In Washington D.C. in the US, there is a building complex, called the Watergate Complex, which consists of six buildings.
On 17 June 1972, five men were arrested from the Watergate Hotel (one of the six buildings in the Watergate complex).
They were believed to have entered to commit a crime, but it was later found that they had come there to fix the listening devices (microphones, etc.) that they had installed a week earlier in the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) office.
DNC is the governing body of the Democratic Party, one of the two big political parties in the US, and their office was also in the Watergate complex.
Upon investigation, these 5 people were traced back to Richard Nixon’s (the then US President) support group.
They had installed the listening devices to spy on the Democratic Party to benefit in the upcoming (1972) election, which Nixon was contesting for re-election.
Further investigations revealed that illegal money had been used to fund these secretive operations.
Before these illegal activities could be linked to Nixon, he was re-elected (November 1972).
In 1973, Nixon’s role in this scandal came to the surface, and for his attempts to block the FBI investigation, he was impeached but before he could be convicted (or acquitted), he resigned.
Watergate scandal was the biggest scandal in American history, and the media covered it extensively, including the break-in, cover-ups, related kidnapping, etc.
The tag “Watergate” was first used in August 1972 (before that it was more of the break-in, tapping scandal, etc.).
Then, within a year, in August 1973, an American magazine American Lampoon did a satirical story about a fake Russian scandal and, comparing it with the Watergate scandal, named it “Volgagate”.
This is said to be the first use of ‘-gate’.
In September 1974, a New York Times columnist, William Safire, detached “gate” from “water” for the first time and went on (in subsequent years) to coin 20 more “gates”, such as Briefingate, Travelgate, etc.
Since Safire had once been a speechwriter for Nixon, he was, years later, accused of using “gate” so much to restore Nixon’s reputation by highlighting that scandals (“gates”) were everywhere.
