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) captured it in the new series Los fontaneros de la Casa Blanca, which premiered on HBO Max this week. Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux play E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, ex-CIA and FBI agents, respectively, who land on the Committee to Re-elect President Richard Nixon and end up immersed in one of the America’s biggest political scandals: The installation of hidden microphones in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex.
Until now we had as a great reference of the case the lauded journalistic work that the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein once did, for which they won the Pulitzer Prize and which was brought to the big screen with Tots The President’s Men (1976), with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The White House Plumbers puts the spotlight in a different place: it focuses on the five arrested for breaking into the Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972, and the two men who organized it, Hunt and Liddy, featured here earlier like a pair of shoemakers.
Both had been hired by the White House for covert operations and their first mission, in 1971, was to break into the office of the psychiatrist of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, to look for documents that they could compromise him. It did not go well and despite this the couple ended up at 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, because when you experience it from the point of view of the assailants you see it as it really was, very funny,” said Harrelson in a meeting with journalists. “We’ve heard a lot about the assault, but we wanted to know what the couples who took part in it were like before anything happened, why they did it and how it impacted their lives,” said Mandel, who defines this story as “a very funny tragedy”. “When you look deeper, at the failed assaults and other distractions, 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 explains some events that are as surprising as they are real, such as the fact that there were up to four attempted assaults – the first failed for different reasons – or that the assailants were discovered due to an absurd distraction: a d ‘els put tape on a back door to be able to open it and access the centre; a watchman discovered it and removed it, and did not attach any importance to it, but when he returned hours later and saw that someone had placed it again, he became suspicious.
