I

McCarthy remained a force in American intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Born in 1912, she graduated from Vassar in 1933, moved to New York City, and began reviewing books for The Nation and The New Republic. Mobilized politically by the Moscow show trials, McCarthy joined the anti-Stalinist left at Partisan Review as the magazine’s theatre critic.Footnote ¹⁴ She became a key figure among the New York intellectuals.Footnote ¹⁵ Her fiction depicted folly and hypocrisy in fellow writers, which partly explains why male colleagues often dismissed her politics.Footnote ¹⁶ But McCarthy was in fact a consistently political writer, both in her fiction and in her journalism. She followed public affairs, cared about elections and politicians, participated in protests, and made various political arguments. In broad ideological terms McCarthy was a left liberal who opposed communism, valued dissent and critical independence, and kept herself open to radical ideas. One interlocutor was the Italian anarcho-pacificist Nicola Chiaromonte, whose utopian critiques of the state helped shape McCarthy’s interest in libertarian socialism.Footnote ¹⁷ Another influence was the radical humanist Dwight Macdonald, for whose magazine politics she also wrote.

Arendt was the major influence on McCarthy’s political thinking. They met in 1944 and built a close personal and intellectual friendship.Footnote ¹⁸ When The origins of totalitarianism appeared in 1951, McCarthy read the book ‘in the bathtub, riding in the car, waiting in line in the grocery store’. Deeply impressed, her sole criticism to Arendt was that Origins felt overdetermined in parts: ‘the implication you make … that totalitarianism is a scheme in the minds of certain displaced men to rob other men of their sense of reality seems to me to scant the element of the fortuitous in the development of this whole phenomenon’.Footnote ¹⁹ Other readers shared this concern.Footnote ²⁰ But Arendt’s book enthralled McCarthy, convincing her that totalitarianism was the worst political threat in modern history. In particular McCarthy admired its sections on South Africa, Disraeli, and ‘the structure of the totalitarian movement, with the fellow-travelers representing “reality” to the members, the members to the cadre, and so on’.Footnote ²¹

In mid-century America, debates about totalitarianism often focused on concepts of mass society.Footnote ²² Arendt thought social atomization and alienation were crucial for totalitarianism, but she doubted that American life had been fully captured by these forces.Footnote ²³ McCarthy saw totalitarian features in US anti-communism, but she rejected the view that American society at large was moving towards fascism or totalitarianism.Footnote ²⁴ When Simone de Beauvoir stressed the conformity and loneliness of US social life, McCarthy attacked her analysis.Footnote ²⁵ ‘[Beauvoir] talks a great deal of American conformity but fails to recognize a thing that Tocqueville saw long ago’, McCarthy wrote; ‘that this conformity is the expression of a predominantly middle-class society; it is the price paid (as yet) for the spread of plenty.’ McCarthy argued that America was not defined by totalitarian alienation but had realized ‘the economic and social goals of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and of progressive thought in general’.Footnote ²⁶ She defended forms of New Deal liberalism and broadly accepted the embrace of American life among New York intellectuals at this conjuncture. Partisan Review in spring 1952 ran its famous symposium on ‘Our country and our culture’.Footnote ²⁷

McCarthy changed her mind about the plausibility of American totalitarianism after watching Richard Nixon in the 1952 election. As the Republican vice presidential candidate, Nixon defended himself from corruption charges in the ‘Checkers speech’, a famous television performance that projected democratic authenticity. Detailing his strained finances and hardscrabble childhood, Nixon had people like McCarthy in his sights: cosmopolitan elites who lived in big cities and looked down on ordinary citizens.Footnote ²⁸ The speech generated public support for Nixon and deep anxiety among liberals, who saw him as manipulative and demagogic.Footnote ²⁹ McCarthy went further by seeing Nixon specifically as totalitarian. ‘The Nixon success, if it’s really serious, is too horribly Orwellian to contemplate’, she wrote to Arendt; ‘it would mean that mass society is a reality.’ Having recently criticized Beauvoir on conformity, McCarthy now worried that Nixon represented a totalitarian breakthrough in American politics. By manipulating public opinion with televised imagery, Nixon seemed ‘in a way more terrifying than any of the successes of Nazi or Soviet propaganda, which after all are based on something’, McCarthy stressed, ‘on deteriorated ideologies, national interests, primitive mysticism, and on the fact of a dictatorship’. But Nixon’s mobilization of mere ‘advertising techniques … blows all my conceptions of U.S. life sky-high’.Footnote ³⁰

After the Republicans won the election, McCarthy continued to worry about US totalitarianism. She now agreed that mass society had totalitarian dimensions, and thought public opinion should be mobilized against totalitarian politicians. To this end McCarthy planned a new magazine, The Critic, and raised funds of $55,000 for the project.Footnote ³¹ Outlining its editorial line, she wrote that The Critic would ‘fix its attention on totalitarian elements present in America, as well as abroad, and by this I mean mass-culture, Henry Luce, radio, television, Nixon, Whittaker Chambers’, and much else.Footnote ³² The magazine never materialized, but McCarthy did persuade Arendt to review Chambers’s memoir Witness (1952) as a totalitarian book.Footnote ³³ In the late 1950s McCarthy began to engage with republican political theory, and to conceive democracy in terms of public reason and civic virtue. A key text here was Arendt’s The human condition (1958), which prized ‘the words and deeds of the public realm’, as McCarthy wrote in her review, ‘where men interact with each other’.Footnote ³⁴ McCarthy read Machiavelli closely when writing a travel book on Florence.Footnote ³⁵ She also taught some of Arendt’s Machiavelli seminars at Wesleyan University.Footnote ³⁶ By the 1960s McCarthy had moved to Paris.

Norman Mailer developed one of the most influential critiques of American totalitarianism in this period.Footnote ³⁷ By radicalizing concepts of mass society, Mailer defined totalitarian power in America as essentially a conformist social psychology. Having attacked celebrations of ‘Our country and our culture’, he argued that US totalitarianism flourished not in the state but throughout cultural life. This view shaped Mailer’s notorious review of The group (1963), McCarthy’s bestselling novel about Vassar graduates in 1930s New York. Alongside his aversion to her ‘lady-book’, Mailer thought McCarthy had missed the revolutionary potential of the 1930s by focusing on conformist women from the upper middle class. He framed McCarthy as ‘not close enough to the horror’ of American society, and thus as complicit in the cultural totalitarianism that suffused it.Footnote ³⁸ McCarthy was furious with Mailer, both for his misogyny and because she wrote The group in a humanistic anti-totalitarian vein. For Mailer, the 1930s constituted a heroic and romantic era, which created a radical American public that Cold War conditions then ruined. He could not accept McCarthy’s claim that ‘ladies’ were part of the public, and he did not engage with The group’s complex portrait of the New Deal.Footnote ³⁹

Where Mailer identified US totalitarianism with culture and social psychology, McCarthy insisted that it also depended on state power and politicians like Nixon. Partly because of these differences, Mailer wrote little about Watergate. In 1973 he announced plans for a ‘democratic secret police’, to be called the ‘fifth estate’, but this never got off the ground.Footnote ⁴⁰ After attending some of the Senate Watergate hearings, Mailer told The Village Voice that they were ‘boring’.Footnote ⁴¹ He soon abandoned the subject and focused on a biography of Marilyn Monroe.Footnote ⁴² In contrast McCarthy cared much about Watergate because she already saw Nixon as totalitarian and paid attention to government. Bringing the state back in to debates about US totalitarianism, she came to analyze the contingent relationship between state actors and the broader public.

‘Nixon is getting more ominous’, McCarthy warned Arendt just before he won the presidency in 1968.Footnote ⁴³ Then a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, McCarthy wrote most about public opinion and US foreign policy. She reported from Saigon and Hanoi for The New York Review of Books, and covered the court-martial of Ernest Medina for The New Yorker. Medina had commanded the army unit that committed the My Lai massacre. McCarthy saw his trial as testing the public’s response to state violence. Were military officers accountable for war crimes, or would citizens tolerate atrocity? When Medina was acquitted, McCarthy argued that ‘it was public opinion and not the jury that decided’ because too few Americans truly opposed the war.Footnote ⁴⁴ And if the public accepted Medina’s innocence, what lesser crimes might it permit? Nixon was re-elected in November 1972 with a large popular majority. That June burglars had broken into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex on behalf of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). The White House began to cover this up just after their arrest.

Much of McCarthy’s political thought focused on relations between the public and the state. Contesting the view that mass society alone created American totalitarianism, she stressed the significance of state actors in general and Nixon in particular. Building on theories of republican citizenship, McCarthy thought democracy required a broad public commitment to deliberative self-government. In the months before Nixon’s Checkers speech, McCarthy had argued that ‘common sense’ was ‘the rationale of a democracy’, and that ‘a belief in common sense is the informing spirit of all democratic institutions, from the jury system to universal suffrage’.Footnote ⁴⁵ During Watergate it was the interaction between state power and public opinion that most engaged McCarthy. What kind of public did Watergate produce? How could it cope with Nixon’s crimes?

II

McCarthy arrived in Washington for the Senate Watergate hearings in June 1973. She stayed at the Watergate hotel, where Arendt sent flowers for her sixty-first birthday.Footnote ⁴⁶ The food was bad, there was no bookstore in the mall, and to McCarthy’s Parisian eye the architecture seemed ‘pathetically suburban and middle-American’.Footnote ⁴⁷ But she was pleased to be in the thick of things. McCarthy liked a courtroom drama, and her work in fiction and theatre criticism helped for covering Watergate. A minor celebrity in the Senate hearings, McCarthy sat among the press and took notes ‘continuously in a small, dense hand’, according to The New Yorker.Footnote ⁴⁸

The crisis was full-blown. What began with the break-in had become a broad public reckoning with issues of executive power, domestic surveillance, and democratic legitimacy. Amid the Watergate revelations, it emerged that Nixon had worked to enhance White House control of FBI and CIA operations, and that he wanted more intelligence on US citizens and especially personal enemies. For example, the 1970 Huston plan aimed to deepen presidential direction of domestic espionage and override civil liberties objections in the name of national security.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Kissinger wiretaps illegally spied on journalists and officials in an effort to stop press leaks.Footnote ⁵⁰ And ‘the plumbers’, a White House covert operations unit with CIA connections, had raided the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist after the Pentagon Papers were published.Footnote ⁵¹ So the Watergate burglary was part of a pattern. McCarthy saw the cover-up not as normal corruption but as the state’s concealment of subversion and criminality. She thought Watergate had exposed Nixon’s plan for a totalitarian state with political control of the secret police and executive contempt for the rule of law.

This seemed clear from the testimony of Jeb Stuart Magruder, former CRP deputy director. After implicating senior White House staff in the burglary and cover-up, Magruder defended their actions by claiming that Nixon’s critics also broke the law. ‘He sought understanding for the “psychology” that prevailed in the White House’, McCarthy reported, ‘and that psychology, in turn, he blamed on radicals and dissenters.’ Magruder exposed the administration’s hostility to the basic norm that protest and opposition were part of democratic liberty. ‘He still cannot discern a difference’, McCarthy stressed, ‘between open civil disobedience with its long American tradition going back to the Boston Tea Party and the purely expedient covert criminality of Watergate.’Footnote ⁵² Nor did Magruder recognize that executive officials should implement rather than break the law. Sam Ervin, chair of the Senate Watergate committee, compared the White House culture Magruder described with the Huston plan, which he had condemned for its ‘Gestapo mentality’.Footnote ⁵³ McCarthy idolized Ervin as ‘virtually Shakespearean’.Footnote ⁵⁴ She dedicated The mask of state to him.

McCarthy wanted to establish Nixon’s men as totalitarian figures who aimed to deceive the public and subvert democracy. The most sinister figure in the Watergate drama, she thought, was the senior Nixon fixer Charles Colson. A key strategist for the 1972 landslide, Colson was involved with abortive schemes to kill a journalist and firebomb a think tank.Footnote ⁵⁵ He was also involved with Nixon’s ‘Political Enemies Project’, a list of administration critics singled out for harassment and surveillance.Footnote ⁵⁶ McCarthy came to see Colson as ‘the key figure who could have unlocked the mystery, if there really is one, of who ordered the Watergate break-ins’.Footnote ⁵⁷ He defended Nixon with pugnacious euphemism. When Colson said on television that Nixon’s enemies project ‘was just a list we kept of people not to ask to White House functions’, McCarthy countered that it was actually ‘a political-murder instrument … Compare the “Final Solution”’, she even suggested, ‘toutes proportions gardées, naturally.’Footnote ⁵⁸ At once shocking and flippant, this suggestion framed Watergate in the starkest possible terms.

Despite the administration’s deceptions, McCarthy was initially optimistic about Watergate’s democratic potential. She regretted that Colson never testified and thought seeing him stonewall ‘would have been educational for the public’.Footnote ⁵⁹ More broadly McCarthy saw the Senate hearings as mobilizing public opinion and enhancing political education. The Senate caucus room was busy with citizens, she observed: ‘teen-agers, small children (I have not yet seen a baby), priests, old women in aluminum walkers, one or two mad people in crazed costumes’. The bustling crowd reminded her ‘of the Sistine Chapel’. She described the citizens in the Senate as ‘serious, almost grave … as though they were a self-elected jury’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In McCarthy’s view, the Watergate public combined representative and direct forms of democracy, fusing institutions like the Senate and jury. ‘The public is almost half the story’, she told her Observer editor Peter Crookston, ‘representing a unique American quasi-parliamentary democracy’.Footnote ⁶¹ From this perspective, Congress both represented and invigorated public opinion, but citizens also constituted a self-authorizing body.

Here was a maximalist republican vision of the democratic nation. McCarthy claimed that the whole American public engaged in continuous deliberative judgement about Watergate. From New York to California, ‘the story was being told, democratically, to the entire population, which was discussing it, democratically, as if at a town meeting’.Footnote ⁶² McCarthy insisted that ‘everybody has been fully participating’, and that ‘intent spectators in the Senate Caucus Room are the delegates of a much larger assembly that is watching and judging in homes, offices, campuses, factories’.Footnote ⁶³ In other words, Watergate had created the conditions for an ideal democratic republic. Avoiding differences between ancient city states and modern commercial societies, McCarthy celebrated Watergate’s revival of civic virtue in 1970s America.Footnote ⁶⁴ Against distinctions between direct and representative democracy, she framed citizens as simultaneously represented in Congress and directly participating in politics. McCarthy saw the Watergate public as rational, critical, and national. It could speak and act for itself, as well as through politicians. It held out hope for a more democratic American state.

There were problems with this vision. While McCarthy framed the Watergate public as a universal political subject, she engaged little with issues of inclusion, exclusion, and civic inequality. Black Americans figure uneasily in The mask of state as hotel workers and taxi drivers.Footnote ⁶⁵ McCarthy noted but did not analyze their partial and liminal presence in political Washington. Her work in this way exemplified ‘the lack of Black characters in the many segments of the [Watergate] story’ that the sociologist Gloria Joseph analyzed in 1973. Joseph saw ‘the idolizing of Senator Sam Ervin’ as particularly ironic, given his ardent opposition to civil rights legislation. She argued more generally that Watergate revealed what African Americans already knew about the American state. ‘Black people have long been on the receiving end of the repressive tactics of those in power’, Joseph wrote, ‘but it is only when repression is felt by white America that it becomes a problem, and people become concerned about a rising trend toward fascism’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Illustrating these concerns, McCarthy mostly ignored race in her analysis of authoritarian state power and democratic resistance.

McCarthy also developed a wishful account of Watergate journalism. She argued that print media was crucial for democratic deliberation, and that Watergate had revived the public’s interest in newspapers. ‘People were buying not one but two or even three [newspapers], plus Time and Newsweek’, she claimed. ‘On airplanes I watched the silent majority, vociferous as usual, turn first to the news pages and then to the sports pages.’Footnote ⁶⁷ But on the ground the reality was that television drove public engagement with Watergate. Though print journalists were crucial in reporting the crisis, Watergate became nationally dominant through gavel-to-gavel television broadcasts of the Senate hearings.Footnote ⁶⁸ McCarthy found it ‘surprising how faithfully and closely these televised hearings are followed’, and stressed the primacy of print: ‘without the supplement of the daily newspaper and the weekly news magazines, it is doubtful whether the public would have been up to the televised spectacle’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Indeed, Watergate made it seem to McCarthy ‘as though Marshall McLuhan had never been thought of and we were back in the Gutenberg Galaxy’.Footnote ⁷⁰ McLuhan was a media theorist and technological determinist. He thought printing through moveable type had effectively ‘created THE PUBLIC’, and saw modern nation states as products of print technology.Footnote ⁷¹ Because he saw democratic politics as declining with radio and television, McLuhan framed Watergate not as a legitimacy crisis but as normal electronic surveillance.Footnote ⁷² He found television protean and interesting, and thought Nixon was bad at the medium.Footnote ⁷³ On each of these points McCarthy reversed McLuhan: print media still mattered, the democratic nation remained powerful, and Nixon’s power relied upon television. ‘Nixon is a television creation’, she argued, ‘a sort of gesturing phantom, uncomfortable in the old-fashioned world of printer’s type.’ While television ‘can be controlled and manipulated’, print was at some level uncontrollable, ‘as has been demonstrated in the Soviet Union’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Notwithstanding the limits to her claims about democracy and journalism, McCarthy’s approach to Watergate enabled a focus on the contingent relationship between public opinion and totalitarianism. What she wanted to explore were two political formations in conflict with each other: a democratic public reading newspapers and building civic virtue, and a totalitarian state with lying elites and televised propaganda. As the Senate hearings continued, McCarthy analyzed the public’s engagement with these state actors. What mattered politically, she thought, was the public’s ability to act on its deliberative judgement and knowledge. ‘If we know, that is, and don’t act, can find no frame for action’, McCarthy wrote, ‘Nixon and his sly firm, knowing that we know and won’t do anything, will have nothing more to fear’.Footnote ⁷⁵ In her view, democratic failure around Watergate would create wider forms of state impunity for the American future.

III

The politics of deception became a major theme in McCarthy’s Watergate writings. This emerged after watching testimony from Nixon’s senior allies: John Mitchell, director of CRP; John Ehrlichman, domestic policy chief; and H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff. All had conspired to cover-up the burglary and resigned before their Senate appearances. All were implicated by the former White House counsel John Dean, whose testimony damaged Nixon deeply.Footnote ⁷⁶ For McCarthy, Dean showed ‘no trace of far right ideology’ and seemed ‘resolved to tell the truth about this particular set of events’.Footnote ⁷⁷ He offered ‘touches of awful veracity in his character study of the President and of the paranoid atmosphere surrounding him’.Footnote ⁷⁸ McCarthy analyzed this White House culture through Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman.

Mitchell was ominous, McCarthy thought, because his testimony served to bore and distract the public. He dispensed ‘a steady dosage of lies’, dodged and ignored questions, and claimed to forget key facts.Footnote ⁷⁹ She compared him to a turnip.Footnote ⁸⁰ McCarthy then stressed that Mitchell showed how some forms of dishonesty, while disingenuous and perhaps unwitting, were still morally and politically serious. ‘Mitchell brought evil into the Caucus Room’, she wrote, ‘and this was not unconnected with the boredom he was able to generate.’ Through a kind of numbing public banality, Mitchell turned ‘spectators who had been constituting a sort of town meeting into a restless, anomic, a-political crowd. After several days of him, nobody cared whether Nixon knew or not, whether Haldeman and Ehrlichman planned the cover-up.’Footnote ⁸¹ McCarthy saw Mitchell as depoliticizing the public by generating boredom and civic disconnection. She thought his Senate appearance served to alienate and disempower a previously engaged citizenry.

In this sense, McCarthy saw Mitchell as a variation on the ‘banality of evil’ that Arendt had analyzed in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt here argued that totalitarian state actors were often boring and normal people, whose evil was enabled in part by social alienation and depoliticization.Footnote ⁸² McCarthy had engaged closely with Eichmann in Jerusalem, defending the book from critics and stressing its relevance to modern America.Footnote ⁸³ When covering Watergate, McCarthy argued that Mitchell was a banal malign bureaucrat whose testimony had the effect of creating public apathy. ‘Nor did he seem to be aware’, she added, ‘of the enormity of what he was enunciating – a doctrine of a higher law transcending the Constitution, incarnate in the figure of our old friend Tricky Dick.’ Mitchell struck McCarthy as representing ‘a proto-fascist mentality’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Irving Howe also suggested that, ‘in a mild sort of way’, Nixon’s men ‘do seem to illustrate Hannah Arendt’s notion about “the banality of evil”’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Arendt herself drew parallels with Eichmann when the ex-plumber E. Howard Hunt testified. Watching Hunt claim that he followed orders faithfully, Arendt told McCarthy that he ‘acted and looked pretty much like Eichmann – down to details, the same nose and such’.Footnote ⁸⁶

McCarthy developed a distinctive Arendtian critique of totalitarian depoliticization in the Watergate context. Arguing that ‘the relations of the Nixon band among each other’ had foreshadowed ‘the parallel structures of totalitarian organizations’, McCarthy told her readers to ‘see Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’ to understand the crisis.Footnote ⁸⁷ For those interested, Origins could easily be read for implicit Watergate references. Arendt had seen totalitarian organizations as fusing party and state power to build ‘a functioning reality’ through lies and propaganda, ‘even under nontotalitarian circumstances’.Footnote ⁸⁸ McCarthy saw CRP as an embryonic version of a party-state organization. In a fully realized totalitarian state, Arendt suggested, politicians became impervious to ‘that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense’.Footnote ⁸⁹ McCarthy saw precisely this problem in Mitchell and called her book The mask of state. Arendt stressed that what mattered in totalitarianism was ‘not the truthfulness of the Leader’s words but the infallibility of his actions’. To ensure infallibility, ‘the entourage of the Leader’ engaged in ever more cynical lies and conspiracies, convincing itself ‘that even the maddest device has a fair chance of success’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Was this not the Watergate burglary? What else was the cover-up but a functioning reality? Had not the leader’s entourage lied and conspired to defend his rule?

Ehrlichman struck McCarthy as similar to Mitchell in his stupidity, dishonesty, and evil.Footnote ⁹¹ If anything Ehrlichman looked a more fluent liar, and McCarthy imagined his arrest for contempt of Congress.Footnote ⁹² She thought Haldeman seemed better than Ehrlichman at first, but eventually he too resembled an Arendtian totalitarian bureaucrat. Haldeman’s answers ‘showed a grim family resemblance to those of Mitchell and Ehrlichman’, McCarthy wrote.Footnote ⁹³ For readers of The Observer like the literary critic Cyril Connolly, McCarthy’s articles made sense of the Watergate maze. ‘Anyone can, like me, read all the evidence and watch the telly’, he told McCarthy, ‘but one still gets lost and fails to evaluate witnesses correctly … you make it all clear.’ Connolly had worried that ‘you were too partisan, like a Communist at Nuremberg’. But McCarthy convinced him that Watergate exposed an emerging totalitarian state. Connolly wrote that ‘these people were the most powerful group in the world & on the threshold of seizing power by stealth from democratic institutions – they were like the Nazis on the eve of the Reichstag fire’.Footnote ⁹⁴This response suggests that progressive intellectuals were engaged and persuaded by McCarthy’s account of Watergate.

How far could her analysis be taken? Rule by ideology and terror, which Arendt saw as central to totalitarianism, was hard to see in the Watergate burglary and cover-up.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nor was the public simply bored into submission by Nixon’s men. While McCarthy wrote about deception and depoliticization, many citizens were more straightforwardly angered but unsurprised by the forms of elite corruption that Watergate reconfirmed. Dorothy Stewart had retired from nursing and worked in a hardware store near McCarthy’s Maine summer home. ‘As a quite ordinary citizen, living in a most limited fashion, but fully aware of the slick conniving opportunists that I distrust instinctively’, Stewart told McCarthy, ‘this whole affair seems to prove to me that I may not be so far off base.’ She followed Watergate from a different class position than McCarthy and Connolly. Watching the Senate hearings ‘as background entertainment here in the shop’, Stewart was pleased to hear of McCarthy’s work because ‘I simply felt like registering my reaction to someone’. Stewart’s judgement was that, while Dean seemed honest, the others were obvious liars and ‘should all be wrapped in the same bundle of “gobble-wash”, Mitchell, Ehrlichman and Haldeman. They are making a noble attempt to cleanse themselves and also shield Nixon.’Footnote ⁹⁶

Dorothy Stewart had not been depoliticized by Mitchell’s banal evil. On the contrary her sense of disillusioned spectatorship was clear-eyed, civically engaged, and quietly enraged. She expressed a detached and sceptical opinion, formed by watching television, that was unshocked by Watergate but still opposed to Nixon. Where McCarthy had imagined a mass reading public disempowered by totalitarian bureaucrats, Stewart suggested that self-consciously ordinary citizens were discriminating television viewers. ‘Mrs. Average Housewife’, as Stewart described herself, ‘is accustomed to all sorts of wild situations in these soap operas’ and ‘has been trained to pick out the good and bad characters’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Unsettled by Stewart’s letter, McCarthy told Arendt that it represented ‘the great TV public outside’, and that for this audience Watergate ‘has been entertainment; I don’t know how to judge that’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Stewart implied a Watergate public more defined by disenchantment than either deliberation or alienation. This public was an equivocal political formation, grimly entertained and undeceived but without clear means of action.

Arendt worried too about public opinion’s ambivalence towards Watergate. As the Senate hearings ran into August, she wrote to McCarthy that ‘only 31% (?) support [Nixon] but … no one wants him impeached. In other words, no one really minds about this massive invasion of crime into the political process.’ The polls then were indeed anti-impeachment (by 64 per cent) and convinced of Nixon’s complicity in Watergate (by 76 per cent). What explained this gap? ‘The overwhelming number of scandals which come to light is in a way self-defeating’, Arendt suggested. ‘Everybody, so it must seem did more or less what Nixon did, and where all are guilty no one is.’Footnote ⁹⁹ This echoed the Eichmann debate, when Arendt had argued similarly that ‘where all are guilty, no one is’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Both Arendt and McCarthy wanted public deliberation about the political crimes of particular state actors. They rejected as democratically corrosive the claim that Nixon had done nothing special. In their view Watergate demanded a mass civic response.Footnote ¹⁰¹

But the crisis increasingly turned on narrower contests over the White House tapes. When these emerged through Senate investigation, they seemed to confirm aspects of McCarthy’s analysis. What could be more symptomatic of Nixon’s totalitarian instincts than a personal surveillance system recording his every conversation? ‘The model may be found in the Eastern bloc countries’, McCarthy wrote. ‘Listening-devices installed in offices, hotels, homes, embassies serve no directly profitable purpose but simply go on recording.’Footnote ¹⁰² As she knew from personal experience in Poland, this kind of surveillance was inhibiting and oppressive. ‘The Polish UB [secret police] does not tell you that they have installed microphones in your apartment’, but the space felt different, and clearly ‘at the White House an uneasy feeling got around’.Footnote ¹⁰³ McCarthy suggested that White House staff became so used to bugging each other that ‘the desire to extend surveillance to the opposition party would be almost automatic’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Further ironies abounded. The tapes exposed Nixon as totalitarian but could also end his career – in which case, surveillance would have anti-totalitarian effects.

McCarthy saw the tapes as a lucky technical solution, rather than a real political response, to the democratic crisis of Watergate. Having seen public opinion as politically crucial, she worried that the tapes represented ‘an inadvertence of technology. We would no longer have to weigh such “subjective” factors as credibility in making up our minds’, McCarthy warned; ‘no need for cross-examination, no need, in fact, to hear any more long-winded witnesses’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The tapes lowered the civic stakes of Watergate. They drove legal and technical contests over access, edits, ownership, transcripts. Whole swathes of the crisis devolved into debates about tape doctoring, expert tape witnesses, and what caused tape gaps. The Senate hearings struggled on this shifting terrain. ‘For the first time in six weeks’, McCarthy reported, ‘I heard hisses in the room when Ervin was talking … I turned around and tried to see who was doing it, but the public looked just as usual, intent and impassive.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

McCarthy left Washington in August 1973, less optimistic about the American public and with much unresolved in Watergate. ‘Nixon could go totally nuts’, her editor Crookston wrote. ‘I just hope he can’t survive, otherwise 1984 won’t be so far away.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Perhaps encouraged by these Orwellian anxieties, McCarthy gave lectures in November on ‘Language and politics’ that responded to George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English language’ (1946). Orwell had argued that bad prose was partly to blame for political decline, and that ‘conscious action of a minority’ could and should expose dishonest writing.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ McCarthy agreed with Orwell that ‘cant, jargon, and euphemism’ were nascently totalitarian. But she also pointed out that ‘exposure (Orwell’s remedy)’ had proved insufficient. ‘How many times has Nixon been exposed as a liar?’ What Orwell had missed ‘was the element of consent in the public’, McCarthy thought. While the tapes might bring Nixon down through ‘a delightful turn of technology’, McCarthy maintained that ‘any real improvement would have to be effected by the popular will’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

IV

Many came to agree with McCarthy that Watergate exposed Nixon’s plan for a totalitarian state. Hans Morgenthau argued in The New Republic that Nixon had pursued an ‘abortive adventure in totalitarianism’, and that his allies practiced ‘in a haphazard way the same functions’ as secret police forces ‘in authoritarian and totalitarian societies’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Hunter S. Thompson wrote in The New York Times about ‘the aggressively totalitarian character of [Nixon’s] whole Administration’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Back in Paris, McCarthy remained pessimistic. Watergate’s democratic promise seemed much dimmer to her now. Most of the president’s men had lied to Congress. Citizens like Stewart felt more cynical than mobilized. The tapes were a technical distraction from deeper political problems. McCarthy told Arendt that Nixon’s ongoing rule ‘shows a general inertia and tonelessness of response that’s alarming in itself’.Footnote ¹¹²

To revive and clarify the politics of Watergate, McCarthy wrote a long essay for the New York Review of Books in spring 1974.Footnote ¹¹³ She argued that, starting with the Huston plan and escalating after the Pentagon Papers, Nixon had embraced a totalitarian agenda.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The White House came to resemble ‘the Kremlin during the late days of Stalin’. Ehrlichman ‘took a leaf from [Soviet secret police chief] Yagoda’s book’ when extracting confessions from colleagues.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Haldeman and Mitchell ordered fanatical deputies like Colson to persecute Nixon’s enemies.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This led to Magruder and the Watergate break-in. But McCarthy was clear that Watergate in the end ‘is a creation of Nixon and of Nixonian politics’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ She wrote that, ‘unless we say “Nixon”, we are forced to conclude that nobody authorized Watergate’, and that it ‘came to Magruder from a supernatural agency, identified by some with Mitchell, by some with Haldeman, by some with Colson’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Unless Nixon mattered, Watergate made no sense.

McCarthy had outlined a sequence that structured later histories of Watergate: the Huston plan and Pentagon Papers leading a paranoid Nixon to authorize the burglary’s cover-up and obstruct justice.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But in addition to seeing Nixon as anti-constitutional, McCarthy argued that his aims were overtly totalitarian and that he probably ordered the burglary too. What mattered was ‘the decalage from the Huston Plan to the Ellsberg episode to Watergate itself’, wrote Robert Silvers, her editor at The New York Review of Books. He added that, ‘if the Watergate business had not been fortuitously discovered, and if Nixon had gone on revamping the FBI, the CIA and the military in his second term, with the now forgotten national consensus behind him, he would have had, I’d think, something resembling real dictatorial power’.Footnote ¹²⁰ For Silvers and The New York Review of Books, the politics of Watergate centred on Nixon’s totalitarianism. McCarthy pressed this case as the president’s support fractured. Senator James Buckley, a conservative New York Republican, called in March 1974 for Nixon’s resignation.Footnote ¹²¹

How influential were McCarthy’s Watergate writings? Her work appeared in highbrow and mainstream outlets, and mattered within and beyond the US intelligentsia. In Britain The Observer was a mass-circulation newspaper that sold 775,000 copies every Sunday.Footnote ¹²² Here McCarthy engaged many readers who lacked access to American television. Hazel Hale of west Yorkshire told her that ‘the Watergate Hearings have my undivided attention … I miss the meagre TV coverage we had up to last Thursday – 45 minutes, at the most’.Footnote ¹²³ The New York Review of Books sold around 85,000 copies per issue, but McCarthy’s Watergate pieces also had a broader cultural reach.Footnote ¹²⁴ Readers of The Boston Globe learned from the columnist George Frazier that McCarthy was ‘lighting up the pages of NYRB with her observations on Watergate’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Listeners to WTFM 103.5, a commercial New York radio station, were told by the broadcaster Quincy Howe to ‘beg borrow or steal a copy of the April fourth issue of the N.Y. Review of Books and read Mary McCarthy’s piece’.Footnote ¹²⁶

McCarthy’s arguments here framed Watergate for an easy-listening radio audience. WTFM 103.5 was a mainstream ‘beautiful music’ station with hourly news commentary.Footnote ¹²⁷ Quincy Howe summarized McCarthy’s piece in The New York Review of Books and contrasted it with James Buckley’s call for Nixon to resign honourably. ‘As Mary McCarthy tells the story’, Howe told his listeners, ‘it’s hard to see how anybody but President Nixon had the power and the desire to originate and organize the whole Watergate operation from break-in through cover-up … McCarthy’s interpretation of Watergate runs counter to Senator Buckley’s … What a contrast to the Buckley appeal for a Nixon resignation.’Footnote ¹²⁸ McCarthy sharpened the stakes of Watergate on commercial radio as well as in newspapers and magazines.

When The mask of state was published in book form in June 1974, it was a solid critical success. Richard Goodwin reviewed it positively for The New York Times.Footnote ¹²⁹ A rave by McCarthy’s friend Harold Rosenberg appeared in The New York Review of Books, rebutting a negative piece by James Fallows in Washington Monthly.Footnote ¹³⁰ McCarthy’s book was also reviewed beyond New York and Washington. Victor Hass, veteran book critic at The Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska, thought The mask of state contained ‘some of the most interesting pieces to come out of the Watergate horror’. Quoting her extensively, Hass stressed that ‘McCarthy is no mincer of words’ and was ‘lethal’ with Nixon.Footnote ¹³¹ Her book sold nearly half the first printing of 10,000 copies before publication.Footnote ¹³² It was a ‘Bookseller’s Choice’ in the national chain Doubleday stores.Footnote ¹³³ French and Spanish translations of The mask of state appeared in 1974, followed by a US paperback in 1975.Footnote ¹³⁴

But the book’s commercial success was curtailed by the simultaneous appearance of All the president’s men. Woodward and Bernstein wrote a well-timed blockbuster that narrated their reporting in hardboiled prose. Their book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and landed perfectly in a literary market that rewarded crime and spy fiction.Footnote ¹³⁵ Published as the House judiciary committee began impeachment proceedings, All the president’s men functioned as a civic primer on Watergate’s key moments and characters.Footnote ¹³⁶ The book’s 1976 movie adaptation further enhanced its cultural power. Without imposing an overarching framework on the crisis beyond its narrative suspense and journalistic heroism, Woodward and Bernstein offered a tighter introduction to Watergate than McCarthy’s more speculative and theoretical analysis. This came through in joint reviews of their books. One reviewer wrote that ‘at this Point in Time’ Americans needed to know the basic facts about Watergate, and that Woodward and Bernstein were better than McCarthy for this purpose.Footnote ¹³⁷ ‘To Bernstein and Woodward go the credit for uncovering the most pervasive corruption of our times’, wrote another reviewer, ‘but the reader seeking insight into the nature of that corruption will gain more from Mary McCarthy’s collection’.Footnote ¹³⁸

By summer 1974, the end seemed nigh for Nixon. McCarthy had warned against his totalitarian aims, but Watergate went on for two years without jackboots actually in the streets. The House impeachment hearings suggested a system working, and were lauded this way in Jimmy Breslin’s How the good guys finally won (1975).Footnote ¹³⁹ Publication of partial tape transcripts further reduced the salience of McCarthy’s totalitarian analysis. For instead of a coherent police state, the transcripts revealed a great deal of recursive drift.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ McCarthy wrote that White House staff talked ‘like Murder Incorporated’, but they also seemed blundering and schlocky – more banality than evil.Footnote ¹⁴¹ A series of court rulings and congressional hearings eventually forced the publication of previously withheld tape transcripts. These proved that Nixon knew about the cover-up barely a week after the burglary, and that he personally obstructed justice in a criminal investigation.Footnote ¹⁴² Having lost enough Republican support to prevent impeachment, Nixon resigned in August.

Frameworks of tragedy became prominent ways to understand Watergate just after Nixon’s resignation. Pardoning the former president for all crimes committed in office, Gerald Ford said that Nixon’s fate was ‘an American tragedy’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Theodore White theorized Watergate as a tragedy in Breach of faith: the fall of Richard Nixon (1975). White argued that Nixon’s character was his fate, that ‘his character was flawed’, and that hubris led to nemesis in Watergate.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ But Woodward and Bernstein’s second book, The final days (1976), took furthest the view of Nixon as a tragic figure. Watergate here was a tear-jerker. Nixon wept in Kissinger’s arms ‘curled on the carpet like a child’. When he left the White House Nixon’s staff were ‘sad, torn, in tears’, Woodward and Bernstein wrote. ‘They had lost their place in the sun because of what one man had done.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ From this angle, Watergate’s tragedy reflected Nixon’s character and personal actions instead of any wider project for the American state.

McCarthy rejected the view that Watergate was a tragedy. ‘What tragedy?’, she asked. The burglary and cover-up were for her a criminal conspiracy to subvert democracy and build a totalitarian regime. Watergate ‘had a happy ending’, McCarthy stressed, in the sense that ‘Nixon went, and all his court with him’. While his pardon was outrageous, many allies went to jail. The real tragedy of Watergate, McCarthy thought, lay in how Nixon represented democratic as well as totalitarian forces. His career was a political fact that ‘we have all played a part in’, she wrote. ‘We voted for him, opposed him, cheered him, abused him, marched against him, strewed flowers in his path.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Nixon’s fraught popularity, not his personality, made Watergate partially tragic. His ability to express real public sentiments, as well as manipulate opinion, made him politically significant and remained bracingly resonant.

Thus McCarthy saw Watergate as a kind of mirror for democracy. She thought its deepest meaning lay not in Nixon’s personal tragedy but in the very process of political revelation. What ultimately mattered in Watergate was the uncanny part ‘that persists in disclosing itself, despite all efforts, well-meaning or evilly designed. Pardon will not quieten Nixon’, McCarthy concluded; ‘nor in the long run will it defraud the public, if getting hold of the facts, the actual corpus delicti, rather than of Nixon’s flailing, struggling person is its real desire’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Watergate reflected the public back to itself in ways that were troubling, potentially empowering, and most of all revealing. If the public wanted to oppose Nixon’s state project, it would gain much from Watergate. But if the public looked away from the Watergate mirror, if the main issue was Nixon’s character, or if the crisis became a legal and technical matter, then its core political lessons would be lost. Watergate showed McCarthy how and why the relationship between public opinion and state power could run in both democratic and totalitarian directions.

This edge to McCarthy’s argument was caught best in the underground press.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ While circulations here were small, radical counterpublics thrived. Reviewing The mask of state for the Boston weekly Gay Community News, Gary Indiana argued for a broader popular front against Nixonian proto-fascism. ‘A political alliance of the Gay Liberation Movement with the ideologies of other oppressed groups could be a real threat’, he wrote, specifying ‘poor blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and others whose spokespersons have been casually murdered by the government’. For marginalized citizens facing state violence, Indiana framed left political unity as an urgent practical necessity. Where McCarthy had celebrated and criticized the American public at large, Indiana thought her analysis called for a more focused and militant coalition. Nixon and Ford might be followed by ‘something far more unhinged, but much more tightly organized’, Indiana warned. It was ‘not the hour for those of us with everything to lose by a fascist conquest of America to “wait and see”’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

After Watergate a more bellicose and better organized conservative movement became dominant in American politics. Congress investigated domestic surveillance and disclosed more abuses, but did not seriously alter the structure or power of executive intelligence agencies.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Ronald Reagan, for whom Watergate was ‘not criminal, just illegal’, won the 1980 election and became a broadly popular president.Footnote ¹⁵¹ He reauthorized FBI and CIA programs that spied on US citizens. ‘Really, was it worth it to throw Nixon out?’, McCarthy asked in 1982. Watergate had seemed to vindicate ‘the framework of our republic’, because citizens saw ‘the judiciary and the legislative branches of government rounding on the monstrous, trespassing executive’. But now the state was ruled by Reagan and what McCarthy saw as ‘Far Right’ forces. Searching for their origins, she emphasized ‘the trail leading out of Watergate blazed by Chuck Colson. It is a chilling thought that he, from his jail cell, understood the message of Watergate better than we fond libertarians.’Footnote ¹⁵² In despair at politics and feuding with Lillian Hellman, McCarthy focused on writing obituaries and memoir in her later years.Footnote ¹⁵³ She died at seventy-seven in 1989.

McCarthy thought about Watergate through complex interactions between an emerging totalitarian state and the wider American public. Framing the burglary and cover-up not as a detective story but as a deep crisis of democratic legitimacy, she argued that Watergate initially produced a rational mass public in direct opposition to Nixon. But she also worried that bureaucrats like Mitchell worked to build public apathy and entrench American totalitarianism. As the crisis continued, McCarthy explained the ambiguities of Watergate by emphasizing the equivocal and contingent nature of public opinion. She stressed the public’s capacity to support both democratic and anti-democratic state forms. In this sense, Watergate was a mirror that revealed what the public really wanted from the state. For McCarthy, the crisis exposed how and whether American democracy could unmask and defeat the power of liars, criminals, and worse.