The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of The Atlantic’s November issue that year, “The Runaway…