When ‘a third-rate burglary’ is a comedy of errors
Howard Hunt was a longtime CIA agent who bore at least some responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco and, depending on the depths of your conspiracy theory beliefs, may have known Lee Harvey Oswald and may have been in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
G. Gordon Liddy had a relatively brief tenure in the FBI and then became a lawyer and a failed politician; he was best known for outlandish behavior like firing a gun in a courtroom, eating a rat, holding his hand over a flame till it burned, and playing Adolf Hitler speeches to pump himself up.
These are the two men the Nixon administration put in charge of digging up dirt, first on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and then on the Democratic National Committee, which became infamous as the Watergate break-in. Their rabid devotion to the cause, combined with rampant selfdelusion and astonishing incompetence, led to the arrest of the duo and their team and ultimately brought down the administration.
Their escapades have now been captured in “White House Plumbers,” a limited series on HBO, starring Woody Harrelson as Hunt and Justin Theroux as Liddy. “They were the has-been and the never-was teaming up, which is very dangerous,” adds David Mandel, in a Zoom interview. Mandel directed all five episodes.
The series, created by Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, plays like a jaunty heist caper gone wrong, but one with massive real-world implications, making the series feel like watching a car wreck where you’re rooting for the car to crash. Huyck said in a joint interview with Gregory that Hunt and Liddy’s disastrous forays into political espionage were “a perfect doomed buddy comedy.”
Gregory and Huyck previously served as writers and executive producers on the HBO comedy “Veep,” where Mandel was the showrunner. Gregory says that people in Washington used to tell them “Veep” was closer to the truth than “The West Wing” “in terms of how venal and petty and incompetent people really are”; they brought that same perspective to “Plumbers.” The inner workings of our government, Gregory says, are “not as majestic as you think. The real version is shoddy and low rent and sadly funny.”
The self-named Plumbers were born as a Special Investigations Unit, headed by Egil “Bud” Krogh, a secondary figure in the affair, and one of the only ones to seemingly feel remorse.
In 2007, he co-wrote “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House” and years later, when he was hospitalized, he shared his stories with his neurologist. The doctor brought in his son, producer David Bernad, to hear these wild tales; Bernad brought the idea to Gregory and Huyck, who used Krogh’s book as a launching point.
“I thought I knew Watergate, but when Dave brought us this story and we started doing research we realized we had heard ‘All the President’s Men’ but not the how and why it actually came to be,” Gregory says.
“And so many descriptions of Watergate were serious and somber but this was a lunatic story of guys in wigs with air pistols and prostitute boats. The characters were so bizarre and rich.”
Huyck says much of the comedy derives from the Plumbers’ incompetence but some of that stemmed from budget cuts. “They might have gotten away with it if they’d had a full budget,” he says. “Hunt hires the Cubans for the break-in because they worked for free. They didn’t have the highest quality bugs or walkie-talkies and they didn’t use the walkie-talkies all the time because batteries were expensive.”
Mandel says the series is “a very funny tragedy” and calls it “the ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’/ ’Reservoir Dogs’ version of Watergate,” because in most tellings of Watergate Hunt and Liddy are bit players and because in this series the break-in itself is secondary to the characters’ narrative arc.
But their story remains relevant, says Matthew Krogh, coauthor of his father’s book. “My dad put on himself responsibility for creating this hidden, funded, no-rules society, but people like Liddy and Hunt bear responsibility, too. The core lesson is the danger in allowing things to fester in darkness with people creating their own societies and making their own rules. We saw it again in the Trump administration where there was a top-down authoritarianism and loyalty was the currency.”
Huyck and Gregory say their past television experience prepared them well, with Huyck explaining that their first scripted job was writing for “The Larry Sanders Show.” “Garry Shandling drilled into us to seek the truth in any given scene,” he says, so they played the story straight and let the laughs come organically from the characters and situations.
As for having protagonists who are bad people doing bad things — destroying the country and their families — Gregory notes that “Veep” “was pretty good training, since [Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s] Selina Meyers was an awful human being and an awful mother.”
Mandel says balancing the tone was tricky because “Veep” could have jokes about political abuse and scandal but “Plumbers” is about real abuses of power. He included actual footage of Nixon’s speeches and of news reports to remind viewers about the actual crimes and consequences and to show how everything “metastasized.”
Huyck adds that the key to making the series work was to focus on the characters, not the politics. Crucial to that is Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, played by Lena Headey. “The most emotionally resonant element for us was the impact on Hunt’s and Liddy’s families,” Huyck says. Dorothy is no innocent; she had been in the CIA, too, and, like Skylar White, of “Breaking Bad,” gets ensnared by her husband’s misdeeds — she eventually organizes payouts from the government to the Plumbers and their families after the arrests — with terrible consequences..
But she’s smarter and more sympathetic than either of the men (as is, to a lesser extent, Fran Liddy, played by Judy Greer), warning Hunt what he was about to step in and pointing out after Nixon’s landslide reelection that their folly had been totally unnecessary.
“She’s the proxy for the audience in the battle for Hunt’s soul, which Liddy wins,” Huyck says.
Gregory adds that this makes her the stand-in for the audience’s perspective, especially when we see the toll this takes on the Hunts’ family life.
The toughest character to capture was Liddy, whose larger-than-life lunacy often seems unbelievable. “We actually pulled it back because so many stories of things he really did would sound like we made it up,” he says, pointing to a real incident they cut where Liddy screened the Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” at the White House “to inspire people and to show the meaning of loyalty.”
“Even the way he talked didn’t seem real,” Huyck adds, so while Theroux’s performance is stylized, it’s still toned down. “We had to calibrate it through the writing and then with David and Justin for the performance so you could see how preposterous he was but also make him seem real.”
Gregory adds that Hunt was more of a wallflower, as a former CIA agent trained to blend in, so Harrelson amped up his performance some. Ultimately, the goal was not to excuse Hunt and Liddy or even make them particularly relatable but to develop them beyond caricatures.
“You need to find their areas of pain and motivation and work outward from that,” Gregory says, pointing to Hunt feeling responsible for the Bay of Pigs but also feeling wronged by the politicians involved and to Liddy developing his persona after being bullied as a child. “You’ll still want them to fail as you watch, but at least you understand them more.”.
WHITE HOUSE PLUMBERS On HBO. Premieres May 1, 9-10 p.m.