What the Senate Watergate hearings showed about America

This week marks 50 years since the first public hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, also known as the Senate Watergate hearings.

It also marked the start of a public television “experiment,” as the late Jim Lehrer put it: gavel-to-gavel coverage of the hearings, rebroadcast each evening.

“We shall see cross-examination of men who were once among the most powerful in the land, as the select committee tries to answer the ultimate question: How high did the scandals reach, and was President Nixon himself involved?” Robert MacNeil told viewers at the start of coverage on May 17, 1973.

The committee’s work brought several historic moments, namely:

• John Dean, the former White House counsel, recounted that he told Nixon he had “a cancer growing on the presidency and if the cancer was not removed, the president himself would be killed by it.”
• White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a taping system in the Oval Office that recorded conversations between Nixon and other high-level officials.

The historic Senate hearings would eventually lead to the resignation of an American president a year later. Watergate “showed the government of the United States at its absolute worst, and then it showed it at its absolute best,” Lehrer told the NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown during a 2013 conversation.

How co-anchors Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer introduced the Watergate hearings in 1973. Video by Justin Scuiletti/PBS NewsHour

The coverage of the Watergate hearings elicited positive feedback for public broadcasting in an era before C-SPAN. MacNeil and Lehrer went on to create a nightly broadcast that you know today as the PBS NewsHour.

Learn more about the Watergate scandal ahead of the hearings’ 50th anniversary on Wednesday:

• Read: The complete Watergate timeline. (It took longer than you realize.)
• Watch: Judy Woodruff’s 2022 conversation with Garrett Graff about his book, “Watergate: A New History,” a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
• From the Archives: The full gavel-to-gavel coverage of the hearings – 51 days’ worth – can be experienced here, courtesy of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.