Where does the title come from?
In early 1968, Hunter S. Thompson began work on a book called The Death of the American Dream by spending ten days with the Nixon campaign in New Hampshire. He caught a ride to the airport with the candidate because they shared a love of pro football. During refuelling, Thompson tossed away a cigarette butt and almost blew up Nixon’s plane. Thompson never finished the book but in the months that followed, King and Kennedy were assassinated and Nixon was elected President. Thompson’s animus towards Nixon continued through the 1972 election (as documented in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72) and Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the crude revelations of The White House Tapes killed trust in the political process and the American presidency.
Early press reports about the Watergate break-in downplayed it as a “caper” and Nixon's press secretary dismissed it “a third‐rate burglary attempt,” with no connection to the White House. After the trial of the burglars in January 1973, the cover-up started to unravel as Nixon’s campaign security chief James McCord and White House Counsel John Dean broke rank and suggest higher-ups were involved, leading to the Senate Watergate hearings and the disclosure that Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office had been taped and could be used to prove his complicity in the cover-up of what was now a political scandal called the Watergate Affair.
Where did the idea for the film come from?
I’m fascinated by the political turmoil and counterculture of 1968 and what followed, as explored in previous films on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy (RFK Must Die), the Baader Meinhof Group and the Japanese Red Army (Children of the Revolution). While drawn to Kennedy’s politics, I was also fascinated by Nixon, a tragic figure whose political cunning was ultimately exposed by the tapes he used to memorialise his presidency.
The Watergate burglar who drew me in was Rolando Martinez, a legendary Cuban CIA operative who I had interviewed in Miami for a previous project (Killing Oswald) and who was still on a CIA retainer at the time of the break-in, suggesting the Agency was somehow involved. When the CIA declassified their internal history of Watergate in 2016, I wrote a book about the secret history of Martinez and the Watergate burglars and that research informs The Watergate Caper.
While there has been a run of recent films on Watergate, they largely focus on the cover-up and ignore the story of the break-in and the burglars. Charles Ferguson’s Watergate series (2018) barely gives them a mention while HBO’s White House Plumbers plays the burglars for laughs, cartoonish characters unmoored from historical reality.
While All the President's Men is one of my favourite films, it exaggerates the role played by Woodward and Bernstein in cracking the case. Drawing on oral history interviews recorded with Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert and FBI case agent Angelo Lano in 2008 and 2009, the film aims to tell the most accurate, up-to-date story of the Watergate burglars and investigation. As noted in the film, Martinez and Lano both suspected Watergate was a set-up and that one of the burglars tipped off the police.
Every film about Watergate copies a mistake first made in All the President’s Men, where security guard Frank Wills discovers the break-in by finding a piece of tape placed horizontally across the latch of the basement door leading from the underground parking lot to the rear stairwell of the Watergate Office Building to keep it open. The burglars weren’t that dumb. They were more subtle, taping the latch vertically, so it wasn’t obvious, but the myth has prevailed and made them look like bunglers. A small detail, maybe, but it skews how you look at their story.
Where did you find the archive material?
The film has been a five-year project and would not have been possible without the unwavering support of Ryan Pettigrew, audiovisual archivist at the Nixon Presidential Library, where much of the footage was sourced. The Nixon Library holds thousands of hours of news footage taped off-air by the Nixon White House, including the commercials of the era. I visited the library in 2017 to conduct some initial research but with the help of a local researcher, started an exhaustive trawl in November 2021 during Covid.
How did the film’s style and structure come together?
The first section of the film I worked on focused on the break-in, the burglars and the beginning of the White House cover-up. I immediately realised the potential of intercutting Senate Watergate testimony of the burglars and arresting officers and with dramatizations of the break-in in films like All the President’s Men.
The movies referenced in the film are some of my favourites (Medium Cool, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, The Candidate, Network, Dick) but as I started looking for contemporary and retrospective movies referencing Nixon and Watergate references, I found many more and the style and structure of the film emerged. How Medium Cool, Lion’s Love and Shampoo reflect on the political events of 1968. How paranoid thrillers like The Conversation, Taxi Driver and All the President’s Men can be read in the context of the Watergate break-in and investigation which followed. And how the Watergate burglars ran into the stars of Michael Winner’s spy thriller Scorpio hours before they were caught.
The cinema of the Nixon era responded to the tumultuous events of his presidency in uncanny ways. The Conversation started filming in November 1972 and now seems a direct response to the surveillance culture of Watergate but was written several years earlier. As noted in the film, Robert Redford’s initial interest in All the President’s Men stemmed from talking to political reporters about Nixon’s involvement in Watergate while promoting The Candidate.
Why is the story still important today?
For all Nixon’s flaws, he respected the institutions of government and when he knew he no longer had the political support he needed, he accepted his fate. He later acknowledged his mistakes in the Frost-Nixon interviews and in an address to the Oxford Union at the end of the film, where the heckling of protestors outside “makes him feel very much at home.”
Before making the film, I wrote a series of articles for The Washington Post highlighting parallels between political scandals during the Nixon and Trump presidencies. But I didn’t feel this approach would work in the film, as it would feel instantly dated. Nixon is a complex figure and his handling of unpopular foreign wars, political demonstrations, election ‘dirty tricks’ and the ‘culture wars’ of his time has a strong resonance today (see Vice President JD Vance's recent comments on this below).
The film echoes the polarisation of the current US political climate and the re-emergence of political assassination, which haunted the Nixon era. As we approach the US mid-term elections, the political climate seems more polarised than ever.
The film’s release coincides with the anniversary of the burglars’ indictment on September 15, 1972, as part of a White House cover-up to deny all involvement and ensure Nixon’s re-election.