Hello everyone
There have been many dramatizations of the end of the Nixon presidency. Most famously: All the President’s Men; Nixon, and Frost/Nixon (which looked at the post-presidency).
All of these retellings have been very serious in their approach, so it’s good to find White House Plumbers, the new series from HBO (available on Sky/NOW in the UK), which offers an account of the action that plays the story as a hairbrained escapade more reminiscent of the farce the facts suggest.
The hook sets the tone:
Watergate was bad. They were worse.
The Plumbers
The “plumbers” were brought together as a reaction to the Pentagon Papers, a leak of classified information relating to US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The plumbers were there to fix the leaks.
The series features two of the original plumbers: G Gordon Liddy, played by Justin Theroux and E Howard Hunt, played by Woody Harrelson. Both men were involved in the Watergate scandal and both ended up going to jail.
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
The show is billed as the true story of how Nixon’s own political saboteurs and Watergate masterminds accidentally toppled the presidency they were trying to protect.
It certainly tells that story. But if we didn’t know that the story was true, it would lack plausibility. And because the series is reflecting actual events and real people, there is no softening of the characters. In most fiction, the story needs to feel plausible and the characters need to be redeemable.
All of the characters (with the exception of Hunt’s wife, Dorothy) display spectacular levels of incompetence and hubris. Worse they are all charmless, meaning that as the viewer there’s not enough to make you want to keep watching.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all of the best bits.
Disclaimers
We’re used to seeing disclaimers in TV and movies.
The disclaimer for White House Plumbers is quite unique:
no names have been changed to protect the innocent…because nearly everyone was found guilty
There are other episode-specific disclaimers. For instance, in the episode covering the activities of Dita Beard—a lobbyist for ITT, who wrote a memo suggesting that the company could pledge $400,000 for the 1972 Republican National Congress if the Department of Justice would settle its antitrust case against the company—the disclaimer notes:
…but Dita Beard definitely lied
Reactions
Reactions to the series have been mixed and quite polarized—seemingly people either love it, or hate it. There are a lot of one star and five star reviews; there are only a scattering of three star reviews.
There’s much to commend the series—every performance is consistently excellent, there are some laughs, and there’s the historical interest of seeing the operatives working. But it’s a hard watch when every character is so charmless and we already know every twist.
Until July
That’s me until July.
Until then.
All the best
Simon