First, the Senate, in order to investigate charges of political malfeasance in the 1972 presidential election, had created the select Watergate Committee, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin. Later, independent press discovery of the CIA's domestic spying, (Operation Chaos), created national headlines. Thereafter, a long list of questionable CIA activities surfaced which caught the public's attention, and were nicknamed the family jewels. Both the Senate, (January 1975), and the House, (February 1975), created select committees to investigate intelligence matters. Senator Frank Church headed one, and Representative Otis Pike headed the other. In an effort to head off such inquiries, President Gerald Ford had created a Commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whose seminal interest was the CIA's recent foray into collecting intelligence on Americans. 1975 would become known as the "Year of Intelligence".