[Commlist] CFP: “The Watergate Break-In: 50 Years Later” conference

Shane O'Sullivan is pleased to announce a two-day online conference 
reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in, 
convened by Shane O'Sullivan and Dr Melissa Graves.

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 on the evening 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.

We welcome proposals for individual papers and pre-organised panels 
which reflect recent and emerging scholarship on subjects which might 
include: the White House Plumbers, the Fielding break-in, the 
Moorer-Radford Affair, the Gemstone Plan, the surveillance of anti-war 
protestors as a precursor to Watergate, the Watergate burglars, the 
Watergate break-ins, the first phase of the White House cover-up, the 
FBI and CIA investigations, Judge Sirica and the trial of the Watergate 
burglars in January 1973, the Watergate whistle-blowers, the impact of 
the Watergate investigation on the trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony 
Russo, and the work of the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate 
Special Prosecution Force. We are also interested in proposals which 
explore the social and cultural impact of Watergate or other relevant areas.

Conference sessions will be 90 minutes long and comprise 3 x 20-minute 
presentations, followed by 30 minutes for questions/discussion. 
Proposals for pre-organized panel should include a moderator and three 
individual presentations. All presentations will be video recorded and 
made publicly available on the conference website. Selected papers may 
also be published.

The conference coincides with the release of a major new HBO series on 
the Watergate burglars, /The White House Plumbers/ 
<https://www.hbo.com/white-house-plumbers> and invited speakers will 
include historians, academics, published authors on the case and 
Watergate investigators.

The proposal submission deadline is April 10, 2022. Please submit a 
250-word abstract and short bio to (s.osullivan /at/ kingston.ac.uk). If 
submitting a panel proposal, please include abstracts for each proposed 
presentation and short bios for each speaker. Thank you for your 
interest in participating in this conference.


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