White House Plumbers Recap: Project Gemstone

It’s a bad sign when a show routinely litters the screen with expository information like dates and locations, people’s names and job titles. Used sparingly, chyrons like these billboard details of critical importance. These names correspond to the faces of the men on which our story turns. Remember this pivotal date, the date history was made.

On White House Plumbers, though, chyrons are used constantly, even redundantly. For example, I can already tell James McCord is the tyrannical yet inept “head of security” at CREEP because he’s literally standing at the well-labeled office entrance demanding to see the IDs of men he should know on sight. And I can recall one or two dates if you really need me to, but in episode two of White House Plumbers, I’m asked to note (at least) four separate days on which shit happened — a task I can’t perform in my own life unless I’m sent calendar invites. The overall effect of the unnecessary tagging — despite the ASMR satisfaction of the typewriter punches that accompany it — is chaos. Surely one of the hallmarks of a successful TV show is the ability to convey a sense of time and place and character without me having to jot it all down in my Ghostwriter notebook.

But whatever! It’s June 25, 1971, when a person we don’t know types up a note we can’t possibly understand featuring keywords like “Nixon” and “Mitchell,” “convention,” and “400 thousand commitment.” There is a chyron involved, but the true signifier of this scene’s importance is that showrunners have enlisted Oscar nominee/Serial Mom/“certifiable diva” Kathleen Turner to do the typing, a cigarette dangling carelessly from her lips.

Then, suddenly, and for no reason connected to what Kathleen Turner was typing, it’s January 7, 1972. Gordon and Howard are taking sex workers to dinner at the notorious Forge, wooing them with stories of their Cuba-invading “glory” days despite the fact they’re surely already paying these women to appear at the dinner table. Why did the show have us travel to Miami and not just tell us about the henchmen’s plan to blackmail attendees of the Democratic National Convention by tricking them into bedding hookers? I really can’t be sure. Perhaps to demonstrate that Gordon and Howard are feeling pretty comfortable busting the budget for their newly minted electoral-sabotage initiative: Project Gemstone. And at least we get a glimpse of Gordon’s rumored party trick: When the women ask why they should trust these shady men offering to pay them to have sex with other, more liberal men, Liddy holds his hand over the open flame of a candlestick long enough for his skin to singe.

But self-immolation feels like the answer to the unasked question: How stupid is G. Gordon Liddy? The evidence continues to come at us in waves in “Please Destroy This, Huh?” We learn that Giddy keeps a silencer in his office for the very good reason that it’s the same German pistol that Sean Connery poses with in a James Bond poster. “Everyone’s a lot safer with this baby here in my desk,” he says, as we begin to fear the moment the gun goes off. And then, on January 27, 1972, Liddy pitches John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States of America, on derailing the Democratic presidential campaign by, I kid you not, kidnapping and assassinating far-left agitators. He is completely serious. He is also standing inside the walls of the Department of Justice as he proposes this. Mitchell, I guess to his credit, is more than unimpressed with what the Celtic Teutonic–affiliated genius behind Project Gemstone has dreamed up. And yet we know from history that at least one idea from Liddy’s laundry list of crazy infiltration schemes and false-flag ops must take hold: Mitchell will eventually green-light the Bozo Brothers to bug the DNC.

And that’s what the rest of the episode is devoted to explaining — how Mitchell could grow desperate enough to take these men up on their bonkers scheming. And how Liddy and Hunt climb their way back from the basement of Mitchell’s estimation to his good graces. This is where Kathleen Turner finally comes into play. We learn — not via chyron, but by its cousin, archival news coverage — that Turner is Dita Beard, a lobbyist for a company called International Telephone and Telegraph. In the episode’s cold open, she was typing up a memo about the time Mitchell promised ITT a favorable outcome in an antitrust lawsuit in exchange for a humongous donation to the RNC convention in San Diego. Now, the memo’s been leaked to newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. For Mitchell, it’s a felony bribery scandal big enough to sink another man’s presidency; for Hunt and Liddy, it’s a golden opportunity if they can figure out how to seize it without making a bigger, blundering mess of things.

Plan A: When the Senate Judiciary Committee launches an investigation into Dita’s memo, Nixon’s deputy campaign chair, Jeb Magruder, jokes that Liddy should assassinate Anderson. Or is he serious? That Jeb is played by Ike Barinholtz makes it hard to tell, but in 1991, both Liddy and Anderson believed that the possibility was raised and ultimately vetoed.

Plan B: Colson calls in Hunt for help, much like he did in the White House Plumbers series premiere. This time, though, it’s the real last chance for an ex-spook to ingratiate himself with the White House. The last last chance.

And they come up with a playbook so simple that it actually works. No, they don’t kill Dita (though Hunt would later attest that Liddy was “forever volunteering to rub people out”). Instead, they persuade Dita — a rock-ribbed Republican with a history of angina — to simulate a medical episode on the eve of her Senate testimony. They arrange for her to be airlifted to a Denver hospital staffed by doctors friendly to the president’s cause. But this is only a temporary solution. Eventually, Ted Kennedy and the rest of the committee will fly to Colorado, bringing even more publicity to the delayed inquisition. A series of medically unexplainable attacks can buy Mitchell time, but they can’t solve the problem. One day, Dita will be called to answer for her incriminating memo.

Cue Howard, with another idea so simple in its conception and masterful in its execution that I’m beginning to think the Watergate fiasco was all Liddy’s fault. Armed with John Dean’s look-the-other-way, non-approval approval, he convinces ITT to reward Dita for her continued compliance with a healthy Christmas bonus. But the terms of “compliance” have been upped. Now they want Dita to call into question the memo’s authenticity. No one benefits if she admits to being complicit in the ITT bribery scheme, but maybe if she just lies, everyone can get away with it. And she has motivations beyond the financials here. Her daughter, who works for the RNC, has been shunned by her colleagues. This is how Dita rebuilds their reputations in the conservative circles in which they swim.

Honestly, Turner plays Dita with such dark humor that it feels like Howard probably didn’t even need to bother with the Christmas bonus bribe. She would have lied to Ted Kennedy’s limo-liberal face in exchange for the carton of cigs Hunt smuggles into the hospital for her. Hell, she probably would have done it for the sheer thrill. But it’s in these scenes that we see a glimmer of the CIA agent that Howard may have been once upon a time. He’s charismatic and effective. He can read a mood and a moment. He’s not always, it seems, a complete idiot.

Except with his family. With his family, Hunt’s “forever volunteering” the worst of parenting instincts. Somehow, despite the Nürnberg Rally that was their first dinner party, the Liddys and the Hunts have continued to socialize outside of work. Howard and Dorothy even invite Gordon and Fran to their country club in Maryland. Unfortunately, two of Hunt’s kids — Lisa and Howard Saint John — are at the club that same night. I guess this is where rich kids of the Washington metro area smoked weed before there were shopping malls.

Lisa and Howard Saint John embarrass their parents, first by greeting the Liddys high as kites and then by making a larger, louder scene. The emotionally fragile Lisa is playing indignant (and high) white savior to a Black country-club employee who says he didn’t even hear whatever racist attack from another club member that Lisa is protesting on his behalf. But just when it seems Lisa is persuaded to go home, Howard reignites the scene by forcing her to apologize, which of course ends in her calling the guy a “pig” even more vociferously than she started.

In another scene from Papa Knows Best, Howard knocks down the bathroom door after Lisa locks herself inside, a speedy alternative to coaxing her out with love or even bothering to comfort his worried wife. This is how a busy man proves he cares. And it’s not just that Howard is a short-tempered papa when he’s down. He’s a shitty dad in his third at-bat, right after his big win with Dita Beard. Dorothy and the kids are playing a friendly, scoreless game of Scrabble when he gets home, which he ruins with a Challenge when Lisa plays “Xerox” or, just maybe, “xerox.” (Personally, I would have loved to see the board when Lisa played “X/xerox” because there’s only one X in the box, and there was no talk of playing a blank tile, but I digress.) Parenting is a game of compromise. There are bad behaviors to correct and those to ignore. Sometimes you just have to let someone escape a tricky situation without a public apology. And sometimes, just sometimes, you have to let your girl play a proper noun. But Howard, it seems, is only willing to compromise his strict code of ethics when it comes to electoral politics. And so the warm scene of family togetherness ends with Lisa upending the board and screaming.

It’s probably just as well that Howard won’t be at home much in the next few months. Redeemed by what he did with Dita in Denver, his and Liddy’s Project Gemstone is approved. With conditions, of course. There will be no yachtful of sex workers in international waters. The men are, under no circumstances, to murder any commies. But they are given the go-ahead to bug DNC headquarters and $250,000 to put toward the nefarious scheme. In Scrabble parlance, he’s finally scored his bingo.

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