Once Upon a Time in Greenwich Village ... or ... Where Watergate Began

One fine day -- around noon on March 6th, 1970 to be exact, nearly 55 years ago -- a townhouse located at 18 West 11th Street exploded. In this beautiful, serene part of Greenwich Village, an unimaginable act of terror had occurred.

But not really. The explosion was an accident. 

Inside several young people who were part of the left-wing terrorist group the Weather Underground had been building bombs. They were planning to cross the river and attack Fort Dix in New Jersey, then Columbia University, but these young, brash, radicals had no experience handling explosives -- and tragedy ensued.

This very public act of (accidental) domestic terrorism freaked the city out -- as well as the White House of President Richard Nixon. And it set off a chain reaction that eventually led to the first Presidential resignation in American history.

In the aftermath of the Greenwich Village explosion, a young White House aide named Tom Huston wrote a 43-page memo. Dubbed the Huston Plan, it outlined how the US government should fight back against groups like the Weather Underground -- including break-ins, kidnapping, intercepting mail, wiretapping, blackmail, psy-ops, all kind of nasty and ILLEGAL stuff. Huston presented his plan to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. No stranger to the dark arts of surveillance and disruption, Hoover actually rejected the plan -- he didn't want his agents to be put into a position where they might get arrested by local law enforcement and, as an old man, he no longer had the stomach to explain this kind of stuff to Congress. So he dismissed the Huston Plan and that, so it seemed, was that.

Nixon was pissed. He didn't want any more domestic terrorism on his watch and he ordered the plan implemented anyway -- until he backed off. But the idea that his White House might have to freelance on its own to stop America's domestic enemies remained a widely held belief amongst All the President's Men.

A year later, in April 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press. This massive, secret report detailed how the United States had gotten mired in the Vietnam War and lied about being able to win an unwinnable war. The Republican President Nixon, at first, actually was delighted about the leak -- the Pentagon Papers indicted Nixon's two Democratic Presidential predecessors, JFK and LBJ, over their handling of the war -- and viewed it as a political boon for him. But then his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, told him that if the Communist Russian and Chinese governments saw that someone could leak secret information to the press and get away with it they would think that he, Nixon, was a "weakling." 

Nixon flipped out. He ordered that the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, a former Pentagon aide named Daniel Ellsberg, be prosecuted or neutralized. And Nixon didn't want anymore leaks or terrorism or anything like it -- thus the White House Plumbers, a secret group of former FBI and CIA agents, to do dirty jobs for the White House to "plug" the leaks.

In the fall of 1971 two Plumbers -- G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt -- broke into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrist to find information about him that they could use for blackmail. They found nothing and ended up smashing up the doc's office. They returned to the White House empty handed, the Plumbers were disbanded.

But what should have been the end of the story was only the beginning. 

Hunt and Liddy were sent to the Nixon reelection committee called CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the president). Even though this two dopes had messed up their previous assignment, the geniuses at CREEP decided to put them in charge of "black advance" -- spying in Nixon's potential Democratic opponents and sabatoge their campaigns. Eventually this led to Hunt and Liddy and a group of Cubans breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. Thus Watergate, the most consequential political scandal began. And two years and two months later, on August 9, 1974, Nixon would resign the presidency.

It's hard to realize that such momentous history happened within less than five years in the early 1970s. And obviously Watergate is the famous scandal in history.

The seeds of this most American tragedy weren't planted in the White House or even in Washington, DC -- it happened here on the streets of NYC, where history is always happening, once upon a time.