Fifty years ago Friday, burglars broke in the Watergate complex headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. The subsequent actions stemming from that break-in, as students of history know, brought down a presidential administration.
But the dust shaken from the events that played out over the next two-plus years affected politics throughout the nation, including in Tennessee.
Closest to Chattanooga, it played a par in the 1974 3rd District congressional race.
But the day the break-in first hit the hometown Washington Post, June 18, 1972, Democrat Richard Winningham was quoted in the Chattanooga Times as having told members of the Hamilton County Democratic Party Executive Committee the November election “may be the last call for the Democratic party in Tennessee if we don’t defeat [Republican U.S. Sen.] Howard Baker.”
After some 40 years of Democratic dominance in the state, Baker had won one of the state’s two Senate seats in 1966 and was facing re-election. Worse for Democrats, the state had elected U.S. Rep. William E. Brock III, R-Chattanooga, as its other senator two years earlier.