Using Agnew and Nixon as the villains was no casual throwaway by O'Neil and Adams, md62.

I distinctly remember buying this comic after an exhaustive search of candy stores and newsstands, in March, 1971, a week, maybe two, after it hit the stands.

That was 14 months before the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

In October 1973, Agnew resigned in disgrace after kickback and bribery scandals surfaced. he pleaded nolo contendre to tax evasion. Got off easy, IYAM or anyone else who had to listen to his sanctimonious blather.

And Nixon, as you know, resigned in August 1974.

The references to Agnew and Nixon rang very true with me and many others, as Agnew had been criticizing the media for months in the wake of the coverage of the illegal invasion of Cambodia, the ensuing protests and killings at Kent State and Jackson State, and the increasingly hostility by the Nixon administration for anyone who spoke out against it.

You may recall, in addition to Agnew's assault on the freedom of the press (fueled by the purple-prose toxins of the young Patrick Buchanan), Nixon's "Enemies List," and the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers TV show in 1969 because of its criticism of the Vietnam War, for starters. (Check out Pete Seeger singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" in February '68 and and you'll get the picture.)

O'Neil and Adams weren't just doing this because they thought it would be cute.

Good Analysis and you got your points ... right on the money and those years were the "darkest" in American History and I had to ask my Parents what really happen and I was a teenager back then and I wanted to understand what was going on there and I felt that both the President and the Vice President lost a tremendous amount of integrity that led to their resignations and that shamed them and embarrassed the Republican Party in the 70's.


By the way, excellent write-up here ... I wished that I could write like that.

Are you talking about the Watergate period? If so, I would say hardly. The previous decade--the 1960s--saw

--the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the edge of war (including Operation Northwoods, a proposed terror/false flag plan against Americans to con them into thinking it was the work of Castro's Cuba, thus the expected outrage would also support a full scale war against Cuba--all the plans of a number of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff & the Department of Defense
--racial conflict pushing the nation to the point where both the government (specifically the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A.) and people on the street thought a second civil war was possible.
--the highest rate of domestic assassinations in U.S. history (and that includes civil rights activists, members of the clergy, etc.
--the F.B.I.'s COINTELPRO initiative which targeted innocent Americans (e.g. civil rights activists, any sort of black empowerment group, entertainers of the ideological Left, et al), worked with local law enforcement to orchestrate murders of alleged dissidents, etc.
--Vietnam more for what America was actually doing over there than the sold, packaged story, etc.

That's just scratching the surface as the list of terrible, era-defining events is quite endless, and despite some in the media and among Baby Boomers who paint the 60s as The Beatles, a lot of (largely bad) TV, the so-called "Summer of Love" the moon landing and Woodstock, the true decade was incredibly dark and its impact forever altered the course of the nation (and in a few cases, the world) in ways that all things Nixon could not by any stretch of the imagination.

I was in the hospital, coming out of anesthesia, after an operation to repair a hernia.  My parents had Ford's speech on the tv, when I woke up.  I asked what was going on, then fell back to sleep not to long after.  The pardon didn't really shock me, as I was young enough to not really understand all of the consequences; but, following that up with the lunacy of the Ford presidency (more surrounding him, his administration and the country, rather than the man, himself) and the constant lampooning on SNL and even in things like The Pink Panther Strikes Again was all quite memorable and I knew things were a complete mess.

True, but in that period, being "political"--particularly as an American--was not so polarizing a mindset as it would become in the conflicted 1960s (and 70s to a lesser degree). Innumerable Americans felt unified and justified in embracing a proud, political ideology tied to fighting a global evil / the survival of mankind. That's why few can honestly criticize WWII era comics as being "one-sided", since most were on the same train of thought.