IN the early hours of Saturday, June 17th, 1972, five burglars were arrested in the office of Larry O'Brien, national chairman of the US Democratic Party, in the Watergate complex of office buildings in Washington. They were repairing electronic listening devices they had installed in his telephones three weeks earlier.
The five were not professional burglars, of course, but skilled technicians with backgrounds in the CIA and FBI. Three were anti-Castro Cubans, on orders of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), whose chairman was the former attorney general, John Mitchell.
President Richard Nixon was running for a second term. Polls put him 19 points ahead of all prospective Democratic candidates. Was it necessary to break the law to win? Obviously Nixon and Mitchell thought so. It would be folly to suggest this operation could have gone ahead without their sanction.
Why did they do it? Perhaps because of Nixon's respect for O'Brien's political skills. Nixon and Mitchell needed to know and analyse every word uttered by O'Brien in his office - whom he spoke to and what he knew about Nixon's brother, Donald, who got money from Howard Hughes. O'Brien had worked as a lobbyist for Hughes.
As far as Nixon was concerned only one man could bar him from the White House in 1972 - Larry O'Brien. He considered O'Brien the shrewdest Democratic politician in the US. Sam Dash, the Watergate prosecutor, believed Nixon knew of the break-in plan in detail before it took place. He left nothing to chance.
O'Brien was a skilled campaign tactician. He had put Jack Kennedy in the White House in 1960 by the narrowest of margins. He might do the same for George McGovern, a history professor and former bomber pilot who opposed the Vietnam conflict.
An alert night watchman heard unusual post-midnight noises and called the police who responded promptly. The "burglars" were caught with their bugs and "photographic material" - no doubt to identify O'Brien's office visitors.
James McCord, ex-FBl, ex-CIA an air force reserve lieutenant-colonel, when asked their occupations by the judge, announced they were anti-communists". Later his bravado changed when it became clear this was serious business and the White House would not save them.
Nixon was re-elected for several reasons, including a false Vietnam truce announced by Henry Kissinger on the eve of the vote. Probably Nixon would have won anyway - but not in a landslide. He threw his closest aides over the side: H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, adviser on domestic politics. They went to jail.
Why didn't Nixon burn the tapes with the damaging evidence he said didn't exist? He gambled.
He did not think the Supreme Court would order him to hand over the tapes. Haldeman advised against burning the tapes. "They were still our best defence", and he recommended that they not be destroyed, he told Nixon, who betrayed him by blaming Haldeman for Watergate in his interview with David Frost. Haldeman was on weaker ground when he insisted there was no "planned, conscious cover-up operation. We reacted to Watergate as we had to the Pentagon Papers. . . We were highly sensitive to any negative PR." That may be true for Haldeman, who is dead, has left his diaries as evidence.
Sam Dash, the Watergate prosecutor, rejects any comparison between President Clinton's money-raising for electoral purposes and Nixon's ruthless no-holds-barred drive for power. He told the New York Times the Clinton scandals "never came close to the danger and threat to our constitutional government posed by Watergate". Mr Dash is a Democrat, of course.
Leonard Garment, a White House lawyer for five years under Nixon, is puzzled by the "psychology" of Watergate. He does not defend Nixon when someone puts the question on television. They were not close, he says, their relationship was professional. He may be a candidate for "Deep Throat", the insider who confirmed the Watergate story for Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
A former Washington Post journalist suggested in the Atlantic that "Deep Throat" was a senior FBI official worried by Nixon's attempts to take over the bureau after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Still another candidate is Gen Alexander Haig, who became White House chief of staff after Haldemant