Greg Garrett

The enduring appeal of Watergate

  • From Spectator Life
Julia Roberts in Gaslit (Photo: Hilary Bronwyn Gale)

On 24 April the series Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell and Sean Penn as Watergate-era U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, will premiere on Starz. It joins a multitude of books, films, and TV shows about Watergate, starting with the Oscar-winning All the President’s Men (1976) running through to 2017’s The Post.

Granted, Watergate was one of the most disturbing moments in American political history. But why do films and TV shows continue to emerge 50 years after the event itself? Perhaps because they not only speak to long-standing myths about the power of the individual and the resilience of American democracy, but also to deep-seated fears about its fragility. 

When All the President’s Men appeared in 1976, just two years after the best-selling book of the same name by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, it tapped into all the prevailing myths about America.

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