WATERGATE

A forensic and epically detailed examination of Richard Nixon’s downfall

Certificate 15 Director Charles Ferguson Cast Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Pat Buchanan, John Dean Released Out now

Charles Ferguson’s engrossing history lesson clocks in at a whopping four hours and 21 minutes. Offering a comprehensive exploration of the Watergate scandal, how the most powerful individual in the free world abused his seat of authority and colluded with others to hoodwink the nation, as with Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic of 37th President of the United States Richard Nixon, the mixture of political downfall and psychological portrait appears, by sheer weight and force of the drama, to be America’s take on the Shakespearean tragedy. This documentary certainly demands a lot of your time and attention, but with access to surviving members of Nixon’s inner circle willing to talk on camera and the crusading journalists who refused to back down, the wealth of candid first-hand accounts proves invaluable.

Ferguson’s behemoth draws canny thematic parallels with more contemporary administrations. Nixon went after real and imagined enemies – the press, the Democrats, the CIA, the FBI, remnants of the counterculture – with gusto and venom. Tricky Dicky and his administration partook in exercises we’d recognise today as ‘fake news’, all done in order to avert attention away from what was really going on, throwing dust in the eyes of onlookers while that shifted their forces elsewhere.

Watergate – Or: How We Learned To Stop An Out Of Control President, as a title, undoubtedly serves as a clarion call to remember. George Santayana’s line, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” has never felt so relevant (Ferguson ends his film with this very quote). Nixon looks like a great statesman, when placed next to other less politically savvy and trained leaders, but all it takes to deal with corrupt types is moral courage and recognising power is as illusory as it is real.

Incorporating talking-heads interviews, Watergate also peppers in scenes with actors playing Nixon and his goons. It’s a clever way of livening up the material with a thriller-style ambience. Dialogue from Oval Office gatherings is delivered verbatim from Nixon’s infamous tapes, though edited for conciseness. Yet it’s strange the director does not place Nixon’s recordings in historical context. It was Franklin Roosevelt who installed audio equipment in the office, for rather benign purposes (so he could take notes from press conferences and meetings). Other presidents continued to secretly record official appointments and phone calls, but it reached an incriminating apotheosis thanks to Nixon, who taped over 15,000 hours-worth of conversations and kept the fact hidden from even his closest associates.

The tapes provide Watergate with eye-popping shock factor and revelations for those who do not know the whole story, as well as raw doses of reality. The recordings blew away any notion Nixon’s motives were honourable or misguided in the belief he was doing the right thing. Nixon was a bitter and paranoid bully, a racist and a crook.

“The wealth of candid first-hand accounts proves invaluable”