Sunday Rerun: The First of its Kind

  I have to admit, we are a little late watching the MAX miniseries "White House Plumbers," about the bumbling ineptitude of G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt as they carry out their sworn mission to make sure that R. Milhous Nixon would win the 1972 presidential election.

Justin Theroux (l) and Woody Harrelson as Liddy and Hunt.

It just dawned on me when I sat down to write to you about the show that maybe the entire concept of a "miniseries" came about when television bigwigs saw this drama unfold night after night on the Evening News. It was 51 years ago tomorrow that the first crack in the damn dam appeared, when Hunt and Liddy sent a "crack" team of burglars to the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington to get information that might harm the chances for George McGovern to defeat Nixon.

McGovern did not have a chance in hell of winning that election. Even with all the trouble Nixon got into before the election, he still won 60.7% of the vote, but because he had a deeply suspicious nature, he was certain that "THEY" were out to get him.

That seems to be a recurrent theme in presidential politics.

But again, Nixon sent people on all sorts of nefarious missions to sew up the election for himself, and he really should not have bothered. Because the doofuses (doofi?) Hunt and Liddy sent to break into the DNC offices were caught taping the doorlatch open, and a poorly-paid security guard named Frank Wills saved the nation by catching the dunderheads in the act.

Wills called the police, and as it happened, three members of DC's finest happened to be in the area in plainclothes, looking for drug deals and street crimes. They responded to the call and arrested the burglars, who had a lookout named Alfred Baldwin stationed in the Howard Johnson's hotel across the street. Baldwin would have seen the police entering the building and could have notified his compadres, but he was watching a movie called "Attack Of The Puppet People" on TV and, well, he let his guard down.

Starting with those arrests, and the investigation that led up the ladder past Hunt and Liddy all the way to the Big Man In Charge - Nixon - the nation was transfixed night after night as crimes were revealed and Congress took action to investigate and punish the wrongdoers. Spoiler alert: they did.

But maybe that is where someone got the idea to have limited-run series of dramatic events, because this stuff is endlessly fascinating.

And just to show you that 51 years later, things have not really changed all that much, Nixon held a press conference on November 17, 1973, as the investigation began squeezing out the truth. That was the night he said, "People need to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook."

And people laughed. It was fun and entertaining. Of course it was - it took place in Walt Disney's Contemporary Resort in Florida.

Then as now, it all comes back to the mouse.