G. Gordon Liddy

G. Gordon Liddy (born November 30, 1930, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died March 30, 2021, Fairfax county, Virginia) was an American political operative and a mastermind of the break-ins that led to the Watergate scandal, which ultimately resulted in the resignation of U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon. Later, Liddy became a successful right-wing radio talk-show host. His bushy mustache and intense stare made him one of the most recognizable figures in American politics and media.

Early life

Liddy was born in Brooklyn to Sylvester J. and Maria (née Abbaticchio) Liddy and grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. He described in his autobiography, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (1976), that he had overcome being a “puny, fearful boy” by confronting his fears and exercising vigorously. Liddy further described in his autobiography that he had once killed and eaten a rat to overcome his fear of rodents and that he had decapitated chickens so that he could kill like a soldier, “efficiently and without emotion or thought.” Liddy’s parents raised him as a strict Roman Catholic, and he later recalled that nuns introduced him to authority. One of his early inspirations was his uncle, who was an agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Liddy said that as a boy he found Adolf Hitler’s voice reassuring, recalling in a 2004 interview that “Hitler’s sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body.”

Liddy graduated from the all-male St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark, New Jersey, and then Fordham University (1952) in the Bronx. He hoped to fight in the Korean War (1950–53), but the U.S. Army assigned him to an antiaircraft radar unit in Brooklyn. He then received a law degree from Fordham University in 1957. Liddy married Frances Ann Purcell that year, and they had five children.

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Career

In 1957 he joined the FBI. He quit the FBI in 1962, and three years later he became an assistant district attorney in Poughkeepsie, New York, the seat of Dutchess county, where he won fame among conservatives for his role in the 1966 arrest of countercultural icon Timothy Leary, who was a leading advocate for psychoactive drugs. In 1968 Liddy ran for Congress but lost a close race in the Republican primary. He then ran the Nixon presidential campaign in Dutchess county. After Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election, the administration gave Liddy a job as special assistant to the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It was there that he met White House aide Egil (“Bud”) Krogh, Jr., who was in charge of “the Plumbers,” a special investigations unit aimed at stamping out leaks of information to the press.

In 1971 Liddy and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent E. Howard Hunt, the future Watergate mastermind, led a group that broke into the Beverly Hills, California, office of the psychiatrist of military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who had infuriated Nixon with his leak of the Pentagon Papers. They came up empty in their search for compromising information. Following the disbandment of the Plumbers, Liddy went to work for the Committee to Reelect the President (also known as CREEP), for which he organized “dirty tricks” aimed primarily at undermining the Democratic Party.

Liddy proposed an over-the-top package of sabotage efforts, code-named Gemstone, including hiring prostitutes to entrap Democrats at their convention and using hidden cameras to document the misdeeds, kidnapping radicals so that they could not disrupt the Republican Party’s own convention, and even assassinating syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Those grandiose plans were never executed, but Liddy and Hunt did orchestrate a break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) office at the Watergate office-apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C. Liddy later recounted in his autobiography that he had held his palm over a candle flame until his skin burned to earn the confidence of his Watergate associates.

Liddy and Hunt oversaw a team that included six burglars and James W. McCord, Jr., the head of security of Nixon’s reelection campaign, which planted bugs and took photos at the DNC office on May 28, 1972. A few weeks later, on June 17, McCord and four burglars broke in again, but this time they were caught by police. Liddy and Hunt were quarterbacking the operation from a Watergate hotel room, and they too were arrested and charged with burglary, wiretapping, and conspiracy.

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About a week after the arrest, Nixon discussed Liddy in a phone call that was secretly recorded. In the recording (which came to light in the investigation of the ensuing Watergate scandal) Nixon can be heard asking his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow?” When Haldeman responds in the affirmative, the president says, “I mean, he just isn’t well screwed on, is he?”

Later saying that he had not been raised to be “a snitch or a rat,” Liddy refused to testify before the grand jury or the congressional committee investigating the Watergate scandal. He later acknowledged responsibility for the bungled operation, describing himself in his autobiography as “the captain of the ship when she hit the reef.” Liddy also told the counsel to the president, John Dean, “If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on, and I will be there.” In March 1973 Liddy was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but he was freed in 1977 after just four years and four months when U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence. Liddy wrote in his autobiography that he while he was incarcerated he sang “Horst Wessel Lied,” an anthem of Nazi Germany, in response to racial epithets addressed to him by Black prisoners. “I don’t believe there was a man there who understood one word of what I sang. But they got the message,” he wrote.

After his prison sentence, Liddy formed an odd couple with Leary, the man he had helped put in prison more than a decade earlier, for a series of college campus debates. Leary referred to Liddy as “Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker.”

Liddy reveled in his role in the Watergate scandal and drove a Volvo with a personalized license plate that read “H2OGATE.” In 1992 he launched a radio talk show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, which ran until his retirement in 2012. Hundreds of stations carried the syndicated show. He also played villainous roles on television shows including Miami Vice (1984–89), Airwolf (1984–86), and MacGyver (1985–92). “I played only villains, and that way, as Mrs. Liddy says, I don’t have to act. I just go there and play myself,” he told Playboy magazine in 1995. On television Liddy was portrayed by actors Justin Theroux in White House Plumbers (2023) and Shea Whigham in Gaslit (2022).