Richard Nixon and the Watergate Scandal: Rights and Responsibilities

By: Manav Trivedi Senior Individual Exhibit

I chose my topic because my family, being from a lineage of secondgeneration immigrants, has many ties throughout our former and migrant countries. At this moment, there is a political battle between many minsters within which there is a lot of exploitation of scandals. This raised a question in my mind: Isnt it possible for the former leaders of America to use scandalous methods in order to earn money, get elected, etc.? Slowly, we learned about small events such as issues in President Grant or President Hardings administration. Eventually, I focused this broad topic down to the Watergate scandal, which is arguably the worst American scandal. I conducted my research by searching for numerous primary sources such as newspapers after the scandal to understand the common persons point of view. Other valuable sources that I had found include government documents and court cases to get insight on the governments reaction to the event. However, my most powerful source has to be the video and audio recordings of Richard Nixon, himself, explaining his actions and emotions. These three sources gave me different perspectives on the same event, enabling me to judge Richard Nixons criminal-like activity. I also had some useful secondary sources that gauged Nixon based off his previous actions and intentions. I selected the website because I enjoy embracing my creativity in order to arrange text and other media items all in the end to create a visually pleasing web application to explain my theme. I am comfortable with using computers and managing various types of sources to inform my viewers about my historical topic. This enables me to express my own beliefs as well as the facts by implementing virtual structures on a basis of an entire array of sources instead of simply using word and pictures. My website also has many audio-visual components with which the viewers can listen to some of Nixons speeches and to judge his actions themselves. This project relates to the NHD theme because it questions whether the rights of the American people are being given as a responsibility to the right leader. The theme, Rights and Responsibilities, correlates to my topic directly because it questions whether or not the responsibility of the President of the United States to the rights of American people are being given to the right leader. A leader that maintains his responsibility by supplying his citizens with their rights justly determines that the leader in question was a proper representative for the peoplebut in this case, its the opposite. Because Nixon was unable to sustain the right to equality for all people in the United States, he was inadequate for the position. This can be seen during the investigation, where Nixon, thinking of himself as a greater person being the President, unwilling holds onto illegal tapes to his criminal records. He gets elected illegitimately -by cheating-, technically steals government equipment, and then abuses the rights of the American people.