The operative who masterminded the Watergate break-in

G. Gordon Liddy 1930–2021

If G. Gordon Liddy had any regrets about his key role in a scandal that earned him a 20-year prison sentence and brought down a president, he kept them well hidden. As an operative for Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, it was Liddy who hatched a plan to plant bugs in the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex. And it was Liddy who helped direct a pair of break-ins at the complex, the second of which ended with the burglars in handcuffs. An intense figure with a bushy mustache whom Nixon deemed “a little nuts”—Liddy liked to demonstrate his toughness by holding his hand over a candle flame until the skin burned—he refused to testify at either his subsequent criminal trial or the Watergate hearings, saying he wasn’t “a rat.” After leaving prison, Liddy embraced his notoriety, playing TV villains and driving around Washington in a black Volvo with the license plate H20GATE. “I’d do it again for my president,” he said.

Growing up in Hoboken, N.J., Liddy was “a fearful boy with respiratory problems who learned to steel himself with tests of will power,” said The New York Times. He lifted weights, performed the candle trick, and said he overcame his fear of rats by roasting and eating one. He also “decapitated chickens for a neighbor until he could kill like a soldier”—without “emotion or thought,” he later wrote. Following in his lawyer father’s footsteps, Liddy attended a Catholic prep school and then Fordham University.

After graduating, he joined the Army “with hopes of fighting in Korea, but was assigned to an anti-aircraft radar unit in Brooklyn.” Liddy returned to Fordham for a law degree and joined the FBI in 1957, said The Washington Post. After stints as a field agent and a supervisor of crime records in Washington, D.C., he left the agency in 1962 to work “in patent law for his father’s firm” and then as a prosecutor in New York’s Dutchess County in 1966. “He became a local conservative folk hero” for engineering a bust of LSD guru Timothy Leary, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress. In 1968, Liddy helped organize the Nixon-Agnew campaign in New York state and “was rewarded with a post as special assistant to the secretary of the treasury,” working on narcotics and gun control. He soon moved to the White House, where he headed “the plumbers,” a covert team charged with stopping press leaks “embarrassing to the Nixon administration,” said the Associated Press. That led to a role on Nixon’s re-election committee, where he hatched outrageous plots such as “kidnapping war protest organizers and taking them to Mexico,” hiring prostitutes to entrap Democrats, and assassinating a syndicated columnist—a job Liddy proposed to do himself. Most were rejected, but not his scheme to bug the Democratic headquarters. Found guilty of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping, Liddy served 52 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence in 1977. Out of prison, he “repackaged himself as a showman,” said the Los Angeles Times. He wrote novels and a memoir and launched an acting career, “playing a recurring bad-guy role on Miami Vice.” In 1992, Liddy began hosting a popular syndicated radio show on which he “swung from a matter-of-fact reading of the daily news to bombastic outbursts.” His passionate embrace of guns and lambasting of liberals made him a darling “of America’s extreme right,” said The Times (U.K.). In later years he took up motorcycle riding and parachute jumping, and “promoted nutritional supplements.” He remained grateful for what Watergate had done to rescue him from obscurity. “I’m very appreciative,” he said in 1991. “I was an accident of history.”