In today's 24/7, social-media-driven universe, Watergate would have played out in a few months; it dragged on for parts of three years, riveting the nation and dominating headlines morning and night.

Though justice ultimately prevailed and our democratic processes survived, Watergate's corrosive fallout is with us still. Ever since, political leaders are viewed with more suspicion and cynicism. Presidents aren't considered nearly so trustworthy anymore. Escalating polarization between Congress and the White House has crippled bipartisan governance. Reporters and presidents have little use for each other now. All this traces to Watergate.

What follows is a personal remembrance—not just of history, but history that altered America forever. I was fortunate to watch it all unfold firsthand, especially that fateful final week, as the 29-year-old White House correspondent for Newsweek.

Four decades later, in one of life's small ironies, my office at National Journal is in the Watergate complex. Driving to work I pass the old Howard Johnson's motor lodge, now a George Washington University dorm, where Nixon partisans monitored a botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee's Watergate headquarters across the street on the night of June 17, 1972.

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At 12:20 p.m. on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon's press secretary entered the White House briefing room. We knew it must be serious—Ron Ziegler had checked his Marlboro Lights, Styrofoam cup of coffee, and trademark cockiness at the door.

Ziegler's briefing lasted just 83 words and he had trouble finishing. "Tonight at nine o'clock Eastern Daylight Time," he announced, struggling to maintain his composure, "the president of the United States will address the nation on radio and television from his Oval Office."

As Ziegler left the podium, a Wall Street Journal correspondent once again shouted the question he'd been asking at every press briefing for weeks: "Ron, is the president going to resign?"

Early on, Ziegler had denounced the break-in as a "third-rate burglary." Even a year into the scandal, Nixon professed his ignorance and innocence. "I am not a crook," he famously insisted in Orlando, Florida, in November 1973.

By then, however, Nixon's damage-control efforts were cratering. Guided by an FBI agent known as Deep Throat, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had produced a steady stream of blockbuster scoops documenting that the Watergate burglars had been choreographed by retired intelligence agents with close ties to the 1972 Nixon reelection apparatus and within the White House.

A Senate special committee was trying to determine, in the immortal phrase of the late Senator Howard Baker, "what did the president know and when did he know it." Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a legendary trial lawyer from Texas, was hauling presidential associates before a federal grand jury. Nixon's chief of staff and domestic policy adviser had been forced to resign after Woodward and Bernstein reported their complicity in the cover-up.