Plumbers’ cracks (in democracy)

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

It’s a paradox to be deciphered by future historians, but for as much as we live in a time of tremendous technologically-driven capability, it is just as much an era of incompetence. Our politicians are ever the masseurs and masseuses of truth, yet they seem to be getting worse and worse at it. 

Former-President Bill Clinton’s lies seem naive in comparison to George W. Bush’s (the latter got a helluva lot more people killed). Barack Obama lied about his intentions to close the inhumane Guantanamo Bay prison complex in Cuba and ordered more drone strikes (murdering unknown numbers of civilians) than all of his immediate predecessors combined. 

Justin Theroux, left, and Woody Harrelson, right, play G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt (respectively) in The White House Plumbers. Courtesy photo.

Ex-President and hopefully-future-felon Donald Trump deserves his own paragraph. The Washington Post reported in January 2021 that “Don the Con” told a documentable total of 30,573 whoppers during his time in the Oval Office. God knows how many more he’s spouted since his trouncing by Joe Biden in 2020.

And WaPo would know about liars in the White House: It’s the paper that famously broke the Watergate Scandal in 1972, which precipitated the ugly collapse of the administration of Richard M. Nixon in 1974 and shook the nation’s confidence in its founding concept of the rule of law.

Having suffered the ignominy of Trump and his long, lingering tail of corruption — which is still playing out almost a full term after voters sent him packing from Pennsylvania Avenue — Americans can be forgiven for thinking Nixon seems more like the Quaker he professed to be than at any time prior to his ignoble tenure as the most powerful man on Earth.

“Tricky Dick” and his “ratfuckers” are quaint in relation to the wholesale skullduggery and outright lameness of Trump and his minions, but “ratfuckers” of a feather flock together. 

That’s the timely reminder at the heart of the new Max (née HBO) series The White House Plumbers, which tells the lively tale of Nixon’s main fixers E. Howard Hunt (a failed CIA agent whose fingerprints were on both the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs) and G. Gordon Liddy (a failed FBI agent with a Nazi obsession and who went on to a longtime, lucrative career as a Fox News talking head after his prison term, which is really just redundant).

Hunt and Liddy were absolute idiots, though portrayed in the show with subversive glee by Woody Harrelson and Jason Theroux, respectively. (And, for my money, Theroux deserves an award for his sieg-heiling, buttoned-down, family-man nutjob rendition of Liddy that feels too close for comfort in Idaho Legislative District 1.)

Both men had an egomaniacal notion of their own abilities, though events constantly proved otherwise. Hunt wrote crappy spy novels. Liddy had a schtick of putting his hand over lit candles at parties, trying to show off how tough he was but suffering third-degree burn wounds in the process. 

As the show plays out, Hunt, Liddy, et al. tried and failed three times to break into the Democratic National Committee’s HQ in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the intent to plant listening devices in George McGovern’s campaign operations — all the while, U.S. voters were already poised to re-elect Nixon (the fools), the fact of which Hunt’s put-upon (and possibly assassinated) wife constantly reminded him, trying in vain to get him to abandon his ill-begotten mission. 

Played by Lena Headey, Dorothy “Dot” Hunt was the real brains of the marriage, actually serving as a capable CIA agent until her mysterious death in a plane crash just as she was about to spill the beans to a CBS reporter about the dumbass conspiracy in which her husband was entangled (at least according to the Max series). Oh, and Hunt’s family life fell apart as he was consumed by his criminal enterprise, with Dot having to pick up the pieces until she blew up.

The limited series of five episodes, which premiered in May, begins with the break-in at the office of the psychologist treating Daniel Ellsberg, whose conscience led him to leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers to reporters, and which gave detailed and brutally frank assessments of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Its bulk covers Hunt’s and Liddy’s establishment as “The Plumbers,” with an enormous budget paid for by slush funds from CREP: the Committee to Re-Elect the President (a.k.a., the aptly lampooned “CREEP.”)

Hilarity ensues as Hunt and Liddy deploy their dark money to enlist a motley band of right-wing Cubans to conduct the series of bungled burglaries at the Watergate. They are beset by all manner of snafus — the lockpicker doesn’t have the right picks; the conspirators get stuck in a banquet room overnight and have to piss in the whiskey bottles; then they are betrayed by a particularly spineless fellow conspirator, as well as Nixon and his wider coterie of toadies when the news breaks that they actually managed to break into the DNC… immediately being caught, because the whole operation was moronic to begin with.

There is much human wreckage to be sifted through in these characters, twisted and distorted by their awful politics and personal aspirations. It’s all fun and games, until one considers that these deluded dipshits sincerely believed that what they were doing by breaking the law and subverting democratic processes was actually in service of the country that they thought they loved. They didn’t love the country, of course, but worshiped at the altar of their own ambitions.

Sound familiar? Stream it 

on Max.