Watergate 50 years later: Last guy to turn out the lights before burglars arrived recalls infamous break-in

Close to midnight on June 17, 1972, 21-year-old intern Bruce Givner turned off the lights as he exited the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.

Today, as Americans mark the foiled burglary that would eventually bring down U.S. President Richard Nixon, Givner can definitively say: "I was the last person legally inside the offices of the Watergate the night it was broken into." 

The Ohio native had stayed late inside the offices, long after everyone had cleared out, taking advantage of the DNC's flat-fee long distance plan to call up his friends, parents and ex- and current girlfriends. 

"I probably started about 7 p.m., and I just talked and talked and talked," said Givner, now a 71-year-old California tax attorney. "I was talking to at least a dozen people, maybe more."

With the washrooms located in an area that would have locked him outside the office, he decided to step onto the balcony and pee in the planter because he "figured that wouldn't hurt the plants."

What Givner didn't know was that all of his actions were being surveilled by a group of would-be burglars planning to break into the DNC offices and that he was thwarting their plans, and that by doing so, he may have been changing the course of American history.

Givner is just one of the dozens and dozens of people who played some kind of role, direct or indirect, in the Watergate break-in — the most famous attempted burglary in U.S. history.

On this date 50 years ago, five men were arrested for the break-in and charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications.

But the real drama came later, with the discovery that they were working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, and were hoping to find material that would help the Republican Party get Nixon re-elected to a second term. 

Nixon's subsequent attempt to obstruct justice by thwarting the FBI investigation would lead to unprecedented televised political hearings, criminal convictions of the president's top aides and his eventual downfall.

A half century later, the interest in Watergate appears not to have subsided. It remains the subject of books, podcasts and entertainment, with a new series about the scandal called Gaslit starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn out earlier this year and another, The White House Plumbers, starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, on the way.

The suffix "gate" has since become affixed to the scandal du jour, and any new major political controversy that arises is often compared to Watergate in terms of scope or severity.

But the break-in itself that set off the chain of events is also a source of fascination, as landmarks of the famous break in still remain in some shape or form.

The Howard Johnson hotel, where former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin stood lookout for the Watergate burglars from Room 723, is no longer there. It had become a dormitory for George Washington University students but was sold to a developer and is now a mixed-use building combining apartments and retail on the ground floor.