POOR RICHARD BY PHILIP GUSTON

In the summer of 1971two years before the Watergate hearingsRichard Nixon was an incumbent whose grip on power was being tested by the Pentagon Papers. Inspired in part by the work of his friend Philip Roth, who had just finished the novel Our Gang, Philip Gusto n began drawing the object of his political anger and despairRichard Nixon, transformed into the character Poor Richard, rendered with a distinctively phallic nose and scrotal jowls, and accompanied by henchmen Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, and Henry Kissinger.