G. Gordon Liddy

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George Gordon Battle Liddy
Born	November 30, 1930 Hoboken, New Jersey
Charge(s)	Conspiracy, burglary, illegal wiretapping
Penalty	20 year imprisonment, later commuted
Status	Released
Occupation	Attorney, FBI agent, politician, radio personality
Spouse	Frances Ann Purcell
Parents	Sylvester J. Liddy and Maria Abbaticchio

George Gordon Battle Liddy (born November 30, 1930) was the chief operative for U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House Plumbers unit. Along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy masterminded the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972. The subsequent cover-up of the Watergate scandal led to Nixon's resignation in 1974. Liddy later became an American radio talk show host, actor and political strategist. Liddy's radio talk show is now syndicated in 160 markets and on both Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio stations in the United States. He has also been a guest panelist for Fox News Channel.

Contents 1 Early years 2 White House years 3 After prison 4 Controversial statements 5 Acting career 6 Trivia 7 Bibliography 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Early years

Liddy was born in 1930 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Sylvester J. Liddy and Maria Abbaticchio, raised in West Caldwell, New Jersey, and educated at Fordham University. He graduated in 1952 and joined the United States Army, serving for two years as an artillery officer in the U.S. during the Korean War. He returned home in 1954 to study law at Fordham. Graduating in 1957, he went to work for the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. That same year he married Frances Ann Purcell. Liddy tells a story of an unusual encounter he had with Hoover: while paying the director a courtesy call, the purpose to which Hoover had only briefly alluded, the latter launched into a bizarre 45 minute tirade against Eleanor Roosevelt. In this tirade he said that the former First Lady was an enemy of the Bureau and a subversive. Liddy later said, "Despite the irrelevance, I found this fascinating." He joked that afterwards another young agent approached him saying he was also going to have a meeting with the legendary director and wanted to know how to make a good impression. Liddy put on his best poker face and told his colleague to just let Mister Hoover know how much he loved and admired Eleanor Roosevelt

Liddy left the FBI in 1962 and worked as a lawyer in New York City and a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York. In 1966, he organized the arrest and unsuccessful trial of Timothy Leary. In his autobiography, Will, he recounts finding the Leary mansion to be filled with hippies tripping on LSD and watching a video of a waterfall for hours on end. He ran unsuccessfully for the post of District Attorney and then for the House of Representatives in 1968, but used his political profile to run the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in the 28th district of New York.

Few know this detail about Liddy's run for the U.S. House in Dutchess County, or how without it there might not have been a Watergate. Liddy's entrance into that race was against the incumbent Republican Hamilton Fish Jr., a senior member of congress. Fish family influence in the affairs of the nation date back to Dutch Patroon days, including the Revolutionary War, Civil War periods, as well as Ham Fish Sr in the WWII era. A Republican primary challenge to Fish in Dutchess County was not well received in New York GOP or in Washington, D.C. circles. Liddy campaigned actively at first, exploiting his assistant district attorney fame gained staging drug raids at Dr. Timothy Leary's Millbrook estate. But some weeks before election day, while not withdrawing officially from the race, Liddy stopped campaigning. Fish, of course, easily won. Some weeks after the election there appeared a small article in Hudson Valley (Poughkeepsie) newspapers announcing the appointment of Liddy to a government post in Washington. Liddy's access to Washington's inner political circle established, the path to Watergate was set.

[edit] White House years

In 1971, after serving in several positions in the Nixon administration, Liddy was moved to Nixon's 1972 campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President, (officially known as CRP but to opponents known as CREEP), in order to extend the scope and reach of the White House "Plumbers" unit, which had been created in response to various damaging leaks of information to the press. At CRP, Liddy concocted several plots, some far-fetched, intended to embarrass the Democratic opposition. Most were rejected, such as firebombing the Brookings Institution, but a few were given the go ahead by Nixon Administration officials, including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

At some point, Liddy was instructed to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel. Liddy's account can be found in his autobiography, Will.

Attempting to find a solution to the heat coming down on the Nixon administration, Liddy suggested several far fetched ideas as a distraction, one of which included Liddy just "getting assassinated on some street corner".

For his role in Watergate, which he coordinated with Hunt, Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping, and received a 20-year sentence. He served four and a half years in prison before his sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

[edit] After prison

In 1980, Liddy published an autobiography, titled Will, which sold more than a million copies and was made into a television movie. The book received reviews that were typically laudatory of Liddy's writing ability and sense of humor, if not of his personal character. In it he states that he once made plans with Hunt to kill journalist Jack Anderson, based on a literal interpretation of a Nixon White House statement "we need to get rid of this Anderson guy".

In the early 1980s, Liddy joined forces with former Niles, IL Police Officer and co-owner of The Protection Group, Ltd., Thomas E. Ferraro, Jr., to start up a private security and countersurveillance firm called, G. Gordon Liddy & Associates. In the mid 1980s Liddy went on joint lecture tours with fellow ex-con Timothy Leary.

In 1992, Liddy joined the talk circuit and then became host of a syndicated radio program (first through Unistar, and later CBS, before joining Radio America in 2003) espousing extremely conservative views, which was characterized by his highly provocative style.

In addition to Will and the nonfiction books When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country (2002) and Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style (2006, with his son Cdr. James G. Liddy, J. Michael Barrett, and Joel Selanikio), Liddy has published two novels: Out of Control (1979) and The Monkey Handlers (1990). Neither novel sold well. The latter performs the unexpected feat of educating fans of macho action-adventure stories about the cruelties of animal experimentation.

Liddy describes himself as having been sickly as a child, and possessed of many irrational fears. To confront and overcome these fears, Liddy performed various acts that would "kill the fear". Examples include catching, cooking and eating a rat (in order to overcome a phobia about rats) and climbing a tree during a thunderstorm (in order to overcome a phobia about lightning).

One of Liddy's most famous feats of endurance involved holding his hand over a lighter flame until the flesh on his hand was burned. According to the book All The President's Men, he did this once at a dinner party and afterwards somebody asked "What's the trick?" He replied, "The trick is not minding." (This same parlor 'trick' has also been attributed to T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and is shown in a scene in the movie of the same name starring Peter O'Toole.) When he entered prison for Watergate he allegedly used this same trick to intimidate other inmates.

For many years Liddy was agnostic, but has converted to Roman Catholicism.

[edit] Controversial statements

During Liddy's tenure as a radio talk-show host, many controversial statements have been attributed to him, including giving out John Dean's home phone number in 1993 on the radio when Dean was threatening to sue Liddy for defamation. Some of his comments led to condemnation by then President Bill Clinton.

• August 26, 1994 - Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests." ... "They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots.... Kill the sons of bitches.

• September 15, 1994 - If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they're wearing flak jackets and you're better off shooting for the head.

Liddy claimed, after the fact, that his detractors omit some important context: [1]

I was talking about a situation in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.

[edit] Acting career

G. Gordon Liddy has acted in several movies, including The Highwayman, Street Asylum, Camp Cucamonga, Adventures in Spying and Rules of Engagement. He also appeared in the television show 18 Wheels of Justice, had a recurring role on Miami Vice, and guest starred in Al Franken's TV show LateLine. Liddy appeared on a celebrity edition of the NBC TV show Fear Factor on September 12, 2006 (filmed in November, 2005). At 75 years of age, Liddy was the oldest contestant ever to appear on the show. Liddy beat the competition in the first two stunts, winning two motorcycles custom built by Metropolitan Chopper. In the final driving stunt, Liddy crashed and was unable to finish.

[edit] Trivia

• Despite their political differences, Liddy and Al Franken are friends. Franken has been on Liddy's radio show multiple times. Liddy shares a similar friendship with noted feminist Camille Paglia, who has also appeared several times on his show. Liddy is friends with yet another well-known Democratic operative: Lanny Davis. A lawyer, a friend of the Clintons, and an outspoken supporter of President Clinton during his second term, Davis has been on Liddy's radio show numerous times, and for many years, when Davis appeared on Liddy's show, he would be boasted as "The liberal's liberal" and "Defending the Indefensible – The Clinton Presidency", and would have a special spiel played after Jan Hammer's Miami Vice Theme (the theme song from 1984 until 1990) started the show, as it did originally. Liddy made a guest appearance on Whoopi Goldberg's television talk show in 1993.
• Liddy's show initially was a four-hour format, with Review of and Comment upon the News in the second hour, and the other three hours could be call-in or guests. On Listener Appreciation Day, there would be no guests and call-ins for the three call-in hours. The show later switched to a format where a news commentary took the first segment of each hour.
• During the Review and Comment on the News segment of his radio show, Liddy will not say the full name of the Washington Post. He instead bleeps out the name, saying, "Washington's quaint little alternative newspaper, the Washington *bleep*." Liddy claims that he does this in order to avoid being sued by the Post for trademark infringement, although trademark law does not prohibit such mentions. (Liddy will occasionally mention the full name of the Washington Post, if the newspaper itself is involved in a controversial or newsworthy matter.)
• Liddy has described that, as a child in the 1930s, he grew up in a German-American community that included many admirers of Adolf Hitler, and that listening to Hitler's speeches "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before." As an adult, however, he came to condemn Nazism and Hitler as "evil". [2]
• Liddy was stationed at Coney Island at an anti-aircraft battery during his two years in the US Army, and never saw combat.
• Liddy claims that he is the only white man ever to have engaged in weight training with the Fruit of Islam (the paramilitary wing of the Nation of Islam). This occurred while he was in prison.
• Liddy's son Tom is a popular syndicated talk show host in Phoenix, Arizona.
• Liddy is portrayed in the 1999 Watergate satire Dick by humorist Harry Shearer as an especially high-strung, secretive crook.
• Liddy also makes an appearance in the alternate history of the classic 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. Other notable figures portrayed concurrently include President Nixon himself, Henry Kissinger, and Gerald Ford.
• Also in DC Comics, the minion of Darkseid, Glorius Godfrey, takes on the persona of "G. Gordon Godfrey" while trying to undermine the credibility of superheroes. A similar character appears, without the connection to Darkseid, in the Justice League animated series.
• Liddy was a guest judge for a boxing match between Mr. T and "Rowdy" Roddy Piper at the New York portion of WrestleMania 2.
• On the August 17, 2006 episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews, Liddy said that while he was in one of the federal prisons in the 1970s, he had bugged the Warden's phone.
• The original title of Liddy's autobiography was Battle Override, but given the success of the books and movies with one word titles the publisher insisted on a one word title, Will.
• The character of Edward Blake, AKA: The Comedian in Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen is partly based on Liddy.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Bibliography

• G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (St. Martins Press, 1996) ISBN 0-312-11915-1

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official Website
• G. Gordon Liddy at NNDB
• G. Gordon Liddy at the Internet Movie Database
• [3] G. Gordon Liddy -- An interview
• [4] FAIR Article on G. Gordon Liddy Talk Show Statements