WATERGATE.INFO is the work of Malcolm Farnsworth, an Australian with a deep interest in American politics and history.
The site began as a single web page in June-July 1995. I used a set of teaching notes on Watergate as my first project to learn the basics of HTML. For the next six years, the site existed on different domains before I acquired Watergate.info in September 2001.
I have endeavoured to bring together the key documents and information relating to Watergate. Video and audio files of the period are an important feature of the site.
Interest in Watergate peaked in the 1990s, around the time of the 25th anniversary of the Watergate Hotel burglary in 1997. It slipped away during the early years of this century but revived in 2016, as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton competed to become the 45th President.
Prior to the election, Trump supporters were keen to paint Clinton as worse than Nixon. They used the Articles of Impeachment to claim that Clinton was guilty of far worse than Nixon was. Since the election, those opposed to Trump were keen to draw upon Watergate as evidence that Trump’s behaviour warranted impeachment or resignation. In the aftermath of January 6, Trump critics saw his actions as far worse than anything done by Nixon. It has been fascinating to observe the site’s traffic statistics in this time and to note the trends in social media mentions.
The site was featured in the New York Times in June 1997, on the 25th anniversary of the break-in: