What Did <em>Atlantic</em> Readers Think of Watergate?
Letters from the Archives is a series in which we highlight past Atlantic stories and reactions from readers at the time.
“Watergate is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his November 1973 Atlantic article, “The Runaway Presidency.”
On June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., in the hopes of procuring campaign intelligence for the White House. The Nixon administration’s effort to distance itself from the burglary stands as one of the greatest political cover-ups in American history: “I can say categorically,” President Richard Nixon insisted that August, “no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” The following months and years
