What If Watergate Never Happened: How Counterfactual History Builds Kids’ Critical Thinking
The granola bar crumbs were stuck to my 10th grader’s history textbook, his laptop open to a chapter on 1970s scandal that cut off halfway through Nixon’s presidency. He pushed his crumpled gum wrapper to the side and looked up from the kitchen table, the question catching me off guard: If Watergate never happened, would Nixon have been remembered as an outstanding president, not just a bad one?
I’d just poured a second cup of coffee, which was already starting to steam out on the counter. My first instinct was to say that question wasn’t on his upcoming quiz, that he should stick to the assigned study guide. But he’d looked too curious to shut down, so I pulled out a chair and sat down. He said his AP US teacher was ditching the usual multiple-choice review that week to do a whole class period of counterfactual questions, open discussions with no right answers. This was the one he’d picked.
We started sorting through what we both knew. I reminded him of the achievements I’d learned growing up and revisited as an adult: Nixon opened formal relations with China, a move that reshaped global politics for decades. He signed the bill that created the Environmental Protection Agency, pushed through desegregation of Southern schools faster than any president before him, and eliminated the military draft. On a scrap of grocery receipt I pulled from my junk drawer, my son scribbled those down under the “yes, outstanding” side.
Then we turned to the other side. Even before the Watergate break-in, Nixon was wiretapping reporters and political opponents, keeping a secret list of “enemies” he wanted targeted by the IRS. He expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia with secret bombings that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and his administration was rife with corruption that had nothing to do the break-in at the Democratic National Committee. We added those to the “no” column. Our golden retriever nudged my hand for a crumb, and I gave him the last half of the granola bar while we sorted through gaps in what we remembered.
I realized right then that I’d never thought about this question myself. All I’d ever absorbed was the cultural punchline: Nixon = crook, resigned in disgrace, end of story. Textbooks do that, right? They reduce complex people to one defining moment, because it’s easier to memorize for a test. But that kind of oversimplification leaks into how kids think about everything, from historical figures to people they see online to classmates they only know one thing about. That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re helping with homework: the most important lessons aren’t the ones that get graded.
After that afternoon, I started noticing how often my kids throw out these messy, “what if” questions out of nowhere, and how often I almost shut them down because they’re “off topic.” I’ve started using this simple trick, the one we used with the Nixon question, that takes 10 minutes max and doesn’t derail dinner or homework. First, when they ask an unanswerable question like this, don’t brush it off. Pull out any scrap of paper and have them split it into two columns: what facts support one conclusion, what facts support the other. No opinions allowed until both columns are full. Second, if neither of you know a key fact, look up one or two together from a trusted source (we use the Library of Congress or National Archives sites for history, no random social media posts). Third, don’t force a final “right” answer. Just ask them what they think after listing the facts, and leave it at that.
We ended up agreeing that Nixon would probably be remembered as a good president if Watergate never happened, but not an outstanding one. The flaws and bad choices ran too deep to be hidden forever, even if the break-in never got uncovered. But we also both acknowledged we could be wrong. There’s no way to test it, that’s the whole point of the question. It’s not about getting the right answer, it’s about practicing thinking through messy, complicated stuff without jumping to a conclusion based on one fact or one moment.
A week later, my son came home and said his class discussion got pretty heated, but no one lost points for having the “wrong” view. Half the class thought Nixon would be outstanding, half thought he’d still be mediocre at best. He said it was the first time he’d left a history class not memorizing an answer, just thinking.
I’ve used the two-column trick with my younger son a couple of times since, when he asked what would have happened if the Titanic never sank, or if the internet was never invented. It doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t require any fancy lesson plans. I still don’t know for sure what would have happened to Nixon’s legacy if Watergate never occurred. I don’t think I need to. The point isn’t the answer. It’s that we stopped, thought through both sides, and got a little better at not reducing people to one single story.
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