The Smoking Gun

The end came in early August 1974 after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to turn over the so-called "smoking gun" tape, the one that made it clear the President had been directly involved in the cover-up since the day it began more than two years earlier.

Given the evidence on that tape, there was no way Richard Nixon's presidency would be able to survive an impeachment trial in the Senate. So, rather than go through that ordeal, he became the first President in American history to resign from office.

Yet it might never have come to that had it not been for the first crack in the Watergate cover-up: the letter from James McCord that Judge John Sirica chose to make public twenty-five years ago this week.

	March Menace
	The Clinton White House
	Political Pressure
	The Nixon Administration is Doomed

Written by Gary Paul Gates. Associate Producer, Adam S. Gaynor.
Video Production by Jonathan Evans