White House Plumbers Season 1 Official Website for the HBO Series

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• 'The Office' Sets First Castmembers for Potential Follow-Up Series
• White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s Wild Career After the Watergate Scandal
• Lifestyle
• White House Plumbers Episode 3 Recap: Don’t Drink the Whiskey at the Watergate
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• HBO's The White House Plumbers Is the Screwiest Historical Story You'll See This Year

Howard tries to assure Liddy and probably himself by claiming that the Cubans will not break under pressure, not realizing that the officers have found the envelope he gave Bernard “Macho” Barker to put into the hotel mailbox. Addressed to the Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, Maryland, it contains membership fees. On the fateful night of June 17, 1972, Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis, break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex. Security guard Frank Wills notices tape covering the latches of some of the doors and calls the authorities. Sgt. Paul W. Leeper, Officer John B. Barrett, and Officer Carl M. Shoffler, dressed in what can be categorized as hippie clothing, arrive at the scene and arrest the burglars. After the third attempt effectively ended in failure and the mockery they subsequently received from Dean and Magruder, Howard decides to go on a trip to Paris with his family.

White House Plumbers Review: Justin Theroux, Woody Harrelson In Watergate Series - Variety

White House Plumbers Review: Justin Theroux, Woody Harrelson In Watergate Series.

Posted: Mon, 01 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

'The Office' Sets First Castmembers for Potential Follow-Up Series

Frank Wills' role in the Watergate break-in is pretty accurately portrayed in the show (aside from him meeting Hunt during that first, unconfirmed break-in). On the blog Rediscovering Black History from the National Archives, it says that while on his rounds on June 17, 1972, Wills spotted the tape on a door and removed it. However, when he returned later he saw that tape had been reapplied. This caused him to call the authorities, who then caught and arrested everyone. Other reports, including from the Nixon Library and History.com, mention that there were at least two break-ins — the planting of the failed bugs and the attempt to fix them was when they all were caught. On the second attempt, the entire team goes in together until James W. McCord Jr. (Toby Huss) separates from them and runs into two security guards.

White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s Wild Career After the Watergate Scandal

And that’s what the rest of the episode is devoted to explaining — how Mitchell could grow desperate enough to take these men up on their bonkers scheming. And how Liddy and Hunt climb their way back from the basement of Mitchell’s estimation to his good graces. This is where Kathleen Turner finally comes into play. We learn — not via chyron, but by its cousin, archival news coverage — that Turner is Dita Beard, a lobbyist for a company called International Telephone and Telegraph. In the episode’s cold open, she was typing up a memo about the time Mitchell promised ITT a favorable outcome in an antitrust lawsuit in exchange for a humongous donation to the RNC convention in San Diego. Now, the memo’s been leaked to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson.

Lifestyle

That’s because this has always been about more than an electoral victory for Hunt and Liddy. Gordon has been picked on all his life, he tells us over and over and over again. Now, he does daily calisthenics (Justin Theroux is very good at push-ups) and exists so close to the president of the United States of America that he irregularly interacts with a guy who regularly interacts with him.

You’ll remember the second attempt — first attempt No. 2, really — from the White House Plumbers series premiere. The ragtag crew of political criminals makes it up to the DNC offices, but Villo doesn’t have the tools necessary to pick the lock. They’re on the Watergate premises just long enough for McCord to get ID’d by a security guard he used to work with.

Magruder earlier spoke to him and revealed that Nixon needed the photographs of everything that O’Brien had in his bottom left drawer. Even though Liddy has grown as disillusioned with his bosses as Howard, he is still staunchly loyal to Nixon. He tells Howard that if he quits now, he will prove his detractors in the CIA right, and that gets through to the other man. Then suddenly, the fifth episode decides we’re supposed to take everything seriously.

Liddy runs upstairs, grabs a gun, and jumps from a second-floor window to surprise and terrorize the egg assailant while Hitler barks. Despite the unflinching physicality Theroux brings to his role, this is not funny. Even if it really happened, it feels stupid to watch it.

After failing upward, the unlikely pair lands on the Committee to Re-Elect the President, plotting several unbelievable covert ops – including bugging the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex. Proving that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, White House Plumbers sheds light on the lesser-known series of events that led to one of the greatest political scandals in American history. Liddy’s notorious plot to spy on the Democratic National Committee, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is satirically featured in the new HBO limited series White House Plumbers. Justin Theroux stars as Liddy, and Woody Harrelson plays his co-conspirator E. The real life Liddy and Hunt were part of a special White House unit, informally known as the Plumbers, whose job was to prevent or respond to leaks of classified information. There were two operations that night, with one team staying to break into the DNC and another attempting to break into Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's campaign offices.

And from that point forward, the Hunts are forbidden from answering the telephone. The soundtrack of their lives will be the interminable shrill of the family landline. This email will be used to sign into all New York sites.

It turns out that Howard’s been sending out notes on White House stationery, including to the flirty flight attendant who he met on the way home from the Ellsberg break-in. I think the threat is that if Howard writes the book on Watergate, the Ellsberg scandal will break, too? I’m not entirely sure, but seeing as the book seems like a TERRIBLE idea, I guess it’s just as well!

This five-part limited series imagines the behind-the-scenes story of how Nixon’s political saboteurs, E. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux), accidentally toppled the presidency they were zealously trying to protect… and their families along with it. Chronicling actions on the ground, this satirical drama begins in 1971 when the White House hires Hunt and Liddy, former CIA and FBI, respectively, to investigate the Pentagon Papers leak.

For McCord, it turns out, politics was always a job. For Howard, who’s since been fired by the PR firm, too, it remains a religion. In the end, the Cubans completely trash the doctor’s office but still don’t find the file. Not that it matters — the LAPD improbably attributes the crime to drug-seeking junkies, and Nixon’s people approve of Gordon and Howard’s tactics even if they didn’t get results this time around.