Jack Davis and the Circle of Blame

Jack Davis supplied the artwork for numerous Time magazine covers. Here is one with a lot of finger-pointing. The April 30, 1973 cover refers to the great Watergate scandal in the Nixon White House. At the time, I thought it was a fantastic magazine cover. It has held up remarkably well.

President Nixon is surrounded by his aides, who are entangled in wiretapping material used during the break-ins at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. (The tapes shown here are not the Nixon White House tapes of Presidential conversations recorded in the Oval Office, the existence of which had not yet been disclosed.) Clockwise from top right: Jeb Magruder, Deputy Director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President; White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman; White House Counsel John Dean; former Attorney General John Mitchell; former Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans, subsequently the finance chair of the Committee to Re-Elect the President; and James McCord, a security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President who was arrested during the second break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Those were the days, my friend!

Jack Davis, "Watergate Breaks Wide Open," Time, April 30, 1973

Jack Davis, Original Artwork for "Watergate Breaks Wide Open," Time, April 30, 1973

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/5022979999/?reg=1&src=fave

Note:  Say, does anyone remember a similar illustration published after the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster? It depicts a circle of finger-pointers, one of them labelled Thiokol, and was entitled "The O-Ring." It may or may not be by Jack Davis. If you have a scan of it, I'd love to see it for purposes of comparison and to refresh my memory. If it is indeed by Jack Davis, I might even like to include it in this post. Anybody?

You're in luck! I have another post on Jack Davis here.

Or there's another post on the Watergate Affair here.

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