Mary McCarthy and the Watergate Crisis

Abstract Watergate is conventionally understood through insider narratives about its complex daily churn as an unfolding political scandal. But the crisis also drove broader theoretical debates about democracy and the state in 1970s America. This article offers the first sustained account of Mary McCarthy’s Watergate writings. She theorized Watergate as a stark legitimacy crisis that revolved around the relationship between democracy and totalitarianism. Through dialogues with Hannah Arendt and others, McCarthy argued that Watergate turned politically on the public’s ability to unmask and contest the power of totalitarian state actors. By rejecting tragedy as a conceptual framework for Watergate, and by recentring the state in debates about US totalitarianism, McCarthy’s work shows how and why interactions between public opinion and state power could advance both democratic and anti-democratic politics.