OPERATIVE CONCOCTED WATERGATE BURGLARY
G. Gordon Liddy, the undercover operative whose bungling of the Watergate break-in triggered the gravest constitutional crisis in American history and led to the resignation of President
Richard
Nixon, died Tuesday at his daughter’s home in Mount Vernon, Va. He was 90.
His son Thomas Liddy confirmed the death but did not give a cause, saying only that it was unrelated to COVID-19.
A theatrical personality whose event-filled career included more twists and turns than a fictional potboiler, Liddy was at various times an FBI agent, jailbird, radio talk-show host, bestselling author, candidate for Congress, actor and promoter of gold investments.
The role for which he is best remembered was in the plot to bug the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in June 1972.
Liddy’s combination of can-do ruthlessness, loyalty to Nixon and ends-justifythe-means philosophy made him a natural fit in a White House determined to get even with its enemies.
At the same time, he was viewed by his superiors as “a little nuts,” in Nixon’s phrase. “I mean, he just isn’t well screwed on, is he?” the president complained to chief of staff H.R. Haldeman a week after the break-in.
With his intense stare, cannonball head, bristling mustache and machine-gun style of speaking, Liddy looked like the archetypal bad guys he later depicted in television shows including “Miami Vice.” His friend and fellow Watergate conspirator, the late Howard Hunt, described him as “a wired, wisecracking extrovert who seemed as if he might be a
candidate for decaffeinated coffee.”
Liddy often boasted of his transformation “from a puny, fearful boy to a strong, fearless man” through a regime of intense exercise and physical bravado such as eating rats.
Although Liddy frequently boasted of his impeccable tradecraft, he made a series of elementary mistakes that allowed his former FBI colleagues to connect the break-in to the White House and ultimately to a small circle of aides around Nixon himself.
He accepted personal responsibility for the fiasco, declaring that he was “the captain of the ship when she hit the reef.”
“If someone wants to shoot me, just tell me what corner to stand on, and I will be there,” he told presidential counsel John Dean.
Detractors viewed the gun-loving, hippie-hating Liddy as a threat to American democracy and the man responsible for many of the so-called dirty tricks of the Nixon administration that led to the resignation of the president on Aug. 9, 1974. Supporters admired his war against “radicals” and “subversives” and his refusal to betray his fellow Watergate conspirators in return for a reduced prison term.
Desperate to contain the scandal during the run-up to the 1972 election, Nixon’s aides launched a cover-up with the personal approval and involvement of the president. Liddy refused to cooperate with prosecutors and Congress, and was sentenced in March 1973 to a 20year prison term for conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping. President Jimmy Carter commuted Liddy’s sentence in 1977 and he was released after 52 months behind bars.
By his own account, the Liddy of the Watergate breakin was a product of the culture wars of the 1960s. “The nation was at war not only externally in Vietnam but internally,” he said in his 1980 autobiography “Will,” which sold more than 1 million copies.
George Gordon Battle Liddy was born Nov. 30, 1930, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew
up in Hoboken, N.J. He was named for a prominent lawyer and Tammany Hall leader. His Irish-Italian family raised him as a strict Catholic in parochial schools.
After graduating from Fordham University in 1952, Liddy spent two years in the Army as an artillery officer, but was exempted from service in Korea for medical reasons. He returned to Fordham to study law, completed his degree and joined the FBI in 1957.
That same year, he married a computer instructor named Frances Purcell.
His wife died in 2010. Survivors include his five children and a sister. One of Liddy’s sons, Raymond, was sentenced to five years of probation last year after a San Diego federal judge found the Coronado resident guilty of possessing child pornography.
G. Gordon Liddy left the FBI in 1962 and in 1965, became an assistant district attorney in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
He became a local conservative folk hero through his involvement in a drug bust in 1966 against Timothy Leary, a former Harvard professor conducting unorthodox drug research.
Narrowly defeated in a GOP congressional primary, he took charge of the NixonAgnew campaign in Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1968, and was rewarded with a post as special assistant to the secretary of the Treasury.
Liddy’s efforts at the Treasury Department fighting drug traffickers put him in touch with White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who had set up a special investigations unit nicknamed
“the Plumbers” to combat leaks in the wake of the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg.
In September 1971, Liddy teamed up with Hunt, a former CIA agent, to hire a group of anti-Castro Cubans to burglarize the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in the hopes of finding compromising material.
After the Plumbers disbanded, Liddy was transferred to the Committee to Reelect the President (popularly known as CREEP), to organize intelligence activities against the Democrats.
He proposed a milliondollar sabotage plan known as “Gemstone,” which was pared back to a $250,000 scheme that included the bugging of the Democrats’ national headquarters.
Unable to find anyone proficient in bugging, Liddy recruited the CREEP security chief, James McCord, whose links to the White House were easily traceable. McCord’s arrest, along with four Cubans, inside the Democratic headquarters shortly after 2 a.m. June 17, 1972, led to the rapid identification of Liddy and Hunt.
Liddy refused to testify to the grand jury. But his silence failed to prevent the disintegration of the coverup following Nixon’s re-election in November 1972. When McCord began to cooperate with investigators in March 1973, John Dean and other Nixon aides concluded that it was every man for himself and negotiated their own immunity deals.