From MAD to Watergate

In celebration — if that’s the right word — of the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the Washington Post features eight cartoons, including this Time magazine cover by Jack Davis.

From the Washington Post: In Davis’s Time cover, the conspirators encircling Nixon are, clockwise from upper left: James McCord, Jeb Magruder, H.R. Haldeman, John Dean, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine; Estate of Jack Davis 1973)

An iconic Davis magazine cover — rendered for Time in April 1973 beneath the headline “Watergate Breaks Wide Open,” and now in the Portrait Gallery’s exhibit — imagines a circle of conspirators ensnared in its tools of taping and surveillance, each finger-pointing at someone else. The art nods to an 1871 cartoon by Thomas Nast, who was skewering the fiscal chicanery of William “Boss” Tweed’s corrupt Tammany Hall political machine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/06/16/cartoons-watergate-nixon-herblock/

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