[In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of
the Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as
Richard Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. Its approaching a Coen
brothers level of satiric genius.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS IS A HILARIOUS TAKE ON THE WATERGATE BREAK-IN  
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Eileen Jones
May 10, 2023
Jacobin
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_ In the new series White House Plumbers, a brilliant send-up of the
Watergate scandal, Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux star as Richard
Nixon’s bumbling covert operators. It's approaching a Coen brothers
level of satiric genius. _

Justin Theroux and Woody Harrelson in White House Plumbers. , (HBO
Max)

 

I'm thrilled to report how much I liked the premiere episode of the
new five-part HBO miniseries _White House Plumbers._ It’s a
raucously funny satirical comedy about the way right-wing loons E.
Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux)
failed upward through the early 1970s to their ultimate peak of insane
incompetence, bungling the Watergate break-in in their idiotic
attempts to preserve Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Episode One covers Hunt’s destroyed CIA career after his disastrous
leadership in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which he blames on “that pussy
JFK.” He’s soon given another chance when he’s teamed with
ex-FBI nutter Liddy to find a way to take down Daniel Ellsberg, the
Pentagon Papers leaker. They’re given this assignment by Egil
”Bud” Krogh (Richard Sommer), a special advisor to Nixon whose
2007 book, _Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons
From the White House_, provides the material for this miniseries.
Writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck (_Veep, The Larry Sanders Show_)
and director David Mandel (_Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld_) do
a scalpel-sharp job of eviscerating the ideologically crazed operators
behind Nixon’s most infamous “dirty tricks.”

Hunt and Liddy hatch a berserk plan to break in to the office of
Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr Lewis Fielding, and get ahold of
Ellsberg’s file so they can leak it and, hopefully, destroy his
credibility. Their methods include casing the office while wearing
garishly fake wigs, an “old CIA trick,” according to Hunt, because
any eyewitnesses will only remember the wigs.

Hunt doesn’t seem to take into account that drawing attention to
yourselves everywhere you go in the first place, by wearing an auburn
fright wig (Hunt) and a black, shoulder-length pageboy (Liddy) as your
only disguises — while taking photos of yourselves in front of the
office you’re about to break into, with the name of the psychiatrist
clearly visible on the sign behind you — are perhaps unnecessarily
risky maneuvers. Hunt also relies on hard-partying, right-wing Cuban
operatives (Tony Plana, Yul Vazquez, and Alexis Valdés), his old
cronies from the Bay of Pigs days. And they’re even wackier and more
reckless.

But none of them are as mad-dog as the notorious Liddy. There’s a
scene that’s pure comedy gold in which Hunt and Liddy, becoming fast
friends, get together for dinner with their wives. At the last minute,
Hunt cautions his wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey), who’s also former
CIA, that Liddy can be “kind of _a lot_.” But nothing prepares
either of them for Liddy’s fervent Adolf Hitler fandom, shared by
his wife, Fran (Judy Greer), who acknowledges that she’s something
of an Aryan trophy wife. Over cocktails, Liddy plays his favorite
Hitler rally record at top volume, so that the two couples are trying
to have polite predinner conversation at the top of their lungs to be
heard over the splenetic shouting in German.

Still from White House Plumbers. (HBO Max)

Theroux’s absurdly black-mustached Liddy is an inspiration, and
Harrelson — always delightful, but getting scarily good by this
point in his career — is never funnier than when he’s playing
someone earnestly trying to hold it together in the face of lunacy
greater than his own. In their hands, the macho rivalry between Hunt
and Liddy — both of whom are convinced they’re the
one _really_ in charge — should get ever more hilarious over the
course of the series.

While denying that he’s a neo-Nazi, so intense is Liddy’s
admiration for Hitler he even swears in German. (“Scheisse!”) And
he has plenty of opportunity to do so as the Ellsberg job gets
spectacularly botched. He and Hunt are both fired by John Dean
(Domhnall Gleeson). They hardly have time to look crestfallen before
Dean hires them again for a much bigger job in the Nixon White House,
serving as leading figures in the Committee for the Re-Election of the
President — mockingly known as CREEP. It seems Nixon regards their
stupendous failure as evidence of their manly, courageous
super-patriotism — which is exactly what he thinks he needs if
he’s going to stay on top politically. And after all, as Liddy says,
“I shit red-white-and-blue.”

And that’s exactly how Hunt and Liddy fail upward — achieving
prominent positions of trust, a huge operating budget, and a big
office in the White House. On the sign outside their door, Hunt has
“Plumbers” inscribed. Liddy, who wanted their operations to be
called “Black Ops,” and even had stationery made up to reflect
that clandestine-sounding title, asks what that’s supposed to mean.

“We plug leaks,” says Hunt, exuberantly proud of his own
cleverness.

Even if you feel like you know a lot about Watergate, this series has
a way of making it all fresh again. It opens with shadowy figures
trying to break into the Democratic campaign headquarters, only the
boneheads didn’t bring the right tools to pick the door lock. A
superimposed message informs us that: “There were four Watergate
break-in attempts. This was attempt number two.”

And so many of the details of this debacle
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true and documented, we’re assured at the start, that “no names
were changed to protect the innocent, because nearly everyone was
found guilty.”

If the series can maintain the standard of the first episode, it might
rival the Coens brothers’ fictional _Burn After Reading_ for its
riotous portrait of Washington DC dumbfuckery.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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