GORDON LIDDY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of G Gordon Liddy, the Nixon plumber of Watergate renown, who after getting out of prison turned into a right-wing showman with considerable success, appeared in the Guardian on April 8th; it had already gone up online, and you can link to that here.

For once, this appeared almost exactly as I wrote it: I had not been given a word count, but after over-writing Larry McMurtry I set one for myself and tried to stick to the facts, ma'am, and hope the readers were adept at reading between the lines. I hit my own word count almost precisely, and everything went smoothly.

Looking at other obits, I was amazed at how often he was billed as the "Watergate mastermind". Let's face it, Watergate was not exactly a brains operation, and when I looked at much of Liddy's career, I saw a similar pattern, by which a certain amount of macho bluster and spotlight chasing overpowered his responsibility for a series of, shall we say, mess-ups. In a way, E. Howard Hunt (that first initial thing has been a right-wing pseudo-upper class trope for a long time) was similar: remember Hunt was a long-time spy novelist, and many of his CIA operations seemed planned as if they were fictions. The two of them paired was trouble in a clandestine specimen jar. 

Watergate was one thing I would have liked to go into in more detail, but that would be opening a pandora's box. You could look at my obit of James McCord, of the CIA's Special Research Staff (at the Guardian here --also my Last Words interview about him here) for a sense of some of  my feeling about the nature of the burglary itself...and also the idea that both Hunt and McCord were accused of being in Dallas the day of JFK's assassination. Jim Hougan, who at the time was the DC editor of Harpers, wrote a seminal book on Watergate, Secret Agenda, part of which surmised that the bungled burglary was a deliberate act by the CIA to weaken Nixon (there was virtually no chance he would lose the '72 election to McGovern), perhaps because of "the Bay of Pigs thing" as Nixon referred to it in the infamous White House tapes. It wasn't until after Liddy's obit had been published that I discovered he had been one of the people associated with Norman Mailer, Edward Jay Epstein and other "deep politics" researchers who called themselves "The Dynamite Club". The easiest way to discredit those who believe in conspiracies is to send them down rabbit holes which distract them from the real prize and also eventually may discredit them: I can just see Liddy doing that to the guys in this club.

I didn't see the need to expound further on Liddy as right-wing shock-jock, pitch man, and huckster: who knows? he may have believed his own shtick, at least superficially. He certainly believed his uber-mensch persona, which was probably as close to the real GLL as we will get. I take his autobiography Will with a grain of salt, but it still might have been interesting to go deeper into those "bund" roots in Hoboken, and the way he celebrated this in his later years. However, the idea of Nixon as the leader whose own will could power America "back" to greatness (in the face of hippies, anti-war and civil rights protesters and the like) was so demonstrably false that when it was resurrected in Reagan's kinder gentler return to the Disneyland 1950s or Donald Trump's much more visibly Teutonic MAGA mode, it was no surprise many Americans bought it both times, and Liddy was there to cheerlead every authoritarian moment,and like a vulture profit from it.