MON., DECEMBER 08, 2008
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Magazine Archives:
Watergate Blues
by Michaelangelo Matos
Has any modern political event ever lent itself so well to pop-culture geekery as Watergate? That’s largely due to the way pop culture absorbed the events as they happened, from sitcoms aspiring to social realism like All in the Family to smart-aleck comedians like Dickie Goodman, whose 1973 single “Watergrate,” [sic] features his inimitable roving-reporter questions answered by snippets from hit records. (Goodman: “With me now is John Snitchell. Mr. Snitchell, who do you believe was responsible for Watergrate?” War: “The Cisco Kid”)
But decades after the fact, Watergate still grips the mind. Maybe that’s because it’s the one time a corrupt White House’s dirty laundry was aired to any effect during the administration itself (as opposed to years after the fact). Or maybe it’s because the events had such a beautiful narrative arc. In the summer of 1972, President Nixon’s re-election committee decides to play dirty with the opposition candidate, bungles a break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters and attempts to cover it up with the President’s go-ahead. The whole kit and kaboodle is uncovered by two beat reporters for the local daily, assisted by an insider with an alias lifted from a porno flick. Especially with that final detail — this could only have happened in the ’70s. And if that decade’s pop culture has any hold on you, Watergate is the key that unlocks a lot of other aspects of US culture at the time, from the desperation driving much of the decade’s best filmmaking to the explosion of disco, whose celebratory sound was just the thing for a generation whose ideals, in the wake of Nixon’s forced retirement, seemed to have come out on top for once.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. One critic friend recently told me that his soundtrack on two West Texas road trips consisted entirely of alternations of German minimal techno and the audiobook of Bob Woodward’s The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat (Simon & Schuster, 2005), as read by actor Boyd Gaines. Another, when I told him I was writing about recordings of the Watergate hearings, simply said, “Awww, yeah — the canonical classic that started it all.” In short, Watergate can be understood as a very odd, riveting performance; as a series of weird cult records by the least groovy guys of their era, like a very white-collar version of Hustler’s Convention; as a piece of pop culture itself.
Only five minutes of Richard Nixon’s The Best of the Speeches are given to Watergate. That’s understandable: the title is Best; it isn’t Not-So-Hottest. “The Watergate Tapes” is an excerpt from a longer address that highlights Nixon’s infamous comment, “I am not a crook.” (It also doesn’t mention the Watergate tapes.) “Resignation” is the real chart-topper: Nixon sounds as comfortable as a man with an anvil sitting on his head, which in a way he did have.
The first cut is probably the most apt: “Checkers,” Nixon’s infamous 1952 address about accusations of fiscal campaign misdeeds in which he was reduced to detailing his personal finances. It’s easy to forget how commanding much of this speech is, until Nixon brings up his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and the titular Cocker Spaniel a campaign supporter gave Nixon's kids; after that, all you can smell is snake oil.
It’s as cloying as the thousandth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street.
Nixon also bats lead-off on Watergate, Vol. 1: The Break-In — the first of five volumes on Smithsonian/Folkways — with his announcement of the resignations of high-level White House aides John Dean, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichmann. Nixon tries to sugarcoat it: “In accepting these resignations, I mean to leave no implication whatever of personal wrongdoing on their part. And I mean no implication . . . [about] others who have been charged tonight.” The way Nixon’s tone rises on the word “others” is classic Dad-has-it-all-under-control: Nixon is audibly trying to hold himself together, and when he says, “Justice will be served very fully and impartially,” it’s as cloying as the thousandth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street.
The real gold, though, are the trials themselves. The juiciest is Vol. 4: White House Horrors: The Testimony of John Mitchell, in which the ex-Attorney General spills everything. “You told Mr. Liddy, ‘Take that stuff out and burn it,’” a counselor asks Mitchell. “Would I be proper in translating your statement… to mean, ‘Get rid of this incriminating evidence?’” Mitchell answers: “Not only that, Senator, to get rid of incriminating evidence, but also to abandon any concept that any such activities would be part of the re-election campaign of the President.”
Listening all these years later, two things about the Watergate trials stand out. One, they’re riveting listening. The testimony is frequently implosive: Nixon’s confederates have risked their entire professional reputation on their man and their country, and it’s all falling apart in the most public manner possible. On Vol. 1, Watergate burglar James McCord talks about having expected executive clemency to swoop in and save his hide in the same hopeful terms with which a child on welfare would discuss the Easter Bunny.
The other noticeable thing is that none of this is business-as-usual. Throughout, the investigative counsel expresses undisguised outrage and disbelief — at the fact that anyone would do something so blatantly misguided and evil, and at the defendants’ stiff-upper-lip denials of complicity. “Who did you think your backers were?” a prosecutor asks another Watergate burglar, Bernard Barker. “I wasn’t there to think,” Barker snaps back. Barker’s testimony is alternately ridiculous and heartbreaking: he seems genuinely perplexed that anyone would question his motives — when he isn’t blatantly dodging the questions.
Again and again, the prosecutors’ offense — and by proxy, the country’s — that the people chosen to run the country would even think to swindle it, much less that they acted on the impulse, is the guiding principle. That may be the most ironic reason of all for Watergate’s continuing hold on the imagination: nostalgia for a simpler, better time. By most accounts, mid-’70s America was not much fun at all. But in the case of Watergate, we can honestly say that, for once, justice was served.
But decades after the fact, Watergate still grips the mind. Maybe that’s because it’s the one time a corrupt White House’s dirty laundry was aired to any effect during the administration itself (as opposed to years after the fact). Or maybe it’s because the events had such a beautiful narrative arc. In the summer of 1972, President Nixon’s re-election committee decides to play dirty with the opposition candidate, bungles a break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters and attempts to cover it up with the President’s go-ahead. The whole kit and kaboodle is uncovered by two beat reporters for the local daily, assisted by an insider with an alias lifted from a porno flick. Especially with that final detail — this could only have happened in the ’70s. And if that decade’s pop culture has any hold on you, Watergate is the key that unlocks a lot of other aspects of US culture at the time, from the desperation driving much of the decade’s best filmmaking to the explosion of disco, whose celebratory sound was just the thing for a generation whose ideals, in the wake of Nixon’s forced retirement, seemed to have come out on top for once.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. One critic friend recently told me that his soundtrack on two West Texas road trips consisted entirely of alternations of German minimal techno and the audiobook of Bob Woodward’s The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat (Simon & Schuster, 2005), as read by actor Boyd Gaines. Another, when I told him I was writing about recordings of the Watergate hearings, simply said, “Awww, yeah — the canonical classic that started it all.” In short, Watergate can be understood as a very odd, riveting performance; as a series of weird cult records by the least groovy guys of their era, like a very white-collar version of Hustler’s Convention; as a piece of pop culture itself.
Only five minutes of Richard Nixon’s The Best of the Speeches are given to Watergate. That’s understandable: the title is Best; it isn’t Not-So-Hottest. “The Watergate Tapes” is an excerpt from a longer address that highlights Nixon’s infamous comment, “I am not a crook.” (It also doesn’t mention the Watergate tapes.) “Resignation” is the real chart-topper: Nixon sounds as comfortable as a man with an anvil sitting on his head, which in a way he did have.
The first cut is probably the most apt: “Checkers,” Nixon’s infamous 1952 address about accusations of fiscal campaign misdeeds in which he was reduced to detailing his personal finances. It’s easy to forget how commanding much of this speech is, until Nixon brings up his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and the titular Cocker Spaniel a campaign supporter gave Nixon's kids; after that, all you can smell is snake oil.
Nixon also bats lead-off on Watergate, Vol. 1: The Break-In — the first of five volumes on Smithsonian/Folkways — with his announcement of the resignations of high-level White House aides John Dean, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichmann. Nixon tries to sugarcoat it: “In accepting these resignations, I mean to leave no implication whatever of personal wrongdoing on their part. And I mean no implication . . . [about] others who have been charged tonight.” The way Nixon’s tone rises on the word “others” is classic Dad-has-it-all-under-control: Nixon is audibly trying to hold himself together, and when he says, “Justice will be served very fully and impartially,” it’s as cloying as the thousandth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street.
The real gold, though, are the trials themselves. The juiciest is Vol. 4: White House Horrors: The Testimony of John Mitchell, in which the ex-Attorney General spills everything. “You told Mr. Liddy, ‘Take that stuff out and burn it,’” a counselor asks Mitchell. “Would I be proper in translating your statement… to mean, ‘Get rid of this incriminating evidence?’” Mitchell answers: “Not only that, Senator, to get rid of incriminating evidence, but also to abandon any concept that any such activities would be part of the re-election campaign of the President.”
Listening all these years later, two things about the Watergate trials stand out. One, they’re riveting listening. The testimony is frequently implosive: Nixon’s confederates have risked their entire professional reputation on their man and their country, and it’s all falling apart in the most public manner possible. On Vol. 1, Watergate burglar James McCord talks about having expected executive clemency to swoop in and save his hide in the same hopeful terms with which a child on welfare would discuss the Easter Bunny.
The other noticeable thing is that none of this is business-as-usual. Throughout, the investigative counsel expresses undisguised outrage and disbelief — at the fact that anyone would do something so blatantly misguided and evil, and at the defendants’ stiff-upper-lip denials of complicity. “Who did you think your backers were?” a prosecutor asks another Watergate burglar, Bernard Barker. “I wasn’t there to think,” Barker snaps back. Barker’s testimony is alternately ridiculous and heartbreaking: he seems genuinely perplexed that anyone would question his motives — when he isn’t blatantly dodging the questions.
Again and again, the prosecutors’ offense — and by proxy, the country’s — that the people chosen to run the country would even think to swindle it, much less that they acted on the impulse, is the guiding principle. That may be the most ironic reason of all for Watergate’s continuing hold on the imagination: nostalgia for a simpler, better time. By most accounts, mid-’70s America was not much fun at all. But in the case of Watergate, we can honestly say that, for once, justice was served.
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