June 17, 1972

It was called a "third-rate burglary" by the President's sixth-rate press secretary, RONALD ZIEGLER.

On this day in 1972, the Republican National Committee's team of five crackpot burglars were caught in tbe Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate.  

In 1973, on a college interview trip to Washington, D.C., my mom and I stopped to peer though this window on the sixth floor of 2600 Virginia Avenue., N.W.  The DNC had departed but the stencils were still on the window.

NIXON had a massive conspiracy of misuse of the powers of government to attack his enemies. 

But for the fortuitous discovery of tape on a door by security guard Frank Wills, NIXON might have gotten away with his impeachable offenses. 

Our democracy was saved, NIXON was ousted, resigning in disgrace.  

Our American values were vindicated. 

Thanks to security guard Frank Wills, the Washington Metropolitan Police, United States District Court Judge John J. Sirica, the Senate Watergate Committeee, the House Judiciary Committee, The Washington Post, The New York Times, et al.

Never forget how evil RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON was, or how dozens of his people suffered from committing crimes.  Everything this paranoid Republican touched turned to feculence. 

Lives ruined. 

Careers torched. 

Lawyers disbarred.

NIXON and TRUMP worshippers all were guilty of what Lincoln would have called "idolatry that practices human sacrifice." 

"These aren't very bright guys and things got out of hand," as the heroic whistleblower (whom we now know was FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in a parking garage at 3 AM.  "Just follow the money."

As a high school student in Mullica Hill, N.J.,  I soon was glued to the tv and read The New York Times every day, and The Washington Post (mailed copies at Camden County College Library), following the web of criminality flowing from NIXON & Co. 

I never had a journalism course.  But after college, inspired by Watergate, I became editor of the Appalachian Observer, a small weekly newspaper in Clinton, Tennessee, helping expose the world's largest mercury pollution event, oust a corrupt School Superintendent, and investigating a corrupt Sheriff whom the FBI indicted, arrested and incarcerated. 

I later went on to law school, still inspired.  I clerked for USDOL Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahun Litt and was honored to represent nuclear, environmental and governmental whistleblowers. 

Footnote: Circa 1987, in the depths of depravity of the Reagan Administration, my mom visited me in Washington, D.C. during my clerkship for the U.S. Department of Labor. We took a Tourmobile (R) and it passed the Watergate, with the guide saying something trivial about the cheesecake. Nothing about the June 17, 1992 Watergate break-in.  We asked the driver, then the managers at Tourmobile HQ at Arlington National Cemetery.  A Tourmobile manager had no defense for this stunning omission: he told us the subject of the Watergate break-in was "controversial."  I told the manager that art was not "controversial" at all, but that the break-in was "history" and "res judicata without possibility of appeal. "Tourmobile (R) no longer exists.  It had a monopolistic franchise for tours of the Nation's Capital.