CSotD: Speaking of Watergate
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(Bill Mauldin, June 26, 1973)
Since Watergate has been on so many minds and tongues lately, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at some editorial cartoons on the topic.
However, I didn't want to write a doctoral dissertation and go through the entire period from the break-in (June 1972) to Nixon's resignation (August 1974), so I cherry-picked the 10 days after John Dean began his testimony (June 25, 1973), a period when it was clear something had happened but before the evidence had piled up too deeply for doubt.
First of all, despite the focus on the Senate Hearings, there were other things going on.
Nixon and Brezhnev had just concluded a major summit meeting.
Alfred Buescher laid out the basics of where, in his mind, things stood.
Mauldin marveled at the (purported) results.
And Bill Crawford's portrayal of Kissinger and Nixon expressed, perhaps, a bit of doubt over those results.
Moreover, despite Buescher's image of a strong overall economy in that above cartoon, Jimmy Carter did not invent the economic malaise when he took office in 1977: As Mauldin noted, the dollar was already a bit in the dumpster.
As Crawford said, it impacted food prices, touching off a "housewives' strike" earlier that year which centered mostly on meat prices but that caused many grocers to woo customers with free coffee, donuts and more bargain pricing than usual.
(The Jack Davis cover featured at that above-linked beef strike article was not his only Time Magazine commentary on the era, including Watergate. This link on his covers is worth a look.)
And while OPEC's embargo was still a few months away, Douglas Borgstedt observed our dependency on foreign energy sources.
It just seemed to Herblock like the wrong time for Nixon to be using a combination of public funds and "loans" from a good friend to build a vacation White House and retirement home in California.
(Not sure he'd have felt there was a good time for that.)
However, it wasn't all bad news. Whether as a distraction from Watergate or within the normal flow of diplomacy, Nixon and Kissinger had announced a ceasefire in Southeast Asia, and, if Buescher was dubious about the peace…
… Herblock greeted the concommitant Congressional action with joy.
Still, there was that Other Crisis looming, and Don Hesse was apparently not happy with how the facts and rumors were emerging.
Indeed, one of the benefits of the Senate Hearings was that the current system, explained here by Mauldin, would give way to something a little better organized.
And just in time, Herblock said.
Not that Nixon was unprepared for a bit of leakage, according to Borgsedt.
And Wayne Stayskal even suggested that he'd been doing a little hiring, a sure sign of optimism.
What he wasn't doing was responding himself, despite repeated invitations to do so, as Jeff MacNelly noted. (It would be five months before he famously announced his innocence.)
Of course, he didn't need to, because he had his Vice-President to make public statements, not only deflecting blame but perhaps reminding everyone who was waiting in the wings.
I can't make out the signature of this Copley News Service artist, but I'm less puzzled by that than I am, all these years later, by the timing of Agnew's ouster on corruption charges.
However it happened, it cleared up one potential problem in the whole process: Had Nixon been forced to resign with Agnew still VP, we'd have found ourselves with a foolish-sounding president who shot from the hip, antagonizing people he should be working with, stirring up bad feelings among the citizenry and unleashing ridiculous, counterfactual statements that his aides would have to walk back.
Thank god we didn't find ourselves in that position!
In any case, the refusal of the President to participate in the hearings seemed unfair to Gib Crockett.
It would take a little over a year for Watergate to culminate in Nixon's resignation, but one famous fact that emerged in this period was the "Enemies List," which, the Associated Press intro points out, was apparently not a list of people Nixon wanted his crew of criminals to actively pursue, though the people they did attempt to destroy all appeared on it.
And which, as Herblock points out, put Nixon's interests above those of the nation.
And which I would point out suggests that Nixon's aides compiled and maintained the list but the chief never read through the final version himself, since, as a rabid football fan, he certainly knew who Joe Namath — that long-haired liberal commie — played football for.
It's an interesting collection of both familiar and unfamiliar names from the era, with the best part being the laff you'll get when you get all the way down to the bottom, unless you were foolish enough to waste energy using the stairs.
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