When five Spanish-speaking men in surgical gloves were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., carrying tear gas fountain pens and crisp new $100 bills, The Washington Post knew it had a story.

But the plot that unfolded -- of a nationwide dirty tricks and political sabotage campaign funded and run at the highest level of the White House and an ensuing cover-up that included President Nixon and others -- would shock even an old newspaperman like Ben Bradlee.

		Although dozens of reporters would work on the story, Watergate would become the major work of Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward.

Coverage of the June 17, 1972 break-in started as a traditional police story, reported by a few local Metro reporters and focused on the burglars' appearance in court, but soon it became obvious the story was going to be more than a traditional news brief.

When one of the burglars told the arraigning judge that he was a retired CIA agent, the Post took notice. When notations in an address books found on one of the men yielded the name of Howard Hunt, who was working for the White House, the editors at the Post started to smell something big.

Within two days of what supporters of the president had derisively labeled a "third-rate burglary," The Washington Post reporters had traced the operation into the White House and the campaign to re-elect Richard Nixon.

But the story stagnated for weeks as few details beyond the tantalizing initial clues emerged. Finally, with the help of Mark Felt, the deputy director of the FBI, acting as the famous anonymous source "Deep Throat," the paper picked up the trail of the cash used to pay the burglars.

As Watergate unfolded, the role of Woodward's source grew in importance. Felt did not supply so much the details of the crime or cover-up, but helped direct Woodward's attention.

Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, like the rest of America, had no idea who the source was. Early on, Woodward had told him the source was high within the Justice Department, but he gave no real details as to Felt's rank in the massive organization nor whether the source had an axe to grind.

"I should have known who the hell he was," Bradlee admitted 30 years later. "I mean, think of that for a minute. I don't think that would happen today."

Felt was a close associate of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and when his protégé died in 1972, Felt had assumed he would be in line to take over. But the Nixon White House passed him by, instead choosing L. Patrick Gray, a longtime political ally, to head the agency and Woodward would later say he recognized Felt's possible motivations.

"Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered [White House aide Tom Charles] Huston [who proposed a plan to restructure intelligence-gathering] 'a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community.' The word 'gauleiter' is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as 'the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control,'" Woodward wrote in his 2005 piece about Felt's role as Deep Throat. "There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis."

As the Post and other newspapers, notably the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, pursued the story, increasingly intense independent and congressional investigations began.

The independent effort, headed by Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Attorney General Eliot Richardson, started to learn more about the White House effort to end the FBI investigation. When one White House employee was asked by a Senate investigating committee about a taping system in the Oval Office, Cox launched a legal effort to get some of the tapes.

When administration officials appeared unable to stop Cox, the president moved to fire him in October 1973. Richardson refused and resigned instead, and his deputy also quit rather than dismiss Cox. The chaotic night, quickly dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre, ended with Cox's dismissal by the third-ranking Justice Department official, Robert Bork.

The massacre only fueled Congress' growing anger and frustration with the White House. Within weeks there were more than two dozen measure calling for the president's impeachment.

After a protracted legal fight, the White House gave up the subpoenaed tape, though with 18 minutes missing -- accidentally deleted, Nixon officials maintain, by a White House secretary.

By April of 1974, the Nixon White House released 1,200-pages of tape transcripts to the House Judiciary Committee, a far larger amount than Cox had requested. But the White House continued to battle demands that the actual tapes be released.

		Bradlee still cannot believe he did not know who Deep Throat was until after President Nixon had resigned: "I should have known who the hell he was."

Finally, on July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Mr. Nixon had to turn over the tape recordings of 64 critical White House conversations, rejecting the president's claims of executive privilege.

Three days later, the House committee approved three articles of impeachment against President Nixon. Before the full House could take up the matter, Richard Nixon resigned his presidency on Aug. 8, 1974.

"We had a 24-page supplement, the Nixon Years, in type for the moment of need, and we had laid out page one with a huge NIXON RESIGNS across eight columns," Bradlee recalls in his memoir, "A Good Life." "We didn't have type big enough to fit, so we set NIXON RESIGNS in the largest type we had, printed the two words on glossy paper, then photographed them, enlarged them and spaced them out to fill out the 168-point type."

The effects of the Watergate scandal, botched cover-up and eventual departure of President Nixon had innumerable effects on both the presidency and the press.

One of the offshoots of the Watergate reporting was the development of star journalists -- Woodward and Bernstein turned to writing books, and the film of one of those works, "All the President's Men," made household names of both reporters.

But it is that celebrity that now concerns Bradlee.

"The danger is that there guys begin to look more important than they are and that they think they're more important than they are," Bradlee told Jim Lehrer. "It's hard to understand a person -- the more famous he becomes, the harder it is to say, 'What the hell is his motive? What is he up to?'"

Watergate also gave birth to a new generation of crusading journalists, a group that also saw conspiracy and conflict as a goal.

Bradlee poked fun at these new reporters in his memoir, "We joked about bright-eyed, bush-tailed young Woodsteins coming back from covering a fire in Prince Georges County, reporting that the fire chief was anti-Semitic, there was gasoline in the hoses, and a guy who looked like Howard Hunt had been seen fleeing into the woods."

But upon reflection, Bradlee would soften his critique of some of the over-eager reporting in the post-Watergate world.

On the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Bradlee summed up the experience to the NewsHour's Terence Smith, saying, "I think it attracted a large number of competent and really good young journalists. I think it made politicians more scared of lying, but it sure as hell didn't stop 'em. And I think it was very good for The Washington Post."

-- Compiled by Lee Banville for the Online NewsHour