Anna Daniels
Just in time for impeachment season, here comes a new HBO Watergate series. The White House Plumbers will star Woody Harrelson as E. Howard Hunt, a shady CIA officer, and Justin Theroux as G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent – two of the men who helped plan the Watergate break-in that eventually brought down Richard Nixon. The five-part limited series comes from Veep writers and executive producers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, and will chronicle the events surrounding the political scandal.
THR has the news about The White House Plumbers, which “will tell the true story of how Nixon’s political saboteurs and Watergate masterminds accidentally toppled the presidency they were zealously trying to protect.” The series is partially based on Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House, by Egil “Bud” Krogh and Matthew Krogh. Here’s that book’s synopsis:
In 1971, Egil “Bud” Krogh was summoned to a closed-door meeting by John Ehrlichman, his mentor and key confidant of President Richard Nixon, in a secluded office in the Western White House.
Krogh thought he was walking into a meeting to discuss the drug control program launched on his most recent trip to South Vietnam. Instead, he was handed a file and the responsibility for the SIU, Special Investigations Unit, later to become notorious as “The Plumbers.” The unit was to investigate the leaks of top-secret government documents, particularly the Pentagon Papers, to the press. The president considered this task critical to national security. Nixon said he wanted the unit headed up by a “real son of a bitch.” He got the studious, zealous, and loyal-to-a-fault Bud Krogh instead.
In that instant, Krogh was handed the job that would lead to one of the most famous conspiracies in presidential history and the demise of the Nixon administration. Integrity is Krogh’s memoir of his experiences—of what really went on behind closed doors, of how a good man can lose his moral compass, of how exercising power without integrity can destroy a life. It also tells the moving story of how he turned his life back around. For anyone interested in the ethical challenges of leadership, or of professional life, Integrity is thought-provoking and inspiring reading.
The story of the Watergate break-in has been told on screen before, of course. There’s All the President’s Men, which tracks the investigation into the burglary, and the comedy Dick, which puts a hilarious spin on the whole endeavor. But most of the time, these stories are from the outside looking in. Even Oliver Stone’s sprawling Nixon presented an after-the-fact account of the story. The White House Plumbers, however, will take us inside the story from the ground floor.
“We’re excited to bring together such a talented team to take on this fascinating look at the internal machinations that brought down the Nixon White House,” said Casey Bloys, HBO president of programming. “We’re especially happy to welcome both Woody and Justin back to HBO and are looking forward to getting started.”
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