Scandalgate

Whose idea was it to add the suffix gate to any scandal after the Watergate scandal?

The 'gate’' suffix from the OED.

Only a year after Watergate, the scandal had become so well known that -gate became detached and was used to create names for other scandals. The OED’s first recorded example is from August 1972 in National Lampoon [I think that's a typo; the OED entry for -gate says 1973.]:
>‘There have been persistent rumors in Russia of a vast scandal.‥ Implicated in “the Volgagate” are a group of liberal officials.’

A few months later the –gate craze had shown no signs of abating, a fact signalled by the weary use of ‘inevitably’ in the following quotation:
>‘Inevitably, the brouhaha of Bordeaux became known as Wine-gate.’

They do it in Chinese too.

If you're going to credit any one individual, it would be the late NY Times columnist and former Spiro Agnew speechwriter William Safire. From Wiki:

The adoption of -gate to suggest the existence of a scandal was promoted by William Safire, the conservative New York Times columnist and former Nixon administration speechwriter. As early as September 1974 he wrote of "Vietgate", a proposed pardon of the Watergate criminals and Vietnam War draft dodgers. Subsequently he coined numerous -gate terms, including Billygate, Briefingate, Contragate, Deavergate, Debategate, Doublebillingsgate (of which he later said "My best [-gate coinage] was the encapsulation of a minor ... scandal as doublebillingsgate"), Frankiegate, Franklingate, Genschergate, Housegate, Iraqgate, Koreagate, Lancegate, Maggiegate, Nannygate, Raidergate, Scalpgate, Travelgate, Troopergate and Whitewatergate. The New York magazine suggested that his aim in doing so was "rehabilitating Nixon by relentlessly tarring his successors with the same rhetorical brush – diminished guilt by association." Safire himself later admitted to author Eric Alterman that, as Alterman puts it, "psychologically, he may have been seeking to minimize the relative importance of the crimes committed by his former boss with this silliness."

My personal favorite was a scandal involving TV evangelists. New YOrk Times columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1987:
>Having decreed as recently as December that it was time for journalism to abandon the tired old -gate suffix in the naming of scandals, I am now given a humbling lesson in the error of dogmatism. Its source is the scandal of warring TV preachers, for which there is only one possible name: Pearlygate.

Good one.

If I understand the situation correctly, his job is on the line not so much for calling her a pleb (and the associated "Do you know who I am? I'll have your job!" sort of attitude when she was just doing her duty) as for denying he did so, implicitly calling at least two police officers liars, when they (unlike he) had no reason to lie.

Thankfully, Microsoft's founder hasn't yet been involved in multiple scandals.

I found it vaguely annoying that while the Microsoft founder was Bill Gates, one of the leading IT writers was Gil Bates.

Nutrax - thank you. pearlygate had me laughing out loud.

Edited by: Myanmarbound for clarity

I liked pearlygate and gategate.

If Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme of 'Manson Family' fame broke her parole, that would have to be 'squeaky gate'.

They used to do it in France, too -- it was a really awful idea.

It's just as bad as those other media words that were discussed here recently -- financial tsunamis or employment armageddons or whatever.