep an eye on the small details. You have to be very particular with your word choice, mistakes are only allowed when you choose to make them.
From little different saplings come great disparate oaks. This small clause our founding fathers wrote over two hundred years ago has resulted in the release of one of the most heinous political crimes ever, disparaging american politics towards its end, scarring us with one of the biggest scandals ever, Watergate.
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