Every political culture has a scandal that obsesses the generations that follow. For Australians, it might be the democracy-shattering 1975 constitutional crisis. For us Brits, it could be the Profumo affair, with its sultry whiff of sex and espionage, that ended the administration of Harold Macmillan. Those are both strong possibilities, but in America the answer is a mononymous certainty: Watergate. The 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building brought down a president but, just as importantly, sparked a thousand dramatisations, from All the President’s Men to Frost/Nixon, and now a lavish HBO comedy-drama airing on Sky Atlantic, White House Plumbers.
The “plumbers” are so called because they “fix leaks”. Not from cisterns or U-bends, but from classified material, like the Pentagon Papers which trickled out to The New York Times in 1971. This is the project that brings together Bay of Pigs veteran E Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and former FBI agent G Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) in a collaboration that will ultimately result in the Watergate crisis and the resignation of President Nixon. Together, the two men assemble a crack team of low-level incompetents for their farcical assault on the DNC offices. It is all somewhat like Ocean’s Eleven if, rather than an impenetrable casino vault, the squad were tasked with opening a series of commonplace office doors (albeit with even higher stakes).
