By Lori Perkins
Monday, Memorial Day (May 29th), is the final episode of this five-part HBO series about the men who orchestrated and carried out Richard Nixon’s bungled burglary of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972.
As some of you may know, Watergate was a pivotal event in my young adult years. The reporting by Woodward and Bernstein in The Washington Post was what inspired me to become a journalist. I even wrote a book, with fellow journalist Brian O’Connor, a few years ago titled Everything You Wanted to Know About Watergate (But Were Afraid to Ask), so you would think that I knew everything about the Watergate scandal.
But, to my bemused amazement, The White House Plumbers gave me insights and side stories I was totally unaware of. And the acting – a suburb Justin Theroux as Gordon Liddy and Woody Harrelson as Howard Hunt – definitely worthy of Emmy-award nominations IMHO. For instance, I had no idea that Hunt and Liddy attempted to burglarize the Democratic headquarters four times, and managed to fuck it up four times, with the fourth time being the charm, as we say.
In my Watergate book, I examined the post-Watergate lives of the spouses and children of many of the White House officials who did time – Haldeman, Erhlichman, Colson, Maureen Dean, etc.—but I never thought to look into Liddy and Hunt’s children. Their’s was a real tragedy because they lost their mother right before their father went to jail (and I won’t spoil the real twist in here, but there’s some possible murderous conspiracy thrown into the mix here too).
My millennial son, who OK-Boomers me all the time, asked me if I was really going to watch yet another Watergate rehash (he did not appreciate last year’s Gaslit about Margaret Mitchel, even though it featured Julia Roberts and Sean Penn), but even he can’t pull himself away.
So binge the show before Monday and watch the final episode. You’ll be glad you did, and you’ll see the Watergate fiasco in a fuller picture. Makes the Trump GOP look like it is following in a time-honored tradition!