In 1973 several men who were caught a few years earlier breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington DC came to trial. They were convicted and given harsh sentences, but were promised the sentences would be reduced if they told authorities who had ordered them to break in. I guess some of them started talking, because the various investigations of the Watergate scandal then picked up momentum.
In May of 1973, Congressional hearings investigating the Watergate scandal began. They were broadcast daily every weekday live on tv and the Public Broadcasting Network replayed the committee meetings in the evenings. Those committee meetings were better than any cloak and dagger or thriller movie. The committee meetings were so exciting because every few days a little more truth came out. It was continually surprising to learn that someone closer to the President knew this or that detail. Mr. Butterfield was, I believe, a sound technician. His testamony, that everything said in the Oval Office while Nixon was President was taped, was a game changer! Well, everything except 18 minutes of a conversation that was said to prove that President Nixon knew about it very soon after the breakin. Those 18 minutes were somehow erased. In any event, those committee hearings were very, very exciting! I watched the committee hearings daily.
One thing that made the Watergate Committee hearings great was the bipartisan work of the Republican Senators Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker. If those two had stonewalled, the coverup may have continued and the truth would have never come out. But luckily those two diligently searched for the truth, often siding with the Democrats on that committee. And in the end, the truth came out!