The Watergate case from a perspective closer to comedy. This is how David Mandel (one of the executive producers of that great political satire called Veep) has developed it in the new series The White House Plumbers, which premiered this week on the HBO Max platform. Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux get into the shoes of E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, former CIA and FBI agents, respectively, who landed on President Richard Nixon’s Reelection Committee and ended up fully involved in one of the biggest political scandals in the United States: the installation of hidden microphones in the offices of the National Committee of the Democratic Party in the Watergate complex.
Until now we had as a great reference to the case the praised journalistic work that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did in their day, for which they won the Pulitzer Prize and which was brought to the big screen in All the President’s Men. (1976) with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the leads. The White House Plumbers puts the focus in a different place: it focuses on the five arrested for breaking into the Democratic electoral headquarters on June 17, 1972 and the two men who organized it, Hunt and Liddy, presented here rather like a couple of bunglers.
Both had been hired by the White House for covert operations and their first mission, in 1971, was to enter the office of the psychiatrist of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, to search for documents that could compromise him. It did not go well and despite this the couple later landed on the Committee for the re-election of the president, where they obtained new assignments, including spying on the Democrats in the Watergate building.
“Comedy is a refreshing way to see the Watergate scandal, by putting yourself in the eyes of the assailants you see it for what it really was, very funny,” Harrelson said in a meeting with journalists. “We have heard a lot about the robbery, but from the guys who carried out it, we wanted to know what they were like before it happened, why they did it and how it impacted their lives,†said Mandel, for whom this story is like “a very funny tragedy â€. “In delving into it, the failed muggings and other oversights, you can’t help but laugh, but at the same time it’s a terrible case of abuse of power and violation of the law,” he also warned.
The script for the series is based on the public records of what happened in 1972 and the book Integrity: Good People, Bad Decisions, and Life Lessons from the White House, by Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh and Matthew Krogh. The book recounts some events that are as surprising as they are real, such as the fact that there were not up to four assault attempts -the first failed for various reasons- or that the assailants were discovered due to an absurd oversight: one of them put adhesive tape on a back door to be able to open it and access the center; a guard discovered it and removed it, without giving it any importance, but when he returned hours later and saw that someone had put it back, he became suspicious.
