When a Hapless Villain Somehow Takes Down a Presidency
In 2009, John Rogers, the creator of the crime drama Leverage, wrote a blog post describing how an episode of the show had come together. In it, he noted one of the things he’d learned from fans: They loved the moments when the show’s core team simply chatted about their cases—the thrill of watching smart people being smart together. “Competence porn,” the show’s writers began calling it, and the coinage caught on. The comforts of competence help explain the appeal of films like The Martian and shows like Ted Lasso; they also give a soft rebuke to the pyrotechnic individualism so common in American pop culture. Competence, recast as entertainment, is humble. It is team-oriented. It is also, in its way, a challenge, because it will ask its audience to realize the same thing its characters must: A superhero isn’t coming to save us. We’ll have to do the saving ourselves.
We live, though, in uniquely incompetent times, and one of the shows that best captures this fact is a work of stylized history. White House Plumbers retells the story of the Watergate break-in with a focus on the burglars themselves: the foot soldiers who blundered their way into disgrace. As with traditional treatments of competence, the story delights in the details, turning Watergate into a step-by-step origin story. Richard Nixon is merely a spectral presence in the HBO show; many of the other infamous participants in the scandal are, here, recast as supporting players. Instead, White House Plumbers zeroes in on the antics of the political operatives E. Howard Hunt (played by Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux)—the “plumbers” initially enlisted to simply plug information leaks in the Nixon White House. Through them, the show examines an incompetence so consequential that it took down a presidency.
“The following is based on a true story,” the show’s disclaimer reads, against a blackened screen. “No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because nearly everyone was found guilty.” Its first scene opens on the facade of the Watergate office building, lit against the night. A group of men in suits stands in a neat line in front of the building. They enter. Soon they’re at the door of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, flashlights in hand—the camerawork is tight and hectic—as one of them fumbles with a pick in the door’s lock. He grimaces as he realizes that the device … doesn’t work. “These are the wrong tools,” he announces. As the men erupt into arguments, more of the show’s text appears: “There were four Watergate break-in attempts … This was attempt number two.”
White House Plumbers is most directly based on the memoir The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks That Led to Watergate and Doomed Nixon's Presidency, by Egil “Bud” Krogh (the White House operative who hired Liddy and Hunt) and his son Matthew Krogh. But it’s more broadly based on the wide readings its creators and writers, Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, did as they researched the lesser-known stories of Watergate’s genesis: its connection to the Pentagon Papers and the Bay of Pigs, and how its bunglings were made worse by the fact that even these White House–appointed conspirators were affected by budget cuts. As history, Watergate is excessively well documented—in part because, as Gregory told me, pretty much everyone involved eventually wrote a book about their involvement. “That was almost the challenge,” Huyck told me: “to read every autobiography, watch every interview.”
Gregory and Huyck wrote for the HBO satire Veep, and White House Plumbers is directed by David Mandel, who ended Veep’s run as its showrunner and an executive producer. But the new series is not Veep with a Watergate twist. White House Plumbers is a comedy, but a decidedly dark one. It offers moments of waggish parody—the drawl that Theroux gives Liddy, all sinews and smarm, is its own category of satire—but its humor is typically more blunt than acute. The point is not simply that Hunt and Liddy bumble. The matter is how they bumble: brashly, loudly, melodramatically.
“I think you learn a lot more from antiheroes than heroes,” Gregory told me. And both Liddy and Hunt are plagued by a self-regard so thorough that it becomes its own form of incompetence. They are fervently loyal—to their country, to their president, to their cause. They believe themselves to possess the quality that makes competence so compelling, as a cinematic proposition: a sense of common purpose. But again and again, as they (attempt to) carry out the crimes they have come to see as their duty, their collaborative impulses are stymied by egoism. Both men, the show makes clear, see themselves as the hero of their own story—and, for that matter, of everyone else’s. At every moment, Theroux conveys his character’s conviction that he is starring in an endless show. He carries himself as if he were bathed in invisible limelight, speaking loudly—and decisively—in a stage whisper meant for no one in particular.
Gordon Liddy is not a good guy: Explaining his fascination with Hitler, he confesses that listening to the dictator as a boy made him feel empowered to conquer his fears. (The line is a version of one the real Liddy said during a 2004 interview.) Hunt is not a good guy either. But the men’s badness is not straightforward. Their villainy is complicated by their delusion, and tempered by the fact that both conspirators are ultimately betrayed by the people they trusted to protect them—foremost among them, the president. It’s also complicated by the fact that the qualities that typically account for a character’s villainy—fearsomeness, loathsomeness, cruelty—are, in their case, overridden by their ineptitude. That first break-in scene sets the tone for the show. Many things go wrong as their initial efforts to plug White House leaks expand into national scandal. But all of the error, after a while, adopts an air of inevitability. Liddy and Hunt, as the show portrays them, are tangles of deference and defiance; those qualities can coexist for only so long before something has to give.
[Read: What did Atlantic readers think of Watergate?]
This is one way White House Plumbers is akin to that other political satire. Veep balanced its comic hyperbole with acknowledgements of its characters’ mundanity. Selina Meyer is a terrible person and a mediocre politician. But as she lives her own version of empowered ineptitude—freeing Tibet and then un-freeing it, systematically betraying the people in her orbit, becoming a war criminal—the show offers momentary reminders of how she earned the power she is abusing. Those moments read as interruptions—competence rearing its tidy head—and their effect is to make the character of Selina, and her show, much more nuanced than it might otherwise have been. They also give Veep’s comedy a tinge of tragedy. Selina is a villain, yes, but a deeply prosaic one. Her villainy is neither dramatic nor especially unique. Instead, it results from that dullest of things: inertia. Her badness is a habit she can’t be bothered to break. It is the result of daily choices that accumulate, over time, into history.
White House Plumbers applies that idea to its historical villains. “Tragedy is that much more tragic when you can have a laugh in it,” Mandel told me. The opposite is true as well. “Real life doesn’t plan out when it’s going to be funny or when it’s going to be serious,” he said. “They bump up against each other—sometimes in sloppy ways that do things to you emotionally.” Hunt and Liddy are cartoonish, and foolish in their cartoonishness; they are also bureaucrats and family men. Their histrionics are offset by the attention the show pays to their families, including their wives and several children. (Lena Headey plays Dorothy Hunt—who, like her husband, is a former CIA operative and, unlike him, is often a voice of reason on the show; Judy Greer plays Fran Liddy.) White House Plumbers, in emphasizing the men’s personal lives, might in that way whiff of the villain-rehabilitation impulse that is now common in works of pop culture.
But the show does none of that. It is clear about who these characters are, and who they are not. There is no reputation-laundering here. Instead, the show emphasizes the banality of their villainy. The story, Gregory told me, is ultimately “about the cost of fanaticism.” And Hunt and Liddy embody that. They are at once larger than life and tragically small. They are husbands and fathers and criminals. They are loyal government servants and betrayers of their country. They are victims. They are culprits. And their incompetence makes those complications even more legible.
Monsters reflect their moments: Fire-breathing beasts channel the fear of atomic bombs; vengeance-seeking plant life captures anxieties about climate change; formless malignancies convey the encroachments of the digital world. Villains work similarly. They teach audiences what to fear. They teach us whom to mistrust. There’s urgency, then, in a show that explores the radiating consequences of even the most seemingly oafish forms of misconduct. “They’re too incompetent to be dangerous” was never compelling as a political argument. But if the past several years have proved anything, it’s that incompetence—when fueled by delusion, and convinced of its own righteousness—can be its own kind of threat.