Warning: This article traces the real story behind White House Plumbers, and may contain spoilers.

Don’t blame us for spoiling HBO’s White House Plumbers, blame the guy who committed the crime. He spilled his guts 40s years ago in his book Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy.

There are indeed “second acts in American life.” Liddy proved it, willing his life story into primetime viewing. The publicity tour continued until the guy reinvented himself into a B-list actor. Casting the kid who sees dead people from The Shining as a young Liddy, a nice touch. Despite a stint as a district attorney, “G-Man,” and “Plumber” for Richard Nixon, Liddy was really born for showbiz, he just didn’t know it.

Filling out the cadre of Nixon loyalists was the dour Howard Hunt, the morally conflicted Emil Krogh, two Cuban refugees, Frank Sturgis, Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman, and sketchy legal counselors Charles Colsen, John Dean, and John Erlichman.

Counter to popular image, both Liddy and Colsen dispeled the rumor of "blind obedience" as was in the case of John Kennedy’s sycophants. It’s important to remember that the Nixon cronies are far more responsible for their actions than we think, Nixon ingeniously empowering his underlings. “He played devil's advocate often,” Colsen said. “Some people didn't realize what he was doing.” This culpability is what makes the perpetrators’ crime and how they dealt with the guilt and shame (or failed to deal with it) that much more compelling.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Richard Nixon
Wikimedia

The Watergate debacle was but one of a dozen or so schemes that Hunt, Liddy, and their crew of pranksters had in the works. The list was whittled down to a few most essential tasks, breaking into the Democratic HQ at the Watergate Hotel in Washington at the top, Nixon signing off but keeping his hands as clean as possible. Woody Harrelson, playing Hunt, and Justin Theroux, a dead ringer for Liddy, had no shortages of juicy stories to pick from in this upcoming HBO miniseries.

But the gang’s antics were not limited to just a little B&E. In theory, the Plumbers were supposed to be "plugging" intelligence leaks, but soon waded into larceny, trespassing, and a few other crimes all for the sake of getting Nixon re-elected. Politics is filthy, dirtying everyone that comes in contact with politicians or their operatives, as evidenced when Dean and Liddy obtained a famous prostitute's black book of clients. This list ultimately worthless for blackmailing purposes because it contained as many prominent Republicans as Democrats, the “balance of terror” as Liddy referred to it in his autobiography. Other warm-ups for Watergate was the breaking and entering into a shrink’s office for compromising material on the Pentagon Papers-leaker. Krogh confessed it was a knee-jerk reaction. “We believed then that these leaks constituted a national security crisis and needed to be plugged at all costs.” He lived to regret it.

Each facet of the 1972 sabotage campaign would be assigned a code name, DIAMOND, SAPPHIRE, GARNET, etc. as part of the GEMSTONE scheme that encompassed everything from astroturfed counter-demonstrations, Cuban hit squads, infiltration, document theft, and hi-tech surveillance ops. Many of the group’s wild plans were abandoned for reasons of practicality or money. One of the most terrifying admissions from the Liddy tell-all was the plan to assassinate journalist Jack Anderson.

Related: White House Plumbers: Plot, Cast, Release Date, and Everything Else We Know

Don’t Drink the Scotch at the Watergate Hotel

White House Plumbers HBO
HBO

The stage was set for the Democratic HQ break in. Plans proceeded as rehearsed the third time, the men slipping past security and up to the Democratic National Committee offices of the Watergate Hotel. In the second attempt, Howard Hunt relieved himself in a liquor closet, Liddy gleefully confided with David Letterman while touring in 1982 in support of his autobiography. Not the press Johnnie Walker Red wanted, that bit thankfully edited out by NBC censors.

The actual break-in is the most uninteresting part of the whole affair, over with not much fuss or a fight. Eugenio R. Martinez, Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio R. Gonzales, James W. McCord, and Sturgis following the meticulous plan to the letter. If not for a minor oversight in the master plan, the whole intrigue might have gone undetected. American history hinged on a piece of masking tape. The aftermath of Watergate left America reeling for decades. The on-duty guard that night, Frank Wills, stumbling on the method that the Plumbers had used to keep a self-locking door open. Instead of messing around with protocol, providing the intruders a chance to hide or cover their tracks with bribes or violence, Wills called the cops, exposing the whole secret organization.

Related: Castro’s Spies Review: A True-Life Thrilling Espionage Story of the Cuban Five

From the Slammer to Hollywood

G Gordon Liddy Miami Vice NBC
Michael Mann Productions
Universal Television

The five intruders, and several of the planners went to jail, none for longer than a few years. Nixon, notably of the bunch, got a pardon, his cronies taking the bullet. While Krogh showed remorse, the same can’t really be said for Halderman or Colsen, documents showing that they had been comfortable lying to the American people for years, whipping up false counter-protests long before GEMSTONE. Erlichman, likewise, showed far more shame in getting caught than all the lying he had done in his life. Hunt suffered a more pathetic fate in the following years, his faith shattered genuinely believing “that anything the White House wanted done was the law of the land.”

Watergate exposed the sordid truth of politics to the public, and along the way even the perpetrators were shocked at what they were really capable of, and how their boss viewed the legal system, co-conspirator Jeb Magruder alleging that President Nixon had knowledge of the operation and personally ordered it. Magruder switching his loyalties to God instead of Nixon, becoming an ordained minister in the wake of his incarceration.

While most of the other figures faded shamefacedly into the woodwork, Liddy played up his arrest and refusal of a plea deal to present himself as a principled man and martyr, taking it in stride as he cracked jokes about eating rats. He used the opportunity to launch his TV and film career, soon headlining guest spots on the biggest show at the time, Miami Vice playing a version of his own felonious persona. He loved the attention, which always made him seem way more significant in Nixon’s administration than he was, using the spotlight to stage a speaking tour with his old nemesis and unlikely friend Timothy Leary, and then leveraging his fame to position himself as a political commentator. He didn’t get quite the same treatment, but the guard who busted the plotters did get to play himself in a movie. In this mess, you gotta take the feel-good stories where you can find them.