American History - 12 - Essay Example

SIG organized the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, to gather damaging evidence to discredit Ellsberg. On 17 June, 1972, in order to gather information against Nixon’s political adversaries, an attempt was made to bug the Democratic National Committee’s campaign offices at the Watergate complex. This resulted in the arrest of the burglars. It was discovered that the same break-in team was involved in the Ellsberg burglary and the media linked the attempted burglary to the White House.

Nixon won a landslide election victory in November 1972, and began his second term as President. However, the Watergate Scandal broke, and destroyed his Presidency. The exposure of the Watergate Scandal gained momentum due to the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. Their informer, called ‘Deep Throat,’ was revealed in 2005 to be the former deputy director of the FBI, W. Mark Felt.  Tapes provided incontrovertible evidence that the break-in was authorized by top White House officials, and of Nixon’s involvement.

In May 1974, impeachment proceedings were initiated against Nixon by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Once it became evident that Senators would vote across party lines in favor of impeachment, Nixon tendered his resignation on 9 August 1974. 1. 28-6 The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution serves to demonstrate how public opinion can be manipulated for political purposes. President Lyndon B. Johnson was in need of approval for launching major attacks on North Vietnam, but feared that the public would not support an expansion of the war.

In this context, this resolution appears to be deliberately designed to arouse anti-communist passions. It paints the North Vietnamese as communist aggressors, and uses the ‘red scare’ to gather support for the War. The circumstances under which the North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on the US destroyer Maddox and the fact that it was