1973; the Watergate Bursts

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On March 23 seven men appeared in a Washington, D.C., courtroom to be sentenced for their parts in the Watergate burglary, a break-in by Republican operatives at Democratic-party headquarters the previous June. At 10:00 a.m. Judge John Sirica made his entrance, but before announcing the sentences, he declared that a "preliminary matter" had to be taken care of. He then read a letter he had received from one of the defendants, James W. McCord, Jr. By the time Judge Sirica was finished, a few minutes later, the Watergate affair had exploded from an incident into a scandal.

McCord was a retired CIA employee who had been hired as a "security consultant" by the Republicans. In …