Crossroads: High School Curriculum
Unit XI: Leader of the Free World: 1945-1975
Lesson 6 - Resource 1
Lesson 6
TO THE STUDENT: Your role in this activity is to describe and analyze
the role that your constituency played in the Watergate affair.
DIRECTIONS:
- On a good-sized piece of posterboard, oaktag, or construction paper, draw a
time-line of events in the Watergate affair from the break-in discovered on 17
June 1972 through the cover-up, investigations, and prosecutions, and
culminating with President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard
Nixon on 8 September 1974.
- Within each segment of the time-line, describe the ways that your
constituency took part in events, your constituency's purposes and goals, and
the other groups or constituencies with which you were involved. Design a
flow-chart of these interactions, using an array of well-defined geometric
shapes to represent each of the five major constituencies and different kinds
of lines (solid, dotted, dashed, and so forth) to represent different kinds of
interactions among the groups.
- Following the completion of your chart, you will be asked to assist the
class in creating a large classroom display that clarifies the following:
In the exposure, investigation, and prosecution of the Watergate break-in
and cover-up, the Congress, the judiciary, and the prosecutors carried out
their constitutionally-mandated roles, and the press performed the vital
watchdog function envisioned by the founders of the American republic.
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