There have been numerous films and TV series about the Watergate scandal, which brought down President Richard Nixon in the ‘70s (and subsequently ensured that any other scandal, however light, had an -gate suffix attached to it). Now a new HBO series is exploring the story leading up to it, and the hapless intelligence officers who were assembled into a team by the president on a paranoid mission to thwart his political opponents.
The White House Plumbers has one of the most impressive casts we’ve seen for a while – including Woody Harrelson, Justin Theroux, Lena Headey, Dohmnall Gleeson, Kathleen Turner and F. Murray Abraham – and the fact that the five-part series shares producers with Succession and Veep makes it a must-watch.
The show – based on the 2022 book of the same name by Egil and Matthew Krogh – is focused around the two main players behind the President in the scandal: E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Here's how it went down in real life.
The back story
In June 1971, a damning set of documents known as the Pentagon Papers were released by the activist Daniel Ellsberg and published by The New York Times. They revealed that under the Lyndon B. Johnson presidency, the US government had lied about military involvement and its part in the Vietnam War.
A week later, President Nixon set up The White House Special Investigations Unit – otherwise known as Room 16 project, or more colloquially, The White House Plumbers. In the 2014 book The Nixon Defense, author John W. Dean explains that when one member was asked by a family member what it was exactly that he was doing at the White House, he told them he was “helping the president with leaks”, to which they responded: “Oh, a plumber!” Yeah, sort of.
The team that Nixon had assembled included Hunt (played by Harrelson), Liddy (Theroux), Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, James McCord, and Virgilio Gonzalez, among others. Their tasks were to stop the leaking of classified information to the media, even if that meant by nefarious means.
Their first misstep was in targeting Ellsberg to discredit him. The agents were sent to pull Ellsberg’s file from his psychiatrist in LA, and they bungled the burglary. According to Liddy in his autobiography, Will, he claims there were other events that the Plumbers were also involved in, including examining the Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident, and the alleged involvement of the Kennedy administration in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem.
According to Liddy’s autobiography, the group devised even more bizarre plans that were never actioned, which included kidnapping anti-war protestors and taking them to Mexico, or luring Democrats onto a house boat and setting them up with sex workers, which they would then photograph.
The work of the controversial and secretive group eventually wound down, but a select few members continued on with their illegal activities in the name of aiding the President. Some – including Liddy and Hunt – were involved in the Watergate bugging scandal, when the group attempted to break into the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex to set up hidden surveillance technology to spy on Nixon’s political opponents.
Some of the men in the White House Plumbers group ended up serving time in prison for their involvement in Watergate. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping and served four and a half years in jail. Hunt was also convicted on the same charges and served 33 months in jail.
After their release, Liddy became a controversial media commentator and died in March 2021, aged 90. Hunt died of pneumonia in 2007.
