G. Gordon Liddy, undercover operative convicted in Watergate scandal, dies at 90
G. Gordon Liddy, the undercover operative whose bungling of the Watergate breakin triggered one of the gravest constitutional crises in American history and led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, died Tuesday at his daughter’s home in Fairfax County, Va. He was 90.
His son Thomas Liddy confirmed the death but did not give a cause, saying only that it was unrelated to the coronavirus.
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, best-selling 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 cando ruthlessness, loyalty to Nixon and ends-justify-themeans philosophy made him a natural fit in a White House determined to get even with its political 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 E. 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 and holding his hand over a candle until the flesh burned.
“The trick is not minding,” he once explained of the pain, echoing a line used by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”
He also developed an early fascination with Nazi Germany, saying that he felt an “electric current” surge through his body when he listened to Adolf Hitler on the radio. To the young Liddy, Hitler embodied the “power of will.”
Although Liddy frequently boasted of his impeccable tradecraft, he made elementary mistakes that allowed his former FBI colleagues to connect the break-in to the White House and ultimately to a small circle of Nixon aides.
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 “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.
Opinions differ about whether the Watergate scandal would have exploded without Liddy.
Historian Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin described him as a lowly “spear carrier” following the wishes of his commander in chief who will merit no more than a footnote in the history books.
The director of the nonprofit National Security Archive, Tom Blanton, said Liddy “brought out the worst” in Nixon and his aides, “raising the testosterone level in the White House and ratcheting them up to even more extreme action.”
Desperate to contain the scandal during the run-up to the 1972 election, Nixon’s aides launched a coverup 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 20-year 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 break-in 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. “I had learned long ago the maxims of Cicero that ‘laws are inoperative in war’ and that ‘the good of the people is the chief law.’ “
George Gordon Battle Liddy was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 30, 1930, 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.
“The nuns introduced me to authority,” he recalled. “First, God. And then: The flag.” The son of a lawyer, he was inspired by the example of his uncle, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s original G-men, who claimed to have been involved in the killing of the gangster John Dillinger.