Shadows of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate Scandal still plague the White House today. The shocking break in, orchestrated by the bungling E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) was designed to help their beleaguered president, but instead accidentally toppled him after bugging the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters. Hunt and Liddy were known as the White House Plumbers, or more simply, the Plumbers, and were tasked with preventing further leaks after the unauthorized release of the highly-confidential Pentagon Papers.

This chapter in political history is now a TV comedy called White House Plumbers (VEEP) written by Emmy Award-winning TV writers Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck (both from VEEP, The Larry Sanders Show) and directed by David Mandel.

Gregory and Huyck know a thing or two about political satire when they created White House Plumbers. However, after the election of DOnald Trump in 2016, the grounds shifted.”Prior to 2016, shame and embarrassment were the engine of political satire,” says Alex Gregory. “Politicians would try to avoid them at all costs. They would try to avoid the veil from being lifted on who they really are.” In today’s political landscape, certain candidates lean into them, as a policy platform both on the campaign trail and while in office.

The biggest change in political satire is the death of shame 

“We were mid-Veep when Trump was elected and that changed the complexion of political comedy. So, for us being able to go back in time and do a show set in 1971 and 1972, there was no sense that the country had really experienced almost none of the shenanigans or political depravity at that point,” adds Peter Huyck. He jokes that bugging your White House opponent today would be considered a low-level crime. “If you don’t do it, you’re not trying hard enough.” Since shamelessness was now a requisite political strategy, Gregory and Hyck pondered on what might shock desensitized contemporary audiences.

Who Were E. Edward Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy?

White House Plumbers is a workplace comedy with a mismatched pair. Notes Alex, “You can look at Gordon Liddy as the archetype of shamelessness. He was the first guy who was caught in something like this, and expressed no remorse, no contrition, and he refused to comply with investigations. His inability to accept any shame or guilt set the template because he became a celebrity.” Liddy’s unwavering loyalty was lauded by Nixon’s supporters because he wouldn’t bend or break. He “outpatrioted” anyone else with his refusals to admit he did anything wrong. Huyck compares Liddy to Roger Stone in his defiance of political norms.

Adds Huyck, “One [Hunt] is a has been and one [Liddy] is a never was. They are a toxic combination because they encourage each other’s worst behavior. From a writing standpoint it’s really fun to lean into because they need each other and then they destroy each other.”

States Gregory, “Hunt was the vision and Liddy was the execution. Hunt failed writing spy novels despite all his imagination and Liddy is the guy who would hold his hand over a flame to prove the  point that would never back down.” They each took turns at being leader and follower. “At a certain point, Liddy took over and Hunt said, “We shouldn’t go into the {DNC Headquarters in the Watergate Building] a fourth time,” and Liddy replied, “We’re never going to stop. We’re going in.”

“I think Hunt was a guy who really liked to fly below the radar,” continues Huyck. “He was a former CIA station chief stationed in Central America. He’d been very successful. He really had a chip on his shoulder and an ego. He believed that he belonged in all of the country clubs, working at the highest levels.”

Peter Huyck. Photo by MediaPunch

“Gordon Liddy was much more of a blue collar guy. He grew up in Hoboken. He didn’t go to an Ivy League school, so he didn’t feel that he was a guy who was on the outside looking in. He hated the guys on the inside. He thought they were all phonies.” These sharp differences allow Hunt and Liddy to bring very different perspectives to the job. In some regards, 

“They both wanted to belong in their own ways. They both wanted to be inside the power structure. At some level, I think Liddy’s contempt was also that he really wanted to be close to power. They both wanted to be accepted and cool.”

“They are both aspirational guys. They both had dreams, both had delusions of grandeur, and found themselves in the middle point of their lives not anywhere near where they thought they should be.”

The Comedy Of White House Plumbers

The typical comedic underpinnings of political satire tend to be downplayed and subtle. White House Plumbers also has flourishes of laugh-out-loud comedies like Stepbrothers, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the “Two Stooges,” to keep audiences entertained.

Comedic levity is a literary instrument used to illuminate the gravity of our broken political system. The comedy could have easily derailed the events into political farce. But Gregory and Huyck kept the faith. States Huyck, “As we were writing it, we really did try to stay as close as possible to the truth of all of the moments and the characters.” At times, they had to dramatize certain moments and condense timelines for practical purposes.

But Hunt and Liddy were outrageously funny characters in real life. “The guys really did wear preposterous wigs and costumes for their break ins. They did break in at four different times because they kept blowing it.” It really was a case of art imitating life. “We didn’t intentionally write jokes to hit comedic moments,” confesses Huyck. “We stayed in the pocket of characters who legitimately believed they were saving the country from the Reds.”

“At the time, no one found it funny. This was shocking, horrible stuff that was an embarrassment to the nation. I think in some ways, we were the beneficiaries of hindsight, perspective, distance because it was fifty years ago,” muses Gregory. “And maybe fifty years from now, people will look at the events of 2020 and look at those misguided goons who stormed the Capitol and find it hilarious.”

At the time, nothing about this was funny. Yet, it was inherently absurd.

“We wanted to write something set fifty years ago so that it didn’t feel like we were trying to chase modern events.”

Pete joked about a potential television series about Rudy Giuliani standing in front of the Four Seasons (not the hotel) discussing the soul of the nation while his hair dye runs down his cheek just as there was a TV comedy set in the Korean war called MASH decades after the event.

Adapting The Source Material

White House Plumbers took its initial cues from Integrity, the 2016 memoir of Egil “Bud” Krogh, one of the misguided lawyers jailed for his role in the Watergate scandal. In 2022, an expanded version of events emerged in a book co-written with Bud’s brother Matthew titled, The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks That Led To Watergate And Doomed Nixon’s Presidency.

Peter Gregory responded to the comedy in Integrity and things took off. Both writers subsequently read Liddy’s autobiography, Hunt’s two books, and learned about Dorothy Hunt (Hunt’s wife played by Lena Headey), her death, and the toll it took on the families involved. “It took a different shape from a simple goofy heist. It became more of the folly of fanaticism so we had a bigger picture of all the players involved. The math of research gave it a shape,” adds Gregory. “I think the biggest challenge was distilling all of the information and the characters down to a coherent narrative that tracks our two leads and their families,” adds Huyck.

The writers also did comprehensive research into magazines that had gone out of print to find interviews “of the best and truest version of all of the events and then assemble them into a good narrative structure which was episode one,” recalls Huyck. “It’s the “meet cute” moment when Hunt and Liddy meet, they break into Beverly Hills and it goes catastrophically badly. But they got promoted because they were so enthusiastic.”

Alex Gregory. Photo by Alex Gregory

In the second episode, Hunt and Liddy prove their worth by convincing Dita Beard (Kathleen Turner) to change her story after publicly accusing the Nixon administration of bribery. “They’re actually competent. We needed to see that they aren’t just boobs all the way through,” points out Huyck.

“In episode three, you have the break ins, all four of them. And again, they’re caught. In episode four, they’re on the run trying to get away with it. And then, episode five is the trial and the wrap-up. So the actual events did lend themselves to a natural structure. As writers, that gave us this great backbone to build on.”

“From a storytelling standpoint it’s really a romantic tragedy between these two guys. They meet, they fall in love, they get closer together, their relationship is threatened, they break up and then one tries to kill the other,” concludes Alex.

Basing a television series on well-documented events may have presented some challenges in how to contain so much story into five episodes. “A lot of it was how to start and what would be the opening image of the show because we were starting so far back in time with regard to the break ins. Which of the break ins are we showing? Are we showing a break in at all? We’ve gone back and forth. There’s the drama, there’s the family aspect, and there’s the goofy heist. We ended up settling on one of those heists,” comments Gregory.

“The first ten pages are always the ones you rewrite ninety percent of the time,” continues Gregory. The writers settled on the Bay Of Pigs incident as the starting point to give Hunt and the audience an insight into his motivations and why the Watergate break in happens. “Ten years earlier, Hunt had been placed in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation which had gone terribly. He was blamed and hung out to dry for it, but he always blamed the Democrats and Kennedy. So, for ten years he’d been waiting for a chance to get back at the Democrats. So that’s why when the phone rings at the start of episode one and they say, ‘Do you want to mess with the Democrats? he is all in.”

Following a tumultuous collaboration, Hunt and Liddy will eventually come apart. This schism becomes irreversible when Hunt informs Liddy that he’s going to testify at the courthouse. It’s the last time the men will see each other. This flies in the face of Liddy’s “never surrender” maverick approach.

“Liddy would have gone to jail for the rest of his adult life, but he was actually thrilled to be known as the guy who would not break. Whereas for Hunt, when presented with a wife who had died tragically in a plane crash while trying to protect his crimes, young children who didn’t have a parent, he reached a point where he finally said, ‘It doesn’t make sense. We are sacrificing our lives for a president and for a cause that doesn’t care about us. That scene is almost the most heartbreaking of the whole series because that’s where their friendship fatally ends and they never speak again after that moment,” states Huyck. Their goal failed and they failed. “Once you’ve failed at your goals, you have to change your goals,” says Gregory.

Aside from being an entertaining television series, Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck hope the audiences are emotionally affected by White House Plumbers. Hunt’s wife died prematurely. Perhaps they will be inspired to do some further research into Watergate? We can also learn a lot about our current political climate from these past events.

Gregory is conscious to not offer political advice or lessons to be learned. Audiences can interpret Watergate as they see fit. “But what you get from it, is a portrait of true believers and how people get pulled into a cause. They really believe they’re doing the right thing for their country and for their families. And in that process, they really undermine the country that they claim to be trying to protect. Hopefully, we can humanize that misguided behavior and we can understand it better,” says Huyck.

[More: Emmy-Nominated TV Writer David Mandel Goes Wide On “VEEP”]