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Kyle Hill, Brad Kelley, Osner Valmeus, and Meagan Julia

ENC 1145
Jennifer Enoch
April 25, 2015
Project Three: Watergate Scandal Process Memo
Our overall goal for this project was to highlight former President
Richard M. Nixons connection to the infamous Watergate Scandal of the
1970s. We decided to present our project through the perception of a
modern day FBI detective with the intent to add more context to the viewers
understanding of the Watergate Scandal of 1972 and President Nixons
controversial involvement in it. More specifically, our intension was not to
prove whether or not Nixon was guilty of ordering the burglary of the
Watergate complex or that he used illegal means in order to cover it up.
Instead, we wanted to convey the true severity of the scandal by depicting
how unbelievably far the former president was willing to go in his efforts to
preserve his image as the nations leader.
To a certain extent, we did try to explain that the Watergate Scandal
was caused by a number of illegal actions that were taken by President Nixon
and his campaign staff in order to ensure his re-election into the white house
in 1972, which included burglary, wiretapping, and the use of government
agencies to harm political opponents. Far more importantly though, was the
subsequent attempts by Nixon and his staff to cover up their actions because
that was the part of the scandal that we felt best conveyed what we wanted
to communicate with our project. That is why we chose to focus on that
aspect the most.
As a group, we chose this topic because of the tremendous political
weight this scandal held and the still-present and ultimately negative cultural

impact it had on our nation. Even further, we chose this topic because of how
much context and emphasis it allowed us to place, while still giving us more
than enough sound foundational elements to build our project on. In order to
accomplish this, we chose to meet every Sunday at the library and work on
the project together. Each member of the group was assigned different
portions of the Watergate Scandal to research and eventually synthesize into
an aspect of our project. After doing an effective amount of research, we all
felt that the best platform in which to display the different pieces of our
project was a detectives personal journal paired with a detailed detective
board.
Our intended purpose for the detectives journal was to establish a
first-person perspective of our fictional detective, but more importantly it
was meant to serve as the means by which we depict the narrative that lead
to the overall creation of our project. Part of the narrative we chose to depict
through the journal was the idea of having Nixons old house that was bought
and under renovation of another person and that is how we discovered the
secret documents that Nixon had hidden. As for the detective board, our
intended purpose for it was to be a way to visually link Nixon to the different
aspects of the Watergate scandal. The pieces of evidence we created were
burglar suspect profiles, a Nixon suspect profile, executive documents, a
newspaper article, and phone-call transcripts. Doing so allowed us to meet
the requirement of having different genres in our project. The goal with these
documents was to show the egregious lengths that President Nixon went to
during the scandal, so first we had to efficiently provide backstory and

exposition of the event. We executed this by creating the newspaper article


from 1972 that laid out the Watergate scandal in its entirety. We feel this was
effective because it captured the shared American perception of the scandal
at that time and it can make viewers feel like they were back in the 1970s
during the Nixon era. This, along with the rest of our composing strategies,
helped us to better collaborate and reach our goal in an easier and more
efficient way.
In the end, each document had a specific goal in this project. The
detectives journals intention was to give the background information about
who we are as the detective. The Nixon FBI profile was created in order for
the reader to be able to tell who the project was on just by glancing at the
board. We wanted to give a large picture summary of the situation to give
the reader an idea of the whole story before he or she dove into the small
details of the case. Therefore we created the newspaper as was mentioned
before. The following documents goals were to argue our point: Nixon was
extremely involved in the Watergate scandal that lead to his rightful
resignation.

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