The Senate hoped to learn from the Watergate tapes "what the president knew and when he knew it," in the now famous words of Howard Baker, one of the principal members of the Senate Watergate Committee, which was created especially to find out it there was a connection between Richard Nixon's presidential campaign and the break-in into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel that had been perpetrated only five months before election day (in June of 1972), and that, as it was discovered, had been financed illegally by campaign contributions.
The White House prevented the investigation from taking place, but one of Nixon's aides, John Dean, revealed that the president had been involved in covering-up the incident. In addition, it was revealed that President Nixon had recorded all the conversations that had taken place at the Oval Office, so the Senate was hoping to find out what he and his aides had said about Watergate, but the President refused to give up the tapes. He was eventually forced by the Supreme Court to provide them, and they confirmed that he had been indeed involved in the break-in and in other illegal activities.
