Frank Wills Discovered the Watergate Burglary that Led to President Nixon's Resignation

Forty years ago on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a black security guard, made a discovery that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon two years later and the conviction and incarceration of 43 members of the Nixon administration.

The 24-year-old Wills discovered during his rounds at the Watergate, a hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C., that burglars were breaking into the Democratic National Committee's office, which was housed in the building.

During his rounds, Wills had noticed duct tape on one of the door locks to the committee's headquarters. Willis removed the tape, noted it in his log and continued to make his rounds, which included 11 floors in the luxury complex.

One of the five burglars--Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzlez, Eugenio Martínez, Bernard Barker and James W. McCord, Jr., --noticed the tape was missing and replaced it to prevent the door from latching.

When Wills returned on his rounds, he saw the tape had been replaced and called the police.  Detectives arrived and locked the building's exterior doors and shut down the elevators. They climbed the stairs to the sixth floor and found the door to committee's headquarter had been forced open.

Willis and the police quietly walked into the office. They heard something move, and the police ordered anyone inside to come out. Willis switched on the lights.

The gig was up. Several persons emerged from the shadows wearing suits and rubber gloves, carrying tear gas guns, bugging devices and thousands of dollars in consecutively numbered $100 bills.

Reporters later told Wills the burglars had telephone numbers to the White House. Initially, however, no one knew why the men were there, but that quickly changed.

The arrests set off a chain of events that became known as “Watergate.” An FBI investigation connected the cash found on the burglars to a slush fund used by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, a fundraising group for the Nixon campaign.

After calling it a “third-rate” burglary that had nothing to do with the White House, President Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, to avoid impeachment and conviction.

It was a dramatic downfall for Nixon, who was re-elected president in 1972, defeating Sen. George McGovern, the Democratic Party's candidate for president, in a landslide.

Nixon was the first and so far the only president to resign from office.

Although Wills played himself in the movie All The President's Men, which was based on the book of the same name by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Wills never benefited from his moment of fame.
 
He quit his job as a security guard after the company's owners refused to give him a raise for his discovery. He briefly worked for Dick Gregory, the comedian/activist. The singer/song writer Harry Nilsson also dedicated an album to Wills honor. In the end, however, he was so destitute he washed his clothes in bucket. Wills died of a brain tumor on Sept. 27, 2000, at University Hospital in Augusta, Ga.