Fifty years ago this week, five men were arrested trying to install listening devices after breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington DC's Watergate complex.
More than two years later, Republican Richard Milhous Nixon became the only American president to resign in order to avoid impeachment and conviction by Congress and removal from office.
But some of those who were there half a century ago don't think the same thing would happen today.
Veterans of the Watergate era warn present-day Republicans have proved unwilling to do their constitutional duty and rein in a reckless, even criminal president in Donald Trump, creating grave concerns for the future.
Democracy itself could be at stake, they say.
What exactly did Nixon do?
Richard Nixon's crime was trying to cover up White House involvement in the Watergate break-in, and in doing so, likely obstructing justice.
There was never definitive proof Nixon had any prior knowledge of the break-in itself.
Which is not to say Richard Nixon was a saint, far from it.
The same group of Nixon henchmen who orchestrated the Watergate operation also conducted a wide-ranging dirty tricks campaign to aid Nixon's re-election in 1972.
They committed other break-ins and plotted to blow up progressive think tank The Brookings Institution and assassinate an anti-Nixon newspaper columnist.
Those who knew and worked with Nixon describe him as a brooding, paranoid, peculiar man.
Highly intelligent, even brilliant in some ways, he is remembered as an almost friendless loner with a chip on his shoulder as big as Mount Rushmore.
"Nixon was very unsure of himself," says journalist and author Elizabeth Drew.
Nixon's rise – and fall
After eight years as vice-president to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon lost his first shot at the presidency in 1960 to John F Kennedy in an election close enough and crooked enough that he could rightly feel somewhat aggrieved.
Kennedy's side proved slightly better at ballot stuffing.
Nixon won another tight contest in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey, inheriting a nation at war in Vietnam and seemingly at war with itself at home over civil rights, drugs and crime.
But by 1972, Nixon was riding high, cantering to re-election after his historic visit to China and with an end in sight to the war in Vietnam.
In the sight of greatness, Nixon's presidency and indeed his life was about to collapse into infamy.
But not right away.
Watergate wasn't a major issue in the 1972 election — the links between the White House and the organisers of the break-in were yet to be fully aired in court or the congress.
William Weld, as legal counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, was one of the first people to hear what came to be known as "the smoking gun" tape, one of thousands recorded automatically in the president's Oval Office.
It proved Nixon had engaged in a cover-up beginning just days after the break-in, while publicly denying any knowledge of it.
"You had the president of the United States lying through his teeth to the American people," Weld says.
Not only that, but Nixon had pressured the FBI and the US Justice Department to halt their investigations into Watergate, and it was all on tape.
It was a delegation of Nixon's fellow Republicans, led by 1964 presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, who went to Nixon the day after hearing the "smoking gun tape" to tell him he'd lost their support and should resign immediately.
Nixon did.
Could the same thing happen today?
"Do you think that would happen today?" Weld now asks. "I don't think so."
Weld later became Republican governor of Massachusetts and ran for the GOP's presidential nomination against incumbent Donald Trump in 2020.
Weld says in his legal opinion, Trump committed a crime by inciting a riot on January 6, 2021 when he encouraged his supporters to march on the US Capitol Building to prevent the certification of Biden's election win.
"That was a laydown case for impeachment and removal, and it got just a handful of votes on the Republican side."
Unlike 1972, when senior Republicans told Nixon to resign to avoid impeachment, when Trump was impeached first in 2020, then a second time in 2021, almost all Republicans stood by him.
The constitutional guardrails are now off.
Elizabeth Drew says there's another key difference: ultimately, Nixon had limits on what he was willing to do and the laws he was prepared to break, while she believes Trump does not.
"He was willing to overthrow an election, that is astonishing and terrifying," Drew says.
Trump can run for president again in 2024 or later, but Drew thinks that's unlikely.
But she also has this word of caution, "when people say our democracy is up for grabs, it's true."
