After episode 4's shocking ending, White House Plumbers episode 5 brings the limited series to a close, covering the Watergate trials that put Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and Liddy (Justin Theroux) in jail and the following Watergate hearings that would ultimately lead to Richard Nixon resigning as the US president.
Just as we've detailed every episode of HBO's satirical look at the infamous political scandal, we do so again here, investigating what is fact and what is fiction in White House Plumbers episode 5. This includes things like who cooperated with the prosecution during the Watergate trial, the punishments that Hunt and Liddy received and what happened to them later in life.
Read on to see just how accurate the show is in depicting these events.
What happened during the Watergate trials?
The fiction
With John Dean (Domhnall Gleeson) promising Liddy that presidential pardons would be coming down the road, he, Hunt and the Cubans agree not to cooperate with the prosecution and maintain that they were acting on their own. While Hunt is worried about this strategy, he does agree to go along with it.
Jim McCord (Toby Huss) ultimately does not. At the end of the trial, he gives a statement to the judge (F. Murray Abraham) saying that he is willing to provide information to the prosecution that was not revealed in the initial trial. The judge decides to read the statement aloud in court.
This allows McCord to avoid going to jail while everyone else involved in the break-in ends up serving time. He later gives testimony to the government hearing into Watergate, as does Dean, who reveals that Nixon was taping conversations where he spoke of and tried to incriminate others for Watergate.
The fact
According to the Gerald R. Ford Library's website, Hunt and the Cubans pleaded guilty during the trial, while Liddy and McCord refused to cooperate. However, it explains that realizing he faced a lengthy prison sentence, McCord wrote a letter to Judge Sirica claiming the White House had pressured the defendants to plead guilty. Sirica did indeed read the letter aloud in court, per Politico, which helped lead to the Senate hearing following the trial.
Dean did end up testifying to the Senate committee on Watergate, where he said that Nixon knew of the Watergate cover-up. His testimony also revealed that Nixon had his own taping system set up in the Oval Office, which the Washington Post detailed he hoped would be taken up by the committee as part of their further investigations (we know that they did).
How long did Hunt and Liddy serve in prison?
The fiction
The Cubans are sentenced to 40 years in prison in the trial, Liddy for 25 and Hunt for 35. They all are sent to the same prison at first, with Hunt and Liddy sharing a cell. However, realizing that Nixon is not rewarding their loyalty and having his family desperately pleading to tell the truth, Hunt agrees to work with the prosecution. It is late in the process when much of what he shares is already known, but his testimony does get him moved to a minimum security prison, where the show details he served two-and-a-half years.
Liddy never worked with the prosecution, but he only ended up serving four-and-a-half years after his sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.
The show also details that Hunt may have confessed about the Kennedy assassination on his deathbed, while Liddy would go on to appear in an episode of Miami Vice. It also says that the two never spoke again.
The fact
Hunt was indeed sentenced to 35 years by Judge Sirica, and ended up serving 33 months of this sentence, so a little more than two years and nine months across various prisons. However, a Politico article about a biography that Hunt wrote details claims that during his time in prison he was beaten, robbed, suffered a stroke (which was depicted in the show) and made to perform hard labor on a cattle farm.
Liddy, meanwhile, was sentenced to 20 years by Sirica and ended up serving 52 months, about four years and four months, with President Carter commuting his sentence per NPR. Unlike Hunt, Liddy did not cooperate with the prosecution or testify at the Senate hearings.
We previously covered the reported deathbed confession of Hunt about the Kennedy assassination. As for the note about Liddy appearing on Miami Vice, he actually appeared in two episodes as Captain William "Mr. Real Estate" Maynard in the second and third seasons of the show. Liddy actually would appear in about 20 TV shows and movies post Watergate, according to IMDb, and he also was a conservative talk radio host after his release.
US viewers can stream all episodes of White House Plumbers on Max. In the UK, new episodes of the series premiere Tuesdays on Sky Atlantic.
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