Two impeachments and one insurrection ago, comedian John Oliver described a then-fresh scandal–the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 election–as “Stupid Watergate.” This use of Watergate–a shorthand for the series of crimes, dirty dealings, and subsequent cover-ups that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974–reveals a lot about how we tried to understand the firehose of scandal and corruption that was the Trump Administration. On the one hand, Watergate was a hopeful precedent. It promised that political misdeeds could be brought to light, thoroughly investigated, and could bring down an unfit president. On the other, the idea that the Trump-Russia affair was, as Oliver put it, “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything,” reflected our sense that we were living in a diminished, ludicrous age. It mirrored a perverse longing for a time when the bad guys seemed competent enough to be truly worthy of our opprobrium.
But we looked at the past with rose-colored glasses, and with blinders. This historical fantasy glossed over the fact that the Watergate scandal itself was extremely, staggeringly stupid. In the film version All The President’s Men, the story of the Washington Post reporters who helped blow Watergate open, the mysterious confidential source known only as “Deep Throat” dismisses the notion of any diabolical conspiracy. “The truth is,” he says, “these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
HBO’s series White House Plumbers told the story of two these “not very bright guys.” G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt engineered the bungled break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. The White House’s efforts to cover up its involvement in the crime (efforts approved by Nixon himself), led the president to voluntarily step down rather than face impeachment. But the Watergate incident was just part of a much larger campaign to stymie the Democrats and punish any government officials who leaked information to the press. Hunt and Liddy were the “plumbers” hired to fix the leaks.
But the Watergate incident was just part of a much larger campaign to stymie the Democrats and punish any government officials who leaked information to the press.White House Plumbers began at the beginning, telling the larger story of the many “dirty tricks” that Hunt and Liddy took on in Nixon’s name. The first was a break-in of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers. Another scheme involved helping Dita Beard–a lobbyist who’d spent $400,000 toward the 1972 Republican Convention in exchange for the approval for her company’s merger–fake a heart attack during a Congressional hearing. (This episode featured a superb turn by Kathleen Turner as the salty, chain-smoking Beard.) In chronicling these misadventures, White House Plumbers illustrated how Nixon, as a political standard-bearer, gave many men who worked for him a sense of identity. He inspired a feeling of purpose and belonging and led them–sometimes headlong, sometimes ass-backwards–into criminal conduct. They fell on their swords to protect Nixon from his enemies, some real and many imagined.
If All The President’s Men has become the culturally-enshrined “official story” of Watergate, it is because it is both thrilling and comforting in its lucid economy. In Alan J. Pakula’s exquisitely shot and tautly plotted film version, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly follow lead after lead until they reveal just how high the conspiracy goes. The film ends with a close-up of a typewriter spelling out the headline “NIXON RESIGNS,” as if words alone could bring him down. Nixon himself never appears in the film; he’s a specter that looms just out of view. Hunt and Liddy don’t appear either. They’re simply too buffoonish to work with the film’s vibe of paranoia and menacing conspiracy.
These are two characters that you could not make up if you tried. Hunt was an ex-CIA agent of mediocre achievements who turned his unrealized fantasies of espionage into a series of middling spy novels. “Excellence was never something E. Howard Hunt was destined for,” Garrett Graff writes in his Watergate: A New History. In White House Plumbers, he is played by Woody Harrelson, in an uneven performance that can’t quite straddle the line between farce and tragedy. This is broad caricature–Harrelson leans too much into a locked jaw and a gravelly voice to render Hunt’s gruff pomposity. In moments–like when Hunt, high off the Ellsberg caper, tunelessly belts out Frank Sinatra’s “The Best Is Yet to Come,” he perfectly conveys the beaming euphoria Hunt gets from a renewed sense of purpose. Of the two, Hunt is the more clear-headed and skeptical, and the moments where doubt creeps in were where Harrelson really shines.
What the series continually stressed is that, for these men, Nixon (who ran as the “law and order” candidate in 1968) represents a bulwark against a changing and tumultuous world. This emerged most clearly in the portrayal of Hunt’s home life. His conflicts with his dropout daughter, and his less-than-benign neglect of his other kids, dramatizes Hunt’s determination to fight against the radical political shifts wrought by the 1960s. The “Greatest Generation baffled by their hippie children” is a clichéd narrative, and it definitely gets too much time in White House Plumbers. The upside, however, is a fabulous performance by Lena Headey (of Game of Thrones fame) as Dorothy, Hunt’s wife. Dorothy’s so frustrated with Hunt and his Nixon fixation that she can’t decide if she even likes him anymore. In every scene, she grimly composes her face in that bland upper-class housewife mien: wide eyes that can’t quite conceal the tight smile. “You’re a very simple man, Mr. Hunt,” Dorothy quips as he ogles her in her riding breeches, and she means it in more ways than one. Dorothy, a former agent herself, is fighting on two fronts: trying to get her husband to pay attention to his family, and warning him about how moronic his escapades truly are. Feeling Dorothy’s frustration, you often want her to go full Cersei Lannister and unleash some wildfire on these bozos, but when everything goes sideways it’s Dorothy who keeps everything together.
Gordon Liddy, Hunt’s fellow Plumber, was a man both larger and smaller than life. An ex-FBI agent and failed congressional candidate, Liddy was, in Graff’s telling, an “exceptionally articulate” man with a “warrior-type charisma” and a “willingness to fudge ethical lines.” Idiosyncratically loquacious, egomaniacal, and with fascist leanings, Liddy was a true believer willing to do anything for Nixon. “He’s a Hitler,” one White House staffer said, “but he’s our Hitler.” Liddy concocted a series of dirty tricks fantastically titled “Project Gemstone.” The schemes included putting sex workers on a yacht in order to gain kompromat on Democrats, and kidnapping protesters and sending them to Mexico.The Watergate break-in was the only one to be approved.
Liddy is a great part, and Justin Theroux slips into it like a bespoke suit. Behind a truly glorious mustache, he nails Liddy’s mannered silky voice, and delivers his quirky stemwinders with a smooth conviction. He makes his face mobile and plasticine enough to move like a shot between an overconfident, overdetermined stillness and boiling, flailing rage. Liddy’s a loyal soldier to the end. After he’s charged for the Watergate break-in, he’s more than willing to sacrifice himself. He suggests that his bosses arrange to gun him down on the street, asking only for a clean head shot. Theroux imbues the moment with a true poignancy, giving an undertone of real humanity to this cartoon of a man.
When Hunt and Liddy get together, we feel the giddy delight they feel at being let back into the action. Their harebrained schemes give these straggling and struggling bumblers a feeling of achievement that bolsters their fragile sense of masculinity. At first they butted heads as each tried to be top dog. But soon they bond over their shared resentments (of JFK and Jane Fonda), and their inflated sense of their own roles. “I guess it’s you and me against the entire radical left,” Hunt says to Liddy. White House Plumbers was created by Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, veterans of Veep. It has something of that show’s vibe, both amused and horrified at how major political decisions are being made by ludicrous, petty egomaniacs.
After all, these men were doing what they were doing not just to help Nixon, but to prove their worth to the political class that viewed them with patronizing contempt. They took orders from Jeb Magruder (played in the show by a smarmy Ike Barinholtz) and John Dean (a slippery, cautious Domhnall Gleeson), who clearly viewed them as useful idiots. And herein lies the knotty contradiction at the heart of White House Plumbers. On one level, we are meant to side with Magruder and Dean, as their expressions clearly signal: “Will you get a load of these schmucks?” Yet Magruder and Dean (the first to cut a deal and became a celebrity because of it) are already up to their eyeballs in crimes themselves. They are symbols of the larger corruption that permeated the Nixon Administration, a picture that’s hard to capture when the focus is on Hunt and Liddy.
The first half of the series goes down smooth, like a shambolic heist movie (a Stupid Ocean’s Eleven, if you will.) The music is funky, the wigs ridiculous, the lapels wide. It is fun to see our hapless knights errant fumble at every step. But once Hunt and Liddy are caught in the act, White House Plumbers struggles to find its tone. On the one hand, it is a comic legal thriller, but things get darker as Hunt discovers just how expendable he is, and there are tragic aspects as we see how his actions destroyed his family. The filming is stylish, the cast superb (boasting everyone from F. Murray Abraham to Judy Greer to Kiernan Shipka), but the balance is hard to find.
When we talk about Watergate, we’re talking about many things. Yes, it was a spectacle of rank stupidity by individuals driven by blind, imponderable loyalty. But stupidity and bumblers still managed to cause grave consequences. The profundity of Watergate’s shock to the American political system, and the way it eroded public trust in law, can never be fully measured. With its small men and its big, widespread rot, it’s a story that’s hard to fully get our arms around. White House Plumbers, sometimes brilliant and sometimes hackneyed, reveals so much about why we feel the need to keep telling it.
