What was Watergate?

You see lots of people comparing Benghazi to Watergate. However, Scott Johnson asks,

But what was Watergate? We don’t know who ordered the bungled second break-in of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. We don’t know the motive for the break-in. We don’t know what the burglars were looking for. We do know that as early as June 20, 1972, President Nixon took charge of efforts to cover up his campaign’s link to the break-in and and sought to manipulate the resources of the executive branch to engineer a coverup.