Because the light is better here

[womzilla]

james_nicoll asks a fairly straightforward, unfraught question:

How did Richard Nixon manage to get elected as President in the timeline we see in Watchmen?

Notice the number of respondents who answer a question James did not ask--"How did Nixon stay in office until 1985?"

The second question is more directly addressed in the comic than the first one is, though an answer can be ferreted out, which is why I titled this post what I did.

(My answer to James's question is this:

The first public demonstration of Dr. Manhattan's abilities in 1960 did put him in a military context (destroying a tank). However, the implication in Dr. Glass's essay (the text piece to issue #4) is that Kennedy and LBJ thought or feared that using Manhattan for small conflicts would be an escalation that the Soviet Union would consider comparable to using nuclear weapons.

Midway through his first term, Nixon, the "mad bomber", deployed Dr. Manhattan despite that consideration. The gamble paid off, and Nixon won easy re-election in 1972.

)

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Those comments are wrong about both the comic and the film. Nixon was in office for events dated to 1970 (the end of the Vietnam war) and 1977 (the police strike and the subsequent Keene Act) in both works.

Additionally, in the film, Hollis Mason jokes about voting for him five times, but I don't remember that from the comic--it's a bit too blatant a bit of incluing for the comic. (Hollis could have voted for him six times if he went for Nixon in 1960.) I don't actually have problems with the film having taken some narrative shortcuts--a three-hour film doesn't have as much information as a 300-page comic as densely told as Watchmen--but it's unfortunate if people are coming away from such blatant incluing without the information.

[avram]

There's no incluing so blatant that someone won't miss it.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Tru dat. But if multiple people are making the same mistake, I'm wondering how they're missing the right info.

Ah, as I wrote that I remembered that in the opening montage of the film there's a caption "Nixon wins third term." So, some people are missing that that even was nearly a decade before the "present day" of the narrative.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would explain the error. (And I wouldn't be in a position to realize it myself, because I haven't seen the film yet. People ask why, if I hated the Jackson LOTR films so much [actually, I didn't: what I hate is the widespread claim that they're a good adaptation of the book], I went to see them at all, and this kind of thing illustrates why: if I didn't, I wouldn't have any idea of what the heck people were talking about when they spouted film-born misinterpretations.)