Watergate wasn’t about bumbling incompetents

Woody Harrelson (left) and Justin Theroux (right) starring in White House Plumbers

One night in 1972, six men were arrested while burgling the Democratic Party campaign headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex, Washington DC.

They were employed by the Republican Party to find dirt on the Democrats. It wasn’t an isolated incident but part of a vast operation—run by US president Richard Nixon.

Watergate broke a delusion that US politics was purer than anyone else’s. In so doing it spawned a generation of conspiracy thrillers – neurotic cinema such as The Parallax View, The Conversation and many others.

The events themselves have been retold many times. Films such as All the President’s Men and Nixon were outraged at conspiracy. But more recently it is played for laughs. We had Gaslit, a satirical swipe at claiming to tell the story through lesser players. And now White House Plumbers on Sky does the same but as bungling farce.

We start with incidental music of a 1970s cop show as the gang of burglars tries to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee offices — they can’t because they’ve brought the wrong tools.

The former FBI man Gordon Liddy is played by Justin Theroux with a ferocious moustache and a fondness for Hitler. His ex-CIA co-conspirator Howard Hunt, meanwhile (Woody Harrelson) is a growling tough guy with a tendency to call people “amigo”. Both are proudly self-styled commie-haters, fitting right in with Nixon’s White House.

White House Plumbers is a dark comedy. But the humour is more blunt than acute. The point is not that Hunt and Liddy bumble, but that they bumble brashly and melodramatically.

Their villainy is complicated by their delusion, and tempered by the fact that they are ultimately betrayed by the people they trust to protect them. But all is overridden by ineptitude and an air of inevitability.

“They’re too incompetent to be dangerous” is never a compelling political argument.

There is more to Watergate than the evil of banality. It occurred at a time of deep crisis for the US ruling class. Their war in Vietnam sparked widespread opposition. The resistance of the Vietnamese people linked up with the burgeoning anti-war movement in the US, which had penetrated the army.

According to Robert Haldeman, Nixon’s former chief of staff, “Without the Vietnam war there would have been no Watergate.”

Nixon had been elected president in 1968 in part because he implied that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. Nixon described his strategy to Haldeman, “I call it the madman theory. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached a point where I might do anything to stop the war.”

The result was bombing Cambodia, which they proceeded to cover up so as to not inflame the anti-war movement. The mission targets were faked even in top-secret documents.

The first media report of the bombing was a small article in the New York Times. Few people noticed it. But Nixon responded with a secret intelligence unit, answerable only to him, to plug “leaks” in the government.

The “plumbers” were to carry out a crime spree against the president’s political enemies. The man in charge Egil Krogh, whose book is partially the source of the new programme, was clear. “Anyone who opposes us, we’ll destroy. As a matter of fact, anyone who doesn’t support us, we’ll destroy.”

Meanwhile between 1969 and 1972, as Nixon made war in the name of peace, an estimated 400,000 Vietnamese soldiers died in combat. One estimate is 165,000 civilian casualties in South Vietnam alone for each year of Nixon’s presidency.

As the cover-up collapsed Nixon had to resign in August 1974. And in April 1975, $50 notes flew through the sky in Saigon. The spooks burned documents as helicopters lifted the last of them out of Vietnam. The US suffered a humiliating defeat—and it lost a president along the way.