White House Plumbers Takes Its Subjects As Seriously As They Should Be

 

The early critical response to HBO’s White House Plumbers is that it has nothing really new to say about Watergate, that it doesn’t take  the subject of either Nixon or the scandal seriously enough, that this was a story that didn’t need to be told. In order for me to explain why I am fundamentally enjoying the limited series so much; I think that I have to give some more background.

Ever since Nixon resigned in August of 1974, Watergate and Richard Nixon have been written about and argued about by every single person possible. Nixon has in a sense become the more portrayed President in history, from Anthony Hopkins to Kevin Spacey to Dan Hedaya. There have been books and documentaries made, written by those of every imaginable political persuasion, including his most ravenous defenders and the theorists who still believe he was framed. Every abuse of executive power since then has been compared to Watergate (-gate has been added to almost every political scandal that has happened since), either side will argue that every scandal that happens since is worse than it. The opinions of Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon have been repudiated, then applauded, then repudiated again. Both sides have argued about the benefits – and damage – it has done to every bit of investigative journalism going forward and how our nation was damaged irrevocably from it.

And at a certain point, we either seemed to have learned the wrong lessons from it or stopped asking the most important questions. Last year when I raved about Starz’s Gaslit, I made several arguments to just that point. And since White House Plumbers revisits much of the same stories and characters, its worth reviewing perhaps the most critical question.

In hindsight what strikes me the most about Watergate is not why anyone thought it would be a good idea or why the Plumbers were eventually recruited but why anyone connected with Nixon’s White House thought it was necessary. Indeed in the early minutes of Gaslit John Dean asks why they need to go such elaborate dirty trick when the President’s easily going to win reelection. Mitchell just fixes Dean with a stony stare and Dean just moves on to coming up with a plan which in effect leads to the hiring of Gordon Liddy.

The thing is, well before the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon’s reelection was basically a sure thing. Indeed, as I argued in one of my articles on George Wallace (and Theodore White was my major source) after Wallace was shot on May 15^th, Richard Nixon’s reelection was assured. By the time of the Miami Convention, the Democrats seemed more than willing to make it easy for Nixon. They spent the runup to the convention doing everything they could to stop George McGovern from getting the nomination, his search for a running mate led to the disastrous selection of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, and when that blew up in his face McGovern was essentially dead in the polls. During the fall campaign, most of the major Democratic figures would barely campaign with McGovern. The message seemed to be that four more years with Nixon was better than the alternative.

Furthermore when the Watergate break-in became public knowledge in August, it didn’t change the minds of any voters despite McGovern’s best efforts to do so. Nixon still won in landslide. In All The President’s Men the book, both Woodward and Bernstein seem to admit as much on Election Day when they predict Nixon is going to win reelection anyway. White actually argued that even if the full truth had come out – and he devotes nearly eighty pages in the book to it – that it would not have made a difference, and while White was fundamentally fooled by just how much he misjudged Nixon and the White House, it’s hard to argue with him when he says that no Democrat could have defeated Richard Nixon in 1972.

And the thing is the polling bears it out. Edmund Muskie, the early favorite in January of 1972, was at best in a tie with Nixon and that was with Wallace ciphering off eleven percent of the vote. Humphrey was trailing Nixon by nine percent in the same poll. At the height of McGovern’s popularity as a candidate McGovern was trailing Nixon by five points. After Wallace was shot, he never caught that close again. (I’ll actually be dealing in part with the other reason in another article)

We will probably never hear all of Nixon’s recordings, but one question that I have is that did no one in the administration – Colson or Mitchell or Dean – ever even raise to Nixon the idea that maybe they were wasting money and time on so much making sure Nixon was reelected? They certainly weren’t thinking of a victory in terms of the Republican Party; as chairman Bob Dole noted ruefully, the only time he saw Nixon was on television and Nixon’s 49 state landslide didn’t lead to a Republican majority in either house. David Merrick once famously said that it was not enough for him to win, his opponents must also lose, and when many of the President’s men testified before Congress about Watergate, many of them gave the variations on that response. As far as I know, however, no Congressman or lawyer ever asked the same question John Dean fictionally asked Mitchell in Gaslit. Weren’t they even curious as to why these men had committed such flagrant abuses of power – and were about to go to prison for - for such pointless reasons?

As far as I know, and I am not an expert on Watergate, the question has never been asked, much less answered. I honestly think that Gaslit may have given the best answer to it when it portrayed such horrible people as Jeb Magruder and John Ehrlichman and all the rest not so much as monsters but as little more than hangers-on so desperate to get to close to power that they’ll go anything. When the FBI asks John Dean in Gaslit why he did what he did, he gives an explanation about the kind of leather that the seats on Air Force One have and how comfortable it is compared to the kinds available everywhere else. For half a century we have portrayed all of the men around Nixon as essentially monsters with no souls willing to do anything for Nixon. Gaslit turned the equation on its head by saying that some of them never even met Nixon but just wanted to say they were in the room with them. It is both pathetic and ridiculous at the same time – but I think it’s a far more interesting and believable explanation than so many of the others we’ve had. At the end of the day, we all just want to  sit at the cool kids table and be close to celebrity, power and money, even if we don’t actually get any of those things. Gaslit argues that the Nixon White House was no different than that – and it’s a better explanation than anything I’ve heard. Some might argue its simplifying the motivations of these complex, evil people; I’d argue that for half a century we’ve been needlessly complicated it.

And once you realize that, then it is impossible not to view so much of Watergate as the farce as it is. In that sense, the writers of White House Plumbers have been taking exactly the right by treating every aspect of their activities with the seriousness it deserves – which is to say, none at all.

We meet Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson, superb as always) in a PR firm, still fuming about being let go from the CIA and pathetically eager when he gets a chance to work at the White House. He has grandiose ideas and is fundamentally demeaned when he learns he will be working with G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux leaning into the comic pomposity that Shea Whigham only hinted at in Gaslit) In Gaslit we see Liddy holding his hand over a candle to demonstrate his will; here it is considering just an act of ridiculousness.

The ’operation’ is directed to try and get information about Daniel Ellsberg who has just leaked the Pentagon Papers. The ‘strategy session’  is ridiculous as Hunt and Liddy speak in utter seriousness about breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to read his files to proves he’s a Communist. When this is rejected as silly, Liddy and Hunt persuade their box to just do reconnaissance. (They can’t even agree whether it is a black bag or a black ops.) They travel to Beverly Hills in the most outlandish disguises which Hunt argues will detract from anyone remembering important details about them. Their recon is an act of other silliness that is fundamentally insane before we learn at the end of the episode they got all the information but forgot to take the film out of the camera before they turned in it.

Their operation to break into Ellsberg’s office is somehow more ridiculous when Hunt decides to get Cubans to do this operation ‘out of patriotism.’ These men, he points out, were betrayed at the Bay of Pigs and have been loyal to him since. The operation is a disaster from start to finish: the walkie-talkies they have don’t work, the door to the office is locked, so they break in, the office is fundamentally left disheveled and the Cubans decided to distract them by saying that a junkie broke in and then spray pills all over the place. (Liddy’s calm dissection of how ridiculous they did it is truly a wonderful moment.) All of this unfolds and they get nothing. Both Liddy and Hunt go back to the White House each determined to throw the other under the bus and are fundamentally surprised when John Dean appears, fires them – and then rehires them to work for the Committee to Re-Elect the President because the President likes their initiative. Liddy and Hunt then quietly ask for a million dollars and are given carte blanche. (I seriously doubt John Dean is going to be a fan of either this series or Gaslit; both series fundamentally go out of their way to paint him as far less the truth-teller he’s spent a half-century spinning himself as.)

Now if you are a student of history, you might find how White House Plumbers takes something that you consider an act of a vehement abuse of power and basically play it is as something close to farce managed by fools as offensive. I’d argue it’s the best way to treat everything that the White House Plumbers. Watching so many movies about Nixon and Watergate, very few of them will deal with the burglary itself: Stone’s epic fundamentally seems to treat as a third-rate burglary bringing down the subject and deals with every aspect of it with portent that fundamentally becomes heavy handed. Liddy barely appears in the movie; Hunt is portrayed by Ed Harris. (Gaslit essentially did the opposite in its portrayal of the Watergate break-in; Hunt never so much as shows his face in the show.) Perhaps that is because every element of the Watergate break-in itself is ridiculous: from the idea that bugging the DNC would somehow help Nixon’s reelection, to the fact the recordings got them nothing, to the fact that the Plumbers made three attempts to break in before they finally managed to successfully do so, to the fact that they were caught so easily. These people were so clownish and buffoonish at every aspect of their job that the most remarkable thing is that anyone in the administration somehow thought that these people were the kind of men who could help anyone do anything.

Watching Hunt and Liddy, you really wonder how they could have been good at their previous jobs in the CIA or FBI. And the series does a fine job portraying both men as utter failures and incompetent at so many parts of their lives. Hunt is essentially a failed novelist when the show begins and his wife Dorothy (Lena Headey in a major step down as fearless figures from Cersei Lannister) his typist. They are dealing with the problems of four children, one of whom has dropped out of college in the final minutes of the episode and has been a problem ever since. They love each other but they can barely stand each other. Their marriage is a model of sanity, however, when they have dinner with the Liddys and meet the family and Gordon essentially thinks it’s a good idea to play a speech of Hitler’s as entertainment. He then leaves the house out the upstairs window to try and shoot teenagers who are throwing eggs at it. The drive home is nearly as funny. (“Hitler might not be the best role model,” Hunt gently points out to Liddy at one point.)

I found every aspect of White House Plumbers entertaining for the record. It may not be the historical document you think it deserves, but as a comedy it is marvelous entertaining. This is, for the record, that almost no limited series will even try to do, certainly not HBO. With the exception of The White Lotus, ever since HBO got into the process of the limited series even the best of them have this level of portent that can make them very hard to bear. I greatly appreciated Sharp Objects and Chernobyl but that doesn’t mean I had a ball watching them. It is rare for the limited or anthology series to try to be a comedy, even rarer for it to be a true story. For that reason I can appreciate every aspect of White House Plumbers from the opening credits to the closing ones, bookended with the image of HBO Presents looking like it would have in the 1970s.

So according to the criticisms so many of made about White House Plumbers no, it doesn’t have anything really new to say about Watergate or Nixon, except maybe about the psychological reasons. I’ve argued why this is exactly the tone the subject deserves. And for limited series in general and the ones that HBO makes in particular, it did need to be made because sometimes we need to laugh at the clowns and the world in general. The series has all the other things most people accept from HBO limited series as a given – a superb subject matter, brilliant attention to detail, superb performances from a talented cast. If you want a history lesson from it you won’t get one – but one  comes to a limited series more for entertainment than anything else. On that note, White House Plumbers more than delivers.

My Score: 4.5 stars.