There has been a resurgence of interest in Watergate in recent years, with the revelations of the Mueller investigation and presidential impeachment hearings benchmarked against the historical nadir of political malfeasance, and each new scandal dubbed “worse than Watergate.” At the same time, new document releases have allowed scholars to probe the CIA’s internal history of Watergate and the backgrounds of the burglars and their associations with the Agency in unprecedented detail, and a new study of the FBI’s Watergate investigation has seen the Bureau’s lead investigators emerge from the shadow of Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting to reclaim key breakthroughs in the case for the Bureau’s investigation team.

Fifty years after the break-in, the surviving investigators and prosecutors still can’t understand why the burglars entered DNC headquarters in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972; or how the experienced intelligence operatives in the break-in team made such elementary mistakes, resulting in their arrests and President Nixon’s resignation two years later.

While much has been written about the White House cover-up and the Nixon White House tapes, the stories of the burglars and the FBI investigation are less well-known, and the conference organisers aim to widen the scope of Watergate scholarship and explore some of the remaining mysteries of the case. Conference speakers include historians, academics, published authors on the case and Watergate prosecutors and investigators.