50 YEARS AGO, LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY (Cheri)

This has been a good year for revisiting the early 1970’s in media.

Photo credit:  Starz

I thoroughly enjoyed the Starz mini-series Gaslit, starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn as Martha and John Mitchell. 

I was too young in 1972 to truly comprehend the reasons for the Watergate hearings and Richard Nixon’s resignation.  We didn't have a television.  I do remember stopping by my grandparents' place as Richard Nixon was about to board the plane for California.  I thought it was a coincidence until I was an adult and realized probably not.

I did read All the President’s Men and G. Gordon Liddy’s memoir several years later.  Nevertheless, Gaslit gave me the best feel for what led to the Watergate cover-up and how it was investigated.  I certainly wouldn’t recommend the program for viewers who like to avoid profanity or sex scenes, but the acting was stellar, some of the dialogue was really funny, and it was truly educational. 

It was produced primarily from the viewpoint of Martha Mitchell and John Dean, occasionally the young investigating FBI agents and a fictional tape transcriptionist.  I thought that some of the things that happened to Martha Mitchell must have been invented to maintain modern viewers’ interest, but no.  Reading more later, I discovered that she was truly the victim of some heinous dirty tricks herself.

Photo credit:  Starz and Getty Images

Those of you who have already seen the program – or somehow happen to have otherwise boned up on Martha Mitchell’s life – will remember that she was from Pine Bluff, Arkansas.  We happened to drive through there a couple of days ago on our way to Texas.  Let’s just say it’s a loooong way from Pine Bluff to Washington, D.C.!

Addendum (10/6/23):  Netflix has released The Margaret Mitchell Effect, a roughly 30-minute documentary that covers this same subject matter.  We saw it last December, along with the other four short documentaries that were nominated for Oscars.  While the documentary was interesting - and definitely a better choice for those who don't want sexual content with their history - Gaslit was a lot better at describing what happened to Margaret Mitchell.  With the documentary, you got the feeling the creators forgot that people might not already know what they were talking about.

Photo credit:  AP?

I began reading the newspaper very, very early in life.  When I was eleven years old, I was fascinated by the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst.  The concept of a rich college student being taken was novel, but the introduction to 1970’s home-grown terrorists was eye-opening, to say the least!  I remember my father picking me up from piano lesson and telling me that she had been discovered, but in a nudist colony, “so they couldn’t pin anything on her.”  (My sister was pretty surprised at this unusual “dad joke” when I mentioned it to her recently.)

Jeffrey Toobin published his outstanding American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst in 2016, and I began it then, but life took precedence, and I didn’t come back to it until this year.  Don’t take my six-year delay in finishing as a reflection on the book, as it was fascinating . . . again with some humor, this time provided by the truly bumbling Symbionese Liberation Army members.