The time was not yet 1:00am on June 17, 1972, when security guard Frank Wills noticed tape covering several door latches at the Watergate Complex in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC. Wills removed the tape and thought little of it, but came back an hour later to see that the doors had been re-taped. This time, Wills called the police.
Five men were discovered inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee. These were Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis. All were arrested and charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications.
Subsequent investigation incriminated Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) General Counsel G. Gordon Liddy, and former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. A grand jury indicted the lot of them for conspiracy, burglary and violation of federal wiretap laws.
During the investigation and ensuing trial, it became clear that all seven had ties to the 1972 CRP. President Richard Nixon stated that his chief counsel John Dean had conducted a thorough investigation of the matter, though it later became clear that there had been no investigation at all.
Press Secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the break-in as “a third-rate burglary attempt”.
On September 29, it was revealed that John Mitchell had controlled a secret fund while serving as Attorney General, used to finance Republican campaign intelligence gathering operations against Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was only part of a comprehensive campaign of spying and political sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee. The Nixon campaign was never affected by the revelations. The President was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in American political history.
The Media wouldn’t let it go, particularly the connection between the break-in and the campaign. Relying on anonymous sources, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that there was wide-spread knowledge of the break-in and the attempt to cover it up, knowledge running through the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and all the way to the White House.
The animosity between the media and the White House grew as Nixon and administration officials discussed plans to “get” hostile media organizations.
The scandal blew apart, the following March. Judge John Sirica, presiding over the burglary trial, read aloud in open court a letter from one of the burglars. The letter written by John McCord claimed that trial testimony had been perjured, and that defendants had been pressured to remain silent. The accusations led to the formation of a Senate select committee to investigate the Watergate burglary and subsequent cover-up, and the ultimate discovery of a secret taping system in the Oval Office.
Demands for the tapes were met with claims of Executive Privilege and refusal to hand them over. Litigation made it all the way to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, the unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon voided all claims of executive privilege.
Within six days, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
The President’s support in Congress collapsed after the release of the “Smoking Gun” tape, demonstrating that the President himself had entered into a criminal conspiracy with the goal of obstructing justice. On August 8, Richard Nixon announced his intention to resign from office, effective at noon the following day. The first American President in history to resign from office. The Justice Department pondered an indictment, but that discussion ended a month later with a pardon from President Gerald R. Ford.
It isn’t clear whether Nixon had prior knowledge of the break-in. Watergate prosecutor James Neal was convinced that the President hadn’t known in advance, and the later release of Oval Office tapes seem to bear that out. At one point, you can hear the President ask “Who was the asshole who ordered it?”
Years later, the shoe was on the other foot, as the House considered impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for suborning perjury and obstruction of Justice. Representative John Conyers said in a September 30, 1998 Time Magazine article that “We’ve been advocating the Watergate model (of prosecution). I support it”. Contradicting himself in the next paragraph, Congressman Conyers went on to say “The notion that this review should be open ended like Watergate, as the Speaker continues to insist, is preposterous”.
At the time of the Watergate hearings, Jerry Zeifman was serving as Chief Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee’s permanent staff. Zeifman has since claimed to have fired a junior member of the temporary Impeachment Inquiry staff for dishonesty and unethical behavior, though there remains some doubt as to whether he had that authority. That staff member would continue on with the committee until its dissolution, in 1974.
Irrespective of the degree of his early involvement, Nixon himself was an active participant in the cover-up. In the end, that would prove more damaging than the burglary itself. One hopes that any such betrayal of public trust will always be worse than the underlying crime, but time will tell. Years later, that junior member of the temporary Impeachment Inquiry staff would famously ask, “What difference, at this point, does it make”?
Reduced to three ships by August 1578, Drake made the straits of Magellan, emerging alone into the Pacific that September.
As Stalin’s Soviet Union imposed the “terror famine” of 1932-’33, the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasant farmers known as the 
As director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Lysenko put his theories to work, with unsurprisingly dismal results. He’d force Soviet farmers to plant WAY too close together, on the theory that plants of the same “class” would “cooperate” with one another, and that “mutual assistance” takes place within and even across plant species.
By the siege’s end in the Spring of 1944, nine of them had starved to death, standing watch over all that food. These guys had stood guard over their seed bank for twenty-eight months, without eating so much as a grain.
Born Henryk Goldszmit into the Warsaw family of Józef Goldszmit, in 1878 or ’79 (the sources vary), Korczak was the pen name by which he wrote children’s books.
Korczak wrote for several Polish language newspapers while studying medicine at the University of Warsaw, becoming a pediatrician in 1904. Always the writer, Korczak received literary recognition in 1905 with his book Child of the Drawing Room (Dziecko salonu), while serving as medical officer during the Russo-Japanese war.
The Polish nation, the sixth largest in all Europe, was sectioned and partitioned for over a century, by Austrian, Prussian, and Russian imperial powers. Korczak volunteered for military service in 1914, serving as military doctor during WW1 and the series of Polish border wars between 1919-’21.
The oldest winery for which archaeological evidence exists was established around BC4100, in present-day Armenia. The Egyptian Pharoahs were producing a wine-like substance from 3100BC for use in public ceremonies, due to its resemblance to blood.
Sounds like a great job, as Greek Gods go.
The legions of Rome expanded the Empire across Europe from modern day France and Germany into Portugal and Spain. Everywhere the Legions went, vineyards were soon to follow. To this day, some regions are said to have more ‘Terroir’, than others.
The story is almost certainly a myth, a later embellishment to the story. During his 47 year career, Pérignon went to considerable lengths to eliminate bubbles from his wine. Dom Pérignon never succeed in that goal, yet he did make bubbly wine a whole lot better, using corks for the first time to prevent the escape of carbon dioxide, and perfecting a ‘gentle’ pressing technique which left out the murkiness of the skins.
Pérignon didn’t like white grapes because of their tendency to enter refermentation. He preferred the Pinot Noir, and would aggressively prune the plants so that vines grew no higher than three feet and produced a smaller crop. The harvest was always in the cool, damp early morning hours, and Pérignon took every precaution to avoid bruising or breaking his grapes. Over-ripe and overly large fruit was always thrown out. Pérignon never permitted grapes to be trodden upon, always preferring the use of multiple presses.
Shorter in stature and considerably more powerful than Cro-Magnon, our direct ancestor and all but indistinguishable from ourselves, Neanderthal bodies were suited to the ice age of the early and middle Paleolithic era.
Augustus Longstreet Hull was born 1847 in “The Classic City” of Athens Georgia, and enlisted in the Confederate Army on September 8, 1864.
A greatly diminished Anglo Saxon army marched south, meeting the Norman invader in October, 1066. In an age of mechanized warfare, it is odd to think you could have been on a neighboring hill, and not heard a thing. History changed that day, when King Harold took an arrow to the eye, at a place called Hastings. The last of the Anglo Saxon Kings, was dead. William was crowned King of England that December. Henceforward and forever more, William the Bastard would be known as “William the Conqueror”.
Late in the 12th century, King’s Treasurer Richard FitzNeal likened the Great Survey to the Book of Judgement, the book of “Domesday” (middle English for “Doomsday”), because its pronouncements were final and inviolate, as the Last day of Judgement.
Massive French losses stemming from the failed Nivelle offensive of that same month (French casualties were fully ten times what was expected) combined with irrational expectations that American forces would materialize on the western front led to massive unrest in the French lines. Fully one-half of all French forces on the western front mutinied. It’s one of the great miracles of WW1 that the German side never knew, else the conflict may have ended, very differently.
For eighteen months, British miners worked to dig tunnels under Messines Ridge, the German defensive works laid out around the Belgian town of Ypres. Nearly a million pounds of high explosive were placed in some 2,000′ of tunnels, dug 100′ deep. 10,000 German soldiers ceased to exist at 3:10am local time on June 7, in a blast that could be heard as far away, as London.
“Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
To the Central Powers, such trade had the sole purpose of killing their boys on the battlefields of Europe.
Known fatalities in the explosion included a Jersey City police officer, a Lehigh Valley Railroad Chief of Police, a ten week old infant, and the barge captain.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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