Trace the Watergate scandal from the break-in through Nixon's resignation, and explain how it tested the constitutional system of checks and balances.
On June 17, 1972, five men connected to Nixon's reelection campaign were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, aided by a secret source they nicknamed "Deep Throat" (revealed decades later, in 2005, as FBI official Mark Felt), traced the break-in to senior White House officials. A Senate investigating committee's 1973 hearings revealed that Nixon had secretly taped nearly all Oval Office conversations -- a discovery that made the cover-up provable, if the tapes could be obtained. When Nixon ordered the firing of the special prosecutor investigating him in October 1973, the "Saturday Night Massacre," his attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out the order, a dramatic instance of officials refusing to comply with a presidential directive they viewed as an abuse of power.
The crisis reached the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon (1974), which unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes, rejecting his claim of unlimited executive privilege. One released tape -- the "smoking gun" -- proved Nixon had known of and approved the cover-up almost from the start. Facing near-certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the only U.S. president ever to do so; Vice President Gerald Ford, himself appointed after Nixon's original vice president resigned in a separate corruption scandal, became president and, controversially, pardoned Nixon a month later, a decision that likely cost Ford political support but that he defended as necessary to let the country move past the crisis. Congress responded with structural reforms, including the War Powers Resolution (1973, limiting presidential war-making without congressional approval) and the Church Committee investigations (1975), which exposed years of illegal domestic surveillance and other abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. Watergate's lasting lesson was less about one man's misconduct than about whether the system's checks, even when slow, would ultimately hold -- and they did.
Mastery looks like: They can sequence Watergate's major events from break-in to resignation, explain United States v. Nixon's significance, and present both sides of the Ford pardon debate fairly.
Common stumbles: Treating Watergate as simply a story about one corrupt president, rather than as a test of whether the press, Congress, and courts could hold executive power accountable even when it resisted.