How to teach kids that legacy isn’t black and white: what if Watergate never happened?
The oatmeal was congealed on Javi’s 10th grade history workbook, and my half-empty coffee mug had a ring starting on the thrifted wooden kitchen table when he looked up from the chapter on Watergate and stopped me mid-sentence. “Wait,” he said, one AirPod slipping off his shoulder onto the table, “the textbook says he created the EPA and opened relations with China and got rid of the draft. If Watergate never happened, would he be remembered as an outstanding president, not just okay?”
I’d prepped this lesson the night before, printed the vocabulary flashcards, mapped out the study guide questions, and was ready to check another box on our semester plan. I’d been homeschooling Javi for four years, and I still default to sticking to the plan when I can. He’d been scrolling hot takes on history TikTok all week, revising old presidents’ legacies to fit whatever 60-second argument a creator was making that day, so I was half ready to brush his question off as a distraction from the work we needed to get done. But he leaned forward, pen hovering over his workbook, and looked genuinely curious, not just trying to kill time. So I pushed the flashcards aside. “Let’s figure that out instead,” I said.
The only blank paper I could grab fast was a leftover sheet of dinosaur birthday wrapping paper, so I folded it in half and labeled one side “What we know Nixon did well” and the other “What we know Nixon did wrong.” Our beagle was under the table the whole time, stealing oatmeal crumbs, and we didn’t notice she dragged half a granola bar off my chair until we were halfway through filling it out.
Javi went first on the left side: created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, opened formal diplomatic relations with China, ended the military draft, pulled American troops out of Vietnam, expanded funding for social security and public education. I added a few things most high school textbooks skip: he pushed for the first national desegregation of public schools, and signed the bill that created the Endangered Species Act. On the right side, I started: ordered the IRS to illegally audit anti-war and civil rights activists, approved secret bombing raids in Cambodia without telling Congress. Then Javi added all the Watergate details: approved the break-in at the DNC headquarters, covered up the crime, fired investigators who tried to dig into it, erased 18 minutes of a key White House tape, lied to the public over and over.
When we finished, Javi tapped the left side with his pen. “Okay, but if Watergate never happened, none of this other sketchy stuff would have come out, right? So all this good stuff would be what people remember. Would that make him outstanding?”
That’s the question that stops most of us when we’re teaching history, isn’t it? We’re used to simplifying narratives to make them easy to test, easy to talk about without awkward disagreement. Nixon is a bad guy, end of story, because Watergate is the most famous political scandal in American history. The good stuff gets a 2-sentence throwaway paragraph at the start of the chapter, and that’s that.
The thing I’ve learned over the years, though, is that these messy unplanned “what if” questions are the best learning moments we get. Kids see all kinds of one-sided takes online, and if we only teach them simplified black-and-white history, they don’t know how to push back on bad arguments or think through nuance themselves. The concrete trick I started using after that morning, and that I tell other parents and teachers to try when these questions pop up, is just what we did that day: write down what you know on both sides first, don’t jump to a conclusion. It takes 15 minutes, needs no fancy prep, just any scrap of paper you have lying around. It forces you to slow down instead of repeating the take you memorized.
We talked through it for a while, and the closest we got to an answer was this: if Watergate never happened, Nixon would have finished his second term, his major policy wins would have stood unobscured by scandal, and he would almost certainly be remembered as an outstanding president, not just a good one. But that doesn’t mean his legacy would be pure—even without the break-in, the illegal surveillance, the secret bombings, would still have been there, waiting to come out. Legacy just would have looked different.
Javi put his pen down and leaned back in his chair. “So one big bad choice can wipe out how people remember all the good you did?” he said. I told him that’s part of it, but the bigger thing is that we don’t like to admit people can do both a lot of good and a lot of bad. We want everything to fit in one box.
That night, I walked past Javi’s open door and heard him explaining the dinosaur wrapping paper two-column trick to his friend over FaceTime, talking through a similar question about a controversial musician they both liked. I still wonder sometimes if I should have stuck to the plan that day, finished the Watergate chapter on schedule, moved on to the Ford administration like my curriculum told me to. There’s still no definitive answer to the original question, and there never will be—historians will debate it for decades.
But I’ve kept doing this, for history questions and for fights with friends and for the messy disagreements that pop up at family dinners. It doesn’t give us a neat, satisfying answer every time. But it teaches Javi to stop and look at all the pieces before he picks a side. That’s the lesson that sticks, way more than memorizing the date of the Watergate break-in ever will.
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