Watergate

Cultural impact and depictions

Watergate is often regarded as the climactic moment in the loss of American trust in government following the Vietnam War. Journalist Bill Schneider writes that although American political cynicism did not "start with Watergate... Watergate turned an erosion of public confidence into a collapse". It left such an impression that post-Watergate scandals are often named with the suffix "-gate". These range from genuine political scandals like Koreagate to the sports scandal Deflategate and the discredited Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The paranoia of the "Watergate era" is often associated with a subgenre of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, such as cinematic releases such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) or Three Days of the Condor (1975), and Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), which depicts the lead up to Watergate, on television. In some cases, production had begun before the scandal's zenith and are partly a reflection of the period's zeitgeist.