“In many ways, those Watergate years were the zenith for political cartooning in America,” says Matt Wuerker, the editorial cartoonist for Politico.
Upon the break-in’s 50th anniversary, illustrations by Davis, Oliphant and Sorel are among the artworks featured in the National Portrait Gallery show “Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue,” on view through Sept. 25.
Kate Lemay, the gallery’s acting senior historian and curator of its “Watergate” exhibit, says that although investigative journalism broke the Watergate story and uncovered the scandal’s abuses of power, “art was also in the nexus of that journalism, and I think it gets overlooked.”
To mark art’s role in the coverage, here are eight cartoons that proved to be particularly powerful during the Watergate era.
Heading into the summer of 1973, with the nation glued to the Watergate hearings, “Doonesbury” provided a comic service by profiling some of the Watergate conspirators. On May 29, Mark Slackmeyer, the strip’s campus-radio talk jock, took on former attorney general John Mitchell, who readers are told had recently been “repeatedly linked with both the Watergate caper and its cover-up.”
Slackmeyer draws his own conclusion with a punchline that would become fixed in American culture: “That’s guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!”
“The ‘Guilty’ strip caused such a furor with editors that it sealed the transgressive reputation the strip had been gaining in the preceding years,” Trudeau says now. “Mark had said something out loud — and with unfettered glee — that everyone was thinking.”
The strip “produced the pleasure of confirmation bias,” says Trudeau, yet he notes that a dozen U.S. newspapers dropped the controversial strip. Not even a fictional cartoon character could speak so freely.
Would such a bold comic make waves in the political climate of 2022? “Since social media now makes it possible for anyone to safely make such incendiary judgments,” says Trudeau, citing such phrases as “Lock her up,” “I doubt the same strip published today would cause a ripple.”
Conrad reveled in satirizing Nixon with bold imagery and minimal wording.
In one of Conrad’s cartoons from the Watergate years, Nixon is depicted as a Napoleonic figure sternly commanding a ship. In another, drawn right after the break-in, Nixon poses as a utility worker as he drills into a wall at the door of Democratic headquarters, from which an onlooker says: “He says he’s from the phone company … .”
One of Conrad’s darkest and starkest cartoons of the era was a 1973 white-on-black portrait of Nixon depicted as a web of deception — with the names of many conspirators spun in the silk of corruption and intrigue.