‘White House Plumbers’ Review: History Unclogged
HBO's limited series 'White House Plumbers' ruthlessly mocks the Watergate break-in team. It's satire done right.
Before Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, resigned in disgrace on national television over his role in the cover-up of a break-in at the headquarters of the National Democratic Committee, there was a congressional investigation into said break-in.
That investigation was launched in the wake of confirmation that Nixon lied to the public about any connection to the break-in while running for reelection, which he won. His reelect committee employed a team known as the “White House Plumbers,” who got this whole thing rolling by being arrested during that break-in.
The story has been told countless times in film and television. What makes White House Plumbers (★★★★☆), HBO’s five-episode limited series, different from previous narratives is the ruthlessness with which it mocks that political espionage team. Eschewing the historical tendency to portray E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy as having a dark gravitas, creators Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck have wisely opted to manifest them as the clumsiest of clowns.
Woody Harrelson (Hunt) and Justin Theroux (Liddy) deliver performances that adroitly highlight the foolishness and absurdity of these infamous political operatives without tipping over into caricatures that would risk undermining the severity of their incompetence.
Far too many film and television adaptations of the Watergate scandal over the years have offered ridiculous and undeserved maturity to the actions of the Plumbers, seeming to imply that these were savvy men who simply made a series of unsavvy decisions.
This deeply flawed characterization has seemed to abet a degree of public rehabilitation for these complete dork-ass losers in the years after their relatively brief incarceration over Watergate (Hunt served 33 months and Liddy was slapped with 52 months). I say “relatively brief” because it doesn’t seem the least bit logical that countless citizens charged with non-violent drug crimes spent far longer in prison than these two traitors.
Harrelson plays Hunt as a man who doesn’t seem to know his ass from a hole in the ground, despite having considerable experience on paper as a CIA operative and former Naval officer. That is accurate, and I guaran-damn-tee you any woman or person of color who had made as many unforced errors as Hunt throughout the Watergate saga would have received this dipshit portrayal long ago.
Liddy, meanwhile, is contextualized superbly by Theroux, who steals every scene he’s in with an irresistible presence that feels like how it would look if Dwight Shrute and Daniel Plainview shat out a love child. Liddy made a pretty good living after jail with speaking engagements, books, and frequent cameos in television shows despite being a disgusting Nazi piece-of-shit.
But because white men in positions of power decided that white supremacy wasn’t that big a deal, Liddy carved out a space in the public square that essentially anesthetized his horrific worldview and allowed the public to enjoy his bullshit as an outdated and supposedly harmless old crank.
There is one particular scene that manages to effectively destroy, for all time, the reputations of Hunt and Liddy for whatever vestiges of cautious respect they have received in death. While hosting Hunt and his wife Dorothy at their suburban home outside D.C., Liddy decides to put on a vinyl of Hitler’s greatest speeches, blasting it at high volume and claiming aloud to the Hunts that he derived power from Hitler’s rhetorical performance.
Hunt, being the mediocre coward he was, declined to intervene in response to his colleague openly expressing deep admiration for an antisemitic mass-murderer. That sums up these extremists who should have been blacklisted in public media forever after their convictions and the revelation of their white supremacist views.
It’s particularly galling to me that Liddy is still seen by some conservatives as a hero — probably the same ones who cry “cancel culture” any time they’re asked to confront the consequences of their actions. When Liddy delivers a Nazi salute near the end of the finale, it gives me great pleasure to imagine his lingering admirers fuming over the unvarnished truth made crystal clear — a truth they assiduously avoid while falling over themselves to appreciate his shameless tactics.
White House Plumbers is satire done right. It’s funny without sacrificing a shred of seriousness in their heinous actions. It’s what happens when reasonable adults correctly refuse to cede an inch of ground or grace to shitty people who never made an attempt to make amends over their roles in the extremist rightwing culture that has now gone mainstream beyond the wildest imaginations of Hunt and Liddy, both of whom were all-too-happy to fan the flames out of their insecurity and ignorance.
White House Plumbers debuts on HBO and HBOMax on Monday, May 1 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with subsequent episodes dropping weekly through May 29. Visit www.hbo.com or www.hbomax.com.
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