Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were former White House aides. A third, James W. McCord Jr., had been employed by the Committee for the Reelection of the President (CRP), as had Liddy. The entries were financed with secret cash contribution to CRP. McGovern had tried to make the Watergate case a prime issue in the 1972campaign with then unsubstantiated charges that the burglaries were part of a broader Republican plot of illegal campaign sabotage and surveillance that could be traced to Nixon’s office. The issue had no impact. Then in March McCord charged in a letter to U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica, who had presided at the Watergate trial, that ranking White House official were involved in covering up the true dimensions of the scandal and that he and his codefendants had been pressured to remain silent. The same month Nixon repeated earlier assertions that an internal investigation disclosed no White House involvement. But in April Nixon announced that “serious charges” had been brought to his attention as the result of a new inquiry. Many of the charges had already been aired in newspapers as the results of a renewed grand jury inquiry and initial probing by a select Senate committee, chaired by Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.). The charges included these allegations: that John N. Mitchell, first director of CRP and Nixon’s long-time friend and his first attorney general, had approved and encouraged the burglaries; and that Nixon’s two top White House aides, John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, had participated in the cover-up, along with White House Counsel John W. Dean III. On April 30 Nixon ordered dean’s resignation and accepted the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst quit at the same time to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in an investigation of Mitchell, who was his friend and predecessor as attorney general. Elliot L. Richardson replaced Kleindienst. In May Richardson, with Nixon’s concurrence after prodding by Congress, named Harvard law professor Archibald Cox as special federal prosecutor in charge of the Watergate investigation, with the understanding Cox could act without White House interference. The same month Ervin’s committee opened nationally televised hearings into the affair.
In the following months witness after witness confirmed what the press had reported and also added new detail.