Watergate trickster
Devised plots to discredit Richard Nixon’s enemies
Burglary organizer G. Gordon Liddy dies at 90.
G. Gordon Liddy, a cloak-and-dagger lawyer who masterminded dirty tricks for the White House and concocted the bungled burglary that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, died Tuesday in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He was 90.
His death, at the home of his daughter Alexandra Liddy Bourne, was confirmed by his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.
Decades after Watergate entered the lexicon, Liddy was still an enigma in the cast of characters who fell from grace with the 37th president.
As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s reelection campaign, Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were farfetched and were never carried out.
But Liddy, a former FBI agent, and Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Liddy and Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James Mccord, a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.
A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mccord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Liddy and Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.
In the context of 1972, with Nixon’s triumphal visit to China and a steamrolling presidential campaign that soon crushed the Democrat, Sen. George Mcgovern, the Watergate case looked inconsequential at first.
But it deepened a White House cover-up that had begun in 1971, when Liddy and Hunt broke into the office of psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, looking for damaging information on him. Over the next two years, the cover-up unraveled under pressure of investigations, trials, hearings and headlines into the worst political scandal — and the first resignation by a sitting president — in the nation’s history.
Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Reelect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.
“I have lived as I believed I ought to have lived,” Liddy told reporters after his release. He said he had no regrets and would do it again. “When the prince approaches his lieutenant, the proper response of the lieutenant to the prince is, ‘Fiat voluntas tua,’” he said, using the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer for “Thy will be done.”