A priori, everything was said about the Watergate scandal, whether it was with documentary series, journalistic or biographical books, podcasts, and movies like Forrest Gump, Nixon, Frost/Nixon, or Mark Felt: The Informant. But, after four decades of the political espionage case, illegal wiretapping in the National Committee of the Democratic Party is in the spotlight of television fiction. Between April and June 2022, we had Gaslit with Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Dan Stevens and Betty Gilpin and, starting this week, you can see The White House Plumbers with Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux as E. Howard Hunt and G Gordon Libby, the intelligence agents in charge of devising and executing the operation.
It was midnight on June 17, 1972 when Frank Willis, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, found duct tape on the locks of the building where the Democratic National Committee was located. He took it away. After a while, the tape was back there. It was then that he called the police and Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez and Frank Sturgis ended up arrested for planting listening devices and with the intention of photographing opposition documents from the White House, then occupied by Richard Nixon.
The case, as we said, passed to posterity at a social, political and cultural level. It put an end to the Nixon Administration, who had to resign in August 1974, replaced by Gerald R. Ford, after it was shown that he had tried to cover up illegal activities, and the judicial process ended with culprits such as Hunt, Liddy, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, the lawyer John Dean or Egil Krogh, head of the secret police in charge of investigating leaks and turned into a political espionage tool, who was baptized as the White House plumbers.
A key figure in the journalistic imagination of the United States originated: Deep Throat, the mysterious person who denounced the case and leaked information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post, and who in 2005 was revealed to be W. Mark Felt , an associate director of the FBI who retired in 1973. And, on a cultural level, already in 1977 he slipped into the Oscars with the adaptation of the book All the President's Men written by Woodward and Bernstein, which won four Oscars , including an adapted screenplay for William Golden and supporting actor for Jason Robards.
Time, however, offers perspective and the possibility of transforming this anti-democratic sin into a reading of the present, even as a cautionary tale. In the case of Gaslit, for example, it shed light on a figure despised by the prevailing misogyny of the time: Martha Mitchell, then the wife of John N. Mitchell, who was kidnapped from a California hotel so that she could not communicate with the outside world. and leak information harmful to her husband.
The media allowed themselves to be swayed by the current of opinion started by Nixon's men, who sold that Mitchell had mental health problems derived from his alcoholism. Her experience served to coin a medical term, the Martha Mitchell effect, which consists of misdiagnosing a patient by considering that what she says, which is actually true, is a delusional perception. With Julia Roberts radiating charisma and a tone halfway between political drama and satire, Gaslit served to vindicate Martha Mitchell along with the documentary series The Martha Mitchell effect, released a few months earlier.
And, as for The White House Plumbers, it allows us to see the scandal with a more unequivocal tone of comedy thanks to Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, two writers for the histrionic Veep, who portray the extent to which the operation is a political espionage, in addition to dangerous for democracy, it was concocted by eccentric or downright useless characters. The pilot of the series, produced by HBO, forcefully defines Liddy when, at a friendly dinner with Hunt and his respective wives, he considers it appropriate to put on a vinyl with speeches by Adolf Hitler while his wife reveals that, for Liddy, genes are vitally important.
As Alison Herman explains in Variety, the almost total absence of Nixon as a character helps to convey that the fiction is about Donald Trump, whom he considers the president's "spiritual successor" between 1969 and 1973, and who contributed to the erosion of democracy both since his term as well as after the loss of the 2020 elections. The White House plumbers can therefore be interpreted as a mirror for the United States, so accustomed to idealizing its political model, and showing how conspiracy thoughts could take control of the Administration for political purposes and outside the law.
It also makes sense that this effort to demystify the political system develops from an absurd and acid comedy. In a context like the current one, idealism can be interpreted as a shameful value due to accumulated disappointments. And this, in turn, is possibly the greatest triumph of these anti-democratic figures, who are so comfortable with relativism and skepticism.
