WATERGATE
Watergate, 1973-74
by John M. Parrish

"But if there be no accountability, another President will feel free to do as he chooses. The next time there may be no watchman in the night.”

-House Judiciary Committee member James Mann, 1974

In Watergate, 1973-74, students experience the unfolding of America’s most dramatic constitutional crisis of the 20th century: the investigation of the Watergate burglary and its subsequent cover-up.

Beginning in July 1973, as the point where the scandal’s main facts had finally been made public, students will portray members of Congress, the news media, and the Nixon Administration as they struggle to cope with the emerging crisis.

The key to resolving the crisis are the president’s secret White House tapes – Nixon invoked questions of high constitutional principle to withhold access to the tapes from the special prosecutor and Congress – but many of his critics suspected he was merely trying to conceal evidence of his guilt.

With the world’s most powerful person barricading himself within the walls of the White House and threatening to take the constitutional order itself hostage to ensure his political survival, how could well-intentioned leaders pursue truth and justice without risking collateral damage to the nation’s foundational principles and institutions? Watergate gives students the chance to understand the importance of evidence and disciplined verification in resolving conflicts of belief and value, and to wrestle with the often-frustrating complexity of using such processes to decide, under conditions of profound uncertainty, some of the most consequential questions of a nation’s political life.