On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old, black security guard, working the night shift at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., detected a piece of tape on a door lock leading to the offices of the headquarters of the National Democratic Committee. He removed the tape and returned later to find another piece holding open the latch. He called the police, and five men were arrested for burglary. That call set in motion events that led to the prosecution of several men in the administration of Richard Nixon and ultimately the end of his Presidency. Because Wills did the right thing, we now remember this day as the anniversary of the Watergate Scandal.

Wills was, for all intents and purposes, an “ordinary American.” While many black people in the post-WWII Southern Civil Rights Movement—such as E.D. Nixon, Claudette Colvin, Amzie Moore, and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson—acted intentionally as part of a concerted effort to challenge the social and political inequalities of the system of Jim Crow, Wills found himself at an historical pivot point somewhat by accident. What he shares with these crucial figures is that, for the most part, they are lost to our nation’s historical memory.

Adam Henig’s biography, Watergate’s Forgotten Hero: Frank Wills, Night Watchman, follows Wills’ life from the economic hardships of a childhood in North Augusta, South Carolina, with his single-parent mother, who raised him. He did poorly in school, dropped out of high school, and traveled to Michigan to join the Job Corps, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the 1960s, which was discontinued when funding was redirected to the expansion of the Vietnam War. 

Wills worked briefly in the auto industry, was laid off, and found his options limited. When he moved to Washington, D.C., part-time employment was all he could find. His luck changed when he landed a full-time job as a security guard at the Watergate Hotel. 

When Wills helped expose the Watergate Scandal, he couldn’t have been more surprised by the nationwide attention for what he believed was only doing his job. Always a shy, unassuming person, Wills eventually embraced the spotlight, playing himself in the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While Woodward and Bernstein earned acclaim for their work uncovering the scandal, Wills did not. The Watergate building offered him a raise from $80 to $82.50 per week. Wills ultimately left for a role in another Washington building, where he earned $85 per week (about $638 in 2026), and struggled to find stable employment later in his life. 

“There is a breakdown in the political system,” Wills told TIME in 1973. “The American people are not aware of what is really happening. I’ve seen it firsthand, and it’s opened my eyes real wide. I feel sorry for the people who look at Watergate and say it’s just politics.”

In writing my own book, Looking for Frank Wills, I learned that Wills was disillusioned with the important role he played in uncovering the Watergate conspiracy. The shame is that we need ordinary Americans to do the right thing, perhaps now more than ever.

I didn’t set out to draw parallels between the perils we are living through now as a nation and the turbulent period of the late 1960s and 70s. They are clearly there: Americans’ disillusionment with our nation’s deadly wars abroad; the efforts by the Nixon administration to carry out illegal wiretap surveillance of the National Democratic Party Headquarters to help secure a Republican victory in the 1972 Presidential election; and the resignation of Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that shook America to its very core. 

During that time, we were faced with a crucial question: Who are we? How can we have faith in the bedrock principles of American democracy when they are upended by a government who, in the service of power, engaged in deliberate lies and deceit? A government that pitted citizens against one another and convinced an overwhelming majority of the American people that they were betrayed?  

Fifty years later, we are about to mark the republic’s 250th anniversary and, once again, must reckon with a similar question. Will the promise of liberty and equal justice for all prevail? To paraphrase William Butler Yeats, will the foundations of our democracy hold, or will things fall apart? 

Civil Rights pioneer, Ella Baker, believed the answer to this question can only come, in a meaningful way, through the active engagement of ordinary citizens, such as Frank Wills, making common cause with whomever, whenever, and wherever that may be, especially at this moment when that is needed more than ever before.