Unrepentant mastermind of Watergate break-in who became folk hero to Right
Of the many weird characters to emerge from the Watergate scandal, G Gordon Liddy, the man who led the bungled Watergate burglary, was easily the most flamboyant and eccentric. To enforce his professional tough-guy image he would hold his hand over a flaming candle. To fight his fear of rats, he ate one for dinner.
A short, articulate, fastidious man, Liddy, who has died aged 90, was a key figure in President Nixon’s ‘‘dirty tricks unit’’. He was also the sole Watergate conspirator never to break his oath of silence.
Nixon’s aides in the White House lived to rue the day in 1971 that they recruited this extraordinary character for the top secret Special Investigations
Unit, which became known as
‘‘the Plumbers’’, set up to staunch a flood of leaks of administration secrets.
The leak that most infuriated Nixon was the publication in The New York Times of The Pentagon Papers, a top secret and damaging account of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The papers were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a disillusioned former government employee. In a bid to discredit Ellsberg and suggest he was mentally unbalanced, Nixon ordered a psychiatric profile from the CIA.
Failing to come up with anything damaging, the Plumbers, led by Liddy, recruited a group of anti-castro Cubans to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and seize Ellsberg’s psychiatric files. They failed to find any files and beat a hasty retreat. The operation was the start of the White House criminal activities that led directly to Watergate.
Later that year, despite the psychiatrist office fiasco, Liddy was recruited for undercover work for Creep (the Committee to Reelect the President). He was given a budget of US$300,000, with bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate his first target. At the end of April 1972 he received orders to break into the Democratic headquarters, tap its phones and bug the office of the committee chairman Lawrence O’brien. Their mission was also to search for salacious material including addresses of callgirls thought to be having affairs with Democrats.
In May, Liddy gathered together his same band of inept Cubans and after two nights of failed attempts to pick the lock, finally broke in. Two phone bugs were installed, but the O’brien bug failed to work and a second break-in was decided upon to fix it. First a lock on a stairwell door leading to the Democratic offices was taped back in advance by the gang. But the tape was discovered and removed by a security guard, and when the break-in began in the early hours of June 17 the burglars found the door locked.
Instead of aborting the operation, the headstrong Liddy decided to go ahead. The lock was picked and re-taped and the burglars broke in. Making a later check, the guard, finding a new tape on the lock, called the police, who arrested the burglars at gunpoint. A phone book belonging to one of the captured Cubans contained Liddy’s office phone number and he was arrested.
On January 30, 1973, Liddy was found guilty of charges including conspiracy, burglary and planting microphones. He was offered immunity but refused to testify either before a grand jury or Congress. He was later hauled back before a grand jury and took the Fifth Amendment more than 20 times. This earned him further sentences for contempt.
George Gordon Battle Liddy was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930 to Sylvester Liddy, a lawyer, and Maria (nee Abbaticchio). As a sickly, asthmatic child, his first political hero was Adolf Hitler. The town he grew up in was full of ethnic Germans who idolised Hitler and Liddy learnt to salute the Stars and Stripes Nazi-style. When he listened to Hitler on the radio, he later said, it ‘‘made me feel a strength inside I had never known before’’.
Following graduation from Fordham University he served for two years in the army before returning to the university to read law. After this he worked for the FBI for five years then found work as a lawyer before joining the Nixon administration in 1968.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Liddy was handed a 20-year prison sentence for ‘‘sordid, despicable and reprehensible’’ crimes. President Carter cut the sentence to eight years but he was finally paroled after 52 months – the longest jail time for any Watergate felon. He emerged unrepentant.
Exploiting his notoriety and expertise as a former FBI agent, he set up an international security consulting agency in Florida specialising in VIP protection and hostage release. He made thousands of dollars a speech on the lecture circuit and also ran a radio talk show popular with right-wing Americans.
His wife Frances whom he had married in 1957, stood by him through his trial, imprisonment and his subsequent enterprises when he became a folk hero of America’s extreme Right and an opponent of gun control legislation. They had five children; all survive him.
In retirement Liddy promoted nutritional supplements and not only remained a keep-fit enthusiast but also took up motorbike riding, parachute jumping and singing lieder. He also retained a quirky sense of humour, driving around Washington DC in a Volvo with the licence plate H2O GATE.