The 1972 conspiracy that shaped the US

Since then, Nixon’s downfall has inspired artworks from a range of creators, from Alan J Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men, the earliest film in the genre, to Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995), and Robbie Pickering’s Gaslit, a new TV series premiering on StarzPlay on 24 April.

“It’s been an endlessly fertile ground for television, movies, visual art, humour, even music,” says David Greenberg, cultural historian and author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. “There’s something about Nixon’s dark qualities that still provokes the imagination.”

Gaslit also coincides with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue, on view until 5 September. And this autumn, HBO is expected to air The White House Plumbers from the producers of Veep, starring Woody Harrelson as E Howard Hunt and Justin Theroux as G Gordon Liddy, the two masterminds behind the DNC burglary.

So what is it that keeps creatives coming back to the well of Watergate? According to Gaslit creator Robbie Pickering, at least, it’s the chance to give a “modern take” on the scandal. He wanted to focus on the tragic whistleblowers who have faded from the spotlight – particularly Martha Mitchell (played by Julia Roberts), the wife of Attorney General John Mitchell (played by Sean Penn).

Pickering’s eight-part series comes from a more jaded eye than previous screen versions. He says that he and his generation have never known an uncorrupt US presidential administration. After Nixon’s resignation, President Ronald Reagan’s staff got caught making illegal shipments of arms to Iran to fund Nicaragua’s Contra militants in 1986, the year Pickering was born. Presidential scandals continued through to the current investigation of President Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice.

“The baby boomer kind of films and stories about this period really take on the mythological heroes and villains quality,” he tells BBC Culture. “But it really is this mundane story. And by showing some of the lesser-known people, you really understand how human a lot of the villains were and how complex a lot of the heroes were.”

Pickering based his series in part on Slate’s 2018 Slow Burn Watergate podcast, using that programme’s sceptical approach to US institutions by depicting Nixon’s enabling culture: In Gaslit, we never see the president on screen, just his bumbling cronies trying to use bureaucracy to cover up Nixon’s connection to the burglary. All this amid an atmosphere of the casual bigotry and sexism of the time.

Pickering resuscitates the image of Martha Mitchell and other characters who never got the hero treatment before, including White House counsel John Dean’s wife, Mo (played by Betty Gilpin), and even Frank Wills (Patrick R Walker), the African-American security guard who first reported the Watergate burglary.

But Gaslit is really Mitchell’s story, and it’s a heart-wrenching one. With a teased 1970s flip hairdo, Julia Roberts’ Mitchell is surrounded by ’70s decor and decorum: her upscale Watergate apartment is bathed in burnt sienna brown, with avocado kitchen appliances and a railed-in sunken living room with paneled walls and a wet bar, popular at the time. As an outspoken Republican socialite, Mitchell was known for drinking and calling reporters with political gossip and information she picked up from overhearing her husband’s phone conversations or looking through documents he kept in his office.

When John Mitchell was appointed head of Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP as it became known later, for the 1972 presidential campaign, Martha began relaying her suspicions that Nixon was unleashing a bag of “dirty tricks” to get back at enemies and Democratic opponents.

And her actions have tragic consequences. During the week of the Watergate break-in, John asks Martha to stay in a California hotel – not to have a rest, as he says, but so she doesn’t find out about the crime and talk to the press. Behind her back, he orders a bodyguard to keep her away from the phone and newspapers.

Julia Roberts, in pyjamas and a bathrobe, is terrified of what’s happening around her. She tries to call a reporter for help and the bodyguard rips the phone out of the wall to stop her. When she tries to escape, the guard grabs her and beats her in a struggle as she crashes into a glass coffee table. Already bruised, he roughs her up more while injecting her with a sedative to keep her quiet.

Held prisoner for more than a week, Roberts’ Martha is deflated as her power, her voice, is forever stifled. Nixon’s cronies tell the press she has a drinking problem and is recuperating in a psychiatric home. Gaslit by her own husband and discredited by the most powerful government in the world, by the seventh episode the once vivacious socialite becomes a pill-popping ghost of her former self.

According to Pickering, Gaslit is about how collusion in corruption on a personal and national scale can devastate relationships or bind them together. “It’s like a grenade going off,” he says. “John Mitchell’s complicity with Nixon really destroyed his marriage,” just as it destroyed the nation’s belief in the presidency.

Watergate’s intrigue and dysfunction is what often brings artists to retell this saga, according to director Andrew Fleming, whose 1999 film Dick is one of the funniest cinematic Watergate farces. Fleming and writing partner Sheryl Longin combed through all existing Watergate films and books while writing the script. “There were so many ridiculous moments in reality that we had to riff on,” he tells BBC Culture, that a sense of outrageousness was easily written into the script, about two teenyboppers played by Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst, who unknowingly become the heart and soul of the Watergate scandal.

The ultimate anti-hero

“We were definitely inspired by the facts,” says Fleming. “Nixon was a tragi-comic character, his downfall came out of his ego and self-delusion.” Both Fleming and Pickering take liberty with the facts surrounding Watergate to heighten the scandal’s drama and absurdity and, in Pickering’s case, a sense of moral degradation. But Harry Shearer, the voice of Montgomery Burns and Ned Flanders, among others, in The Simpsons, created his online series Nixon’s the One!, because “the facts are so great on their own”, he says.

Nixon’s the One! depicts Shearer as Nixon and other players acting out dialogue taken directly from Nixon’s publicly available White House tapes – with all their racism, anti-Semitism and paranoia on display. Shearer is a self-proclaimed Nixonphile who’s been parodying the shadowy president since the 1960s. “Nixon is the ultimate Shakespearean anti-hero,” he tells BBC Culture. “He’s a remarkable mix of vices and virtues as a character, which makes artists keep coming back.”

Oliver Stone, the director of the 1995 film Nixon, would agree with Shearer. Stone tells BBC Culture he was compelled to make a realistic presentation of the “brooding, tortured man” as film critic Roger Ebert describes Stone’s Richard Nixon, played by Anthony Hopkins. The filmmaker said he used the Watergate scandal as a MacGuffin of sorts to examine one man’s tragic behaviour.

Representations of Nixon are also on display in the National Portrait Gallery’s new Watergate exhibition, along with caricatures, photographs and mixed media presentations of the major figures of the scandal. Like Pickering, curator Kate Clarke Lemay wanted to give a fresh spin on the scandal by rehabilitating Martha Mitchell’s image. Artist Jan De Ruth’s colourful 1970 oil painting of the “very important whistleblower” captures her candid personality, Lemay tells BBC Culture.

De Ruth paints the socialite in a bright yellow shirt and golden yellow hair with an orange glow in the background. Sombre strokes of blue and green give Mitchell a sense of dignity, “much more than other portraits of her,” says Lemay.

Many of the portraits are culled from the gallery’s vast collection of covers from Time magazine, a US news weekly prominent in the 1970s.

Artist George Giusti’s 1973 caricature of John Mitchell on a bleach bottle is particularly arresting. As is Jack Davis’s 1973 cartoon of Nixon and his political circle pointing fingers at each other while wrapped in recording tape, phone cords and headphones – all trapped in the public eye. “Artists are drawn to the intrigue that this scandal offered us,” says Lemay. “They like stories of politicians who made the wrong steps. Watergate was a touchstone.”

Gaslit premieres on StarzPlay on 24 April.

Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue is at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC until 5 September 2022.

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