Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks are spoofed in the new satire commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate probe.
In Dan Mirvish’s new Nixonian comedy 18½, the decades-old mystery of what might have taken place during that fateful eighteen-and-a-half minute gap in secretly recorded White House audio on June 20, 1972, serves as the true story premise for an ensuing eighty-eight minutes of (mostly) fictitious speculation.
Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”
What we do know: In December 1973, investigators discovered that there was a lapse in one of then-President Richard M. Nixon’s secret tapes. Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed to have accidentally erased the missing minutes, which are believed to contain a conversation between Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, on June 20, 1972—just three days after White House “plumbers” had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Office Building.
Beyond those established facts and some cleverly interwoven references to actual historical events and details, director and co-writer Mirvish (who co-founded the Slamdance Film Festival) tells the story of Connie (Willa Fitzgerald), a lowly White House transcriber who, in early 1974, accidentally stumbles across another taping system which has also recorded what was actually said during the infamous gap. Connie wants to do the right thing but is anxious to avoid any consequences for revealing the top-secret tape. So the whistleblower tries to surreptitiously leak the reel to Paul (John Magaro), whom she believes to be a reporter.
Though Mirvish’s mishmash is mostly made up, 18½ made me ruminate on Republicans of both then and now, and whether the GOP has really changed over the past half century.
It’s certainly true that today’s GOP has become more extreme since the 1970s and that Rose Mary Woods’s eighteen-and-a-half-minute faux pas has been trumped by a seven-hour gap in the White House call logs for January 6, 2020. But having grown up during the Watergate era, I don’t buy the Republican rhetoric that the Grand Old Party used to stand for smaller government and individual rights.
After the heroic Daniel Ellsberg—whom National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger once called “the most dangerous man in America”—leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, revealing Washington’s endless lies about the war in Vietnam and more, Nixon went haywire and resolved to “destroy” that “son-of-a bitch,” adding: “I don’t care how you do it.” On June 29, 1971, according to reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Nixon told Haldeman: “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it.”
In addition to the federal government issuing unprecedented prior restraint injunctions to prevent newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers and charging Ellsberg with the Espionage Act, Nixon also approved the formation of a “Special Investigations Unit,” soon dubbed “The Plumbers,” because their job was to fix “leaks.”
In mid-1973, the secret war against Ellsberg was uncovered by Watergate prosecutors, and the case against the whistleblower was eventually dismissed, while the disgraced Nixon was ultimately forced to resign the presidency on August 9, 1974.
The Watergate burglary was part of Nixon’s coordinated covert campaign of dirty tricks— including Donald Segretti and the “ratfuckers”—aimed at winning re-election by any means necessary. Nixon gamed the 1972 presidential race, just as Donald Trump allegedly rigged the 2016 election, and sought to do the same in 2020 by trying to overthrow the U.S. government. And, of course, Roger Stone played roles in both Nixon’s and Trump’s campaigns.
As far as the media is concerned, Trump perpetuated Nixon’s extreme adversarial policy: In a tape from the Oval Office on February 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”
“The press is your enemy,” he explained five days later in a meeting with Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape.
Nixon’s “enemies list” was compiled in order to “screw” his perceived political opponents, such as that notorious subversive enemy of the state, Carol Channing.
While there might be a difference in degree between today’s Republicans and those of the 1970s, the GOP is essentially the same anti-democracy party that it was when Nixon led the plumbers and ratfuckers’ reign of terror, not to mention the FBI’s COINTELPRO and its crackdown on antiwar and minority rights movements.
As we come up on the half-century anniversary of the Watergate break-in, 18½ is a droll reminder of the White House scandal which left the nation reeling.
18½ is being theatrically released on May 27, 2022.
L.A.-based film historian/reviewer Ed Rampell co-authored the third edition of “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.”
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