Magdalena Tsanis
Madrid (EFE).- The true story of Watergate, one of the biggest political scandals in the United States, is laughable. This is how David Mandel (“The Veep”) sees it and has captured it in his new series, “The White House Plumbers”, starring Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux and which premieres this May 2 on HBO Max.
“Comedy is a refreshing way to see the Watergate scandal, by putting yourself in the eyes of the assailants you see it as it really was, very funny,” Harrelson said in a telematic meeting with a group of journalists.
And that is precisely what the series does, in the antipodes of the epic of the journalistic milestone forged by Woodward and Bernstein, foregrounding the five arrested for breaking into the Democratic electoral headquarters on June 17, 1972 and the two men who organized it: Howard Hunt (Harrelson) and Gordon Liddy (Theroux).
Former CIA and FBI agents respectively, both were hired by the White House for covert operations and their first mission, in 1971, was to break into the psychiatrist’s office of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, to search for documents. that could compromise you.
It did not go well and despite this the couple later landed on the Committee for the Re-election of the President, where they obtained new assignments, including spying on the Democrats in the Watergate complex.
“We’ve heard a lot about the mugging, but we haven’t heard from the guys who did it, we wanted to know what they were like before it happened, why they did it and how it impacted their lives,” Mandel explains.
As a CIA agent, Hunt was behind the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (Cuba), as a result of which he began to forge his hatred of Kennedy. He was also a prolific author of spy novels.
“I find my character quite reprehensible as a human being,” says Harrelson, who, on the other hand, confesses that he is “in love” with the one that has fallen to his co-star, Liddy, a charismatic lawyer fascinated by the figure of Hitler, who worked in the FBI and ended up becoming an actor and talk show host.
“They were two guys with huge egos, trained in very different ways and trying to do something together, which is probably why they failed so much,” says Theroux, who defines their relationship as a “romance between colleagues”.
The script for the series is based on the public records of what happened in 1972 and the book “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House.” White House), written by Egil “Bud” Krogh and Matthew Krogh.
Some of the most surprising events that he narrates are real, such as the fact that there were not one but four assault attempts -the first failed for different reasons- or that the perpetrators were discovered due to an oversight that borders on the absurd.
One of them, James McCord, taped a back door so that he could open it and enter the center clandestinely; a guard discovered it and removed it, without giving it any more importance, but when he returned hours later and saw that someone had put it back, he became suspicious.
“I like to define this story as a very funny tragedy,” says Mandel. “In delving into it, the failed muggings and other oversights, you can’t help but laugh, but at the same time it’s a terrible case of abuse of power and violation of the law.”
In that sense, “The White House Plumbers” has a very current reading. Mandel mentions that it is only a few weeks since the trial of Donald Trump in New York and warns of the danger of what he calls “true believers” (“true believers”).
“Those people who say they support a guy or a party to the end, despite doing things that go against their own interests, is an idea that is perhaps even more relevant today than it was 50 years ago” and they are those’ true believers’ the ones who end up in jail, the president doesn’t”.
Mandel is also the creator of “Veep”, another satirical series about power; he believes that comedy is the best way to digest the political situation in recent years in the United States, but also an effective way to present a point of view.
“Comedy is like sugar in medicine,” he stresses, “it disarms people more effectively than yelling your point of view or your anger at them.”