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. 

JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

WARREN ADLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Warren Adler, whose 50 novels included The War Of The Roses, from which was made a hit film, is online at the Guardian; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. Of course the movie is what the hook for the obit was -- it's odd that such a successful and prolific writer should have such a low-profile output.

It is pretty much as I wrote it--but one thing was edited out. I have to confess I had never come across, in my time as a crime fiction reviewer, any of his Fiona Fitzgerald novels. They sound intriguing, and almost a natural for development on TV. I mentioned that, but what was cut out was the fact that the adapter is currently Eric Overmyer--who was the showrunner and adapter of Bosch (and was working on Man In The High Castle as well.) That would bode well.

In Adler's own biography, he mentioned that his classmates at the New School for Social Research included Marion Puzo and William Styron; when I wrote Thomas Berger's obit I recall writing the same thing. So I wonder if they ever overlapped, or if they somehow moved in different circles. I also wondered if Berger's The Neighbors (1980) might have been an influence on War Of The Roses?

Adler is good with set-ups, and it was impressive to me just how prevalent the theme of broken, dangerous or twisted relationships was at the heart of his books, whatever their genre. That he was such a devoted family man shouldn't surprise anyone, but making fiction out of the opposite, repeatedly, is something remarkable. I read a piece he wrote for the magazine of the American Association of Retired People, from which I drew that final quote, and it was very moving: told from a point of view of his own loss, you might say victimhood, and it seemed to me a cruel way of his having to go through what he put so many characters through.

It was also fascinating that, in his first career as a DC PR, he should have advised Nixon (on how he could win the Jewish vote) and been the man who gave the Watergate complex its name. Because of course the Guardian obit I had written just two days before Adler's was that of James McCord, leader of the Watergate burglar's, whose confession was the key to Nixon's being brought down. A strange bit of
synchronicity.

JAMES MC CORD: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the Watergate burglar James McCord went up on the Guardian online Sunday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, as I went through it carefully with my editor to try to keep in on point to the Watergate saga and not digress too far into some of the other points of McCord's career. Thus there wasn't room for more detail on the deep background of Watergate, the relationship between Nixon and the CIA, and indeed the formal investigations: what they did and didn't approach and who indeed Deep Throat actually was. I will write more on this later, but after I talk about McCord on BBC Radio4's Last Word later this week.

The link between the Watergate burglary and Dallas is of course the biggest non-Watergate talking point. The placing of McCord in Dallas is double-hearsay, while Howard Hunt of course lost a libel suit when he was publicly named as being there on the 22nd of November 1963.

I should have brought up McCord's first big job with the Special Research Staff, which was cleaning up after the 1953 murder of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Olson had been dosed with LSD a few days earlier in Maryland, as the CIA seemed to be worried he would inform on the 1951 incident in France involving an experiment with drugs--the deaths in the village of Pont Saint Esprit were blamed on rye bread and ergot. This was part of various CIA operations intended to use drugs as instruments of mind control and interrogation, as well as possible weaponisation. McCord helped ensure Church's death would be listed at suicide; the CIA#s MK-ULTRA program would resurface in the alleged brain-washing of Sirhan Sirhan.

GEORGE PELECANOS TELLS WHAT IT WAS

I suggested in my review a few months ago of George Pelecanos' last novel, The Cut (you can link to it here), that it marked a departure of sorts—it appeared to be both the last in a quartet I called 'Fathers & Sons' but also perhaps the first of a new series, and also a book written in a more straight-forward style that perhaps reflects his television writing but also recalls some of his earlier books with echoes of hard-boiled pulp and westerns.

What It Was is, on the surface, another remarkably straight-forward crime story, and not the first book featuring Derek Strange to follow a western motif: a driving narrative that ends in a shootout. But What It Was is also a meditation, one made all the more effective for the seemingly simple action that drives it.

The story is set in 1972, around the time of the Watergate breakins (and yes, the security guard named Frank who's pointed out in one of the bar scenes is indeed Frank Willis—there is an element of recognition in this novel I found very satisfying, but that many younger –or British--readers will miss) and Derek Strange has left the police and set-up as a private eye. He's hired by Maybelline Walker to retrieve a piece of costume jewellrey with sentimental value, that she'd given to a friend to appraise; said friend has been murdered and the ring has disappeared.

As it happens, the murder is being investigated by Strange's old police partner, Frank 'Hound Dog' Vaughn, and the killer is Robert Lee Jones, known as 'Red Fury', who has embarked on a spree of killing for hire and robbery. But he's ripped off some of the wrong people; mafia killers from up north descend on DC to track down and deal with Fury, even as Strange finds himself caught up in Vaughn's investigation. It's a great story, told with tremendous drive. Red and his girlfriend Coco, driving his muscle-bound Plymouth Fury (part of the derivation of his street name) are outlaws, characters born half from westerns and half from the love of the images of the new black heroes on the screen: this is Shaft chasing Superfly in an urban spaghetti western. The supporting cast is well drawn: the numbers kingpin who gets ripped off, the young hookers the mafia killers party with, the transvestite Martina who is Vaughn's best informant, the Vietnam vet witness Strange tracks down, dismissed by the police as a wino, who maintains a precious sort of dignity; it makes for a rich setting. And, as I said, there are references: to the massive Afros of basketball stars Darnell Hillman and Artis 'Rigor Artis' Gilmore, to Stymie of the Little Rascals, even to a young Nick Stefanos, whom readers of Pelecanos' earlier novels will recognise.

And that all fits perfectly, because this is a meditation—on what it was. The story is being told by Strange to Stefanos, because they are now detective partners, in an afternoon session in a bar, doing what men used to do. What you do, and more importantly, how you do it, defines what you are, and influences everything else. Vaughn, whose views on race are shall we say old-fashioned, still takes people as they come to him, particularly Strange. But as attitudes in society change, that approach becomes more difficult, because the assumptions that lie beneath it are being turned over.

It is a meditation on a different time, with different values, and on change. We all looked different in 1972, not least Pelecanos (see right) and the world seemed more chaotic, and positive, than it did, or does now. Take a look at the cover of the UK edition, which is perfect: hidden inside the natural Afro are all the things which used to define us in the world of adults. Maybe the difference is that now we've managed to transform the world so most people live as if it were a children's world. But of course it isn't.

We see the increase of violence, for its own sake, outside the tight confines even of the business of crime. We see one of the key moments that drove such change – to me the scene with the young hookers using cocaine, the new drug which soon will take over, is indicative of a complete transformation of the value systems of a generation—even one that's already become accustomed to drugs.

This may seem a lot with which to lumber a small taut novel like this, but that's the beauty of Pelecanos' writing; he makes the attitudes shine through. He also returns to his old technique of using music to set scenes and define characters: it's not a coincidence that Strange begins telling his story in reverie inspired by The Dramatics singing 'In The Rain'.

'He's living for this summer,' is one description of Red Fury's disregard for consequences.This is a summer of change—Watergate reminds us of that, perhaps that was the moment when faith in institutional change finally went down the drain. Or up the straw. As the story ends, with reference to 'print the legend' from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence', Strange and Stefanos leave a big tip and go back to work. That's what men do. 'I'll see you when I do,' says Red Fury. Tru dat. What it was indeed.

What It Was by George Pelecanos Orion Books, £9.99 ISBN 9781409143675 NOTE: Orion are offering this book as a 99p ebook and also in a £25 signed & numbered hardback

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BERNARD BARKER: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obit of the Watergate burglar Bernard Barker (pictured right with the rest of the Nixon Five, he's the one in the stylish hat) is in today's Guardian, you can find it here. I'm less convinced of Barker's presence in Dallas on November 22nd, but if you believe Hunt was there then that would make sense. I'd be curious to learn about his activities with Batista's secret police; Havana in the 1950s is a fertile ground for the imagination.

Cut from the piece was his career after he took 'early retirement' from his building inspector job: he came a 'zoning consultant' and was arrested in 1983 and charged with trying to bribe a zoning commissioner. He was eventually acquitted on what was described as a technicality. The time he served in Florida was for using his notary public seal to endorse Nixon campaign funds to himself. As the man said, the price of freedom is high.

Barker is also survived by only one of the Watergate burglars, Eugenio Martinez.