G. Gordon Liddy

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George Gordon Liddy
Liddy in 2004
Born	November 30, 1930 (1930-11-30) (age 78) Hoboken, New Jersey
Charge(s)	Conspiracy, burglary, illegal wiretapping
Penalty	20 year imprisonment, later commuted by President Jimmy Carter
Status	Released
Occupation	Attorney, FBI agent, politician, radio personality
Spouse	Frances Ann Purcell
Parents	Sylvester J. Liddy and Maria Abbaticchio

George Gordon Battle Liddy (born November 30, 1930) was the chief operative for the White House Plumbers unit that existed during several years of Richard Nixon's Presidency. Along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy masterminded the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972. The subsequent cover-up of the Watergate scandal led to Nixon's resignation in 1974; Liddy served four and a half years in prison for his role in the burglary.

Liddy later became an American radio talk show host, actor and political strategist. Liddy's radio talk show is now syndicated in 160 markets and on both Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio stations in the United States.^{[citation needed]} He has also been a guest panelist for Fox News Channel in addition to appearing in a cameo role or as a guest celebrity talent in several television shows.

Contents 1 Early years 2 White House years 2.1 Watergate burglaries 3 After prison 4 Controversial statements 5 Acting career 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Early years

Liddy was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to Sylvester James Liddy and Maria Abbaticchio. Liddy was raised in Hoboken and West Caldwell, New Jersey. He was named for George Gordon Battle, a New York City attorney who had mentored Liddy's father.

Gordon Liddy spent grades 1 through 3 at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. He was enrolled in the fourth grade at SS. Peter and Paul parochial school. He was enrolled in St. Aloysius parochial school where he entered the sixth grade in September 1941. In 1944 Liddy graduated from St. Aloysius parochial grammar school. In September 1944 Gordon Liddy entered St. Benedict's in Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from St. Benedict's in June 1948, at seventeen. He was educated at Fordham University.

He graduated in 1952 and joined the United States Army, serving for two years as an artillery officer at the time of the Korean War, but did not leave the US due to a burst appendix. He returned home in 1954 to study law at Fordham, earning a position on the Law Review. Graduating in 1957, he went to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover, but his work at the agency prompted a supervisor to describe him as "a wild man" and a "superklutz".^[1] At age 29, Liddy became the youngest^{[citation needed]} Bureau Supervisor at FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C., earning multiple commendations from J. Edgar Hoover.^{[citation needed]} He left the FBI in 1962 to practice international law in Manhattan.^{[citation needed]}

Liddy worked as a lawyer in New York City and a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York. In 1966, he organized the arrest and unsuccessful trial of Timothy Leary. As an assistant district attorney, he once fired a pistol into the courtroom ceiling during jury summation.^[1] He ran unsuccessfully for the post of District Attorney and then for the United States House of Representatives in 1968, but used his political profile to run the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in the 28th district of New York.

[edit] White House years

In 1971, after serving in several positions in the Nixon administration, Liddy was moved to Nixon's 1972 campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (officially known as "CRP" but to opponents known as CREEP), in order to extend the scope and reach of the White House "Plumbers" unit, which had been created in response to various damaging leaks of information to the press. At CRP and at the behest of John Dean (operating on his own to impress his superior, John Erlichman, unbeknown to Liddy at that time), Liddy concocted several plots, some far-fetched, intended to embarrass the Democratic opposition.^[2] These included firebombing the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. in order to sneak into the building as firemen and grab sensitive classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, kidnapping anti-war protest organizers and transporting them to Mexico during the Republican National Convention (which at the time was planned for San Diego), and luring mid-level Democratic campaign officials to a house boat in Baltimore where they would be secretly photographed in compromising positions with call girls. Most of Liddy's ideas were rejected by Attorney General John N. Mitchell, but a few were given the go-ahead by Nixon Administration officials, including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.^[3] At some point, Liddy was instructed to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel.

[edit] Watergate burglaries

Liddy was the Nixon Administration liaison and leader of the group of five men who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex with the intent to plant listening devices. John Dean had been given the responsibility for overall campaign intelligence by H.R. Haldeman, and recommended Liddy as intelligence chief to the Committee to Re-elect the President to Jeb Magruder, the Deputy Director. ^[4] Liddy did not participate in the break-in himself, insomuch as he did not actually enter the Watergate Complex, rather, he admitted to supervising the break-in from another hotel across the street. For his crime, which he coordinated with Hunt, Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping. Liddy was sentenced to a 20-year prison term and was ordered to pay $40,000 in fines. He began serving the sentence on January 30, 1973. On April 12, 1977, President Jimmy Carter commuted Liddy's sentence to eight years, "in the interest of equity and fairness based on a comparison of Mr. Liddy's sentence with those of all others convicted in Watergate related prosecutions", leaving the fine in effect.^[5] Carter's commutation made Liddy eligible for parole as of July 9, 1977. Liddy was released on September 7, 1977 having served a total of four-and-a-half years of actual incarceration.

[edit] After prison

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In 1980, Liddy published an autobiography, titled Will, which sold more than a million copies and was made into a television movie. In it he states that he once made plans with Hunt to kill journalist Jack Anderson, based on a literal interpretation of a Nixon White House statement "we need to get rid of this Anderson guy".^[6][7] In the mid 1980s Liddy went on the lecture circuit, and was listed as the top speaker in the college circuit in 1982 by the Wall Street Journal. He later joined with fellow ex-con Timothy Leary on a series of debates which were popular on the college circuit as well. Liddy remained in the public eye with two guest appearances on the 1984-89 television series Miami Vice, playing the role of "Capt. Real Estate," a character loosely based on himself. In Miami Vice, he acted with John Diehl, who would later go on to portray Liddy himself in Nixon (movie), making him one of the few actors who has acted with his own portrayer.

Also in the early 1980s Liddy joined forces with former Niles, Illinois Police Officer and co-owner of The Protection Group, Ltd., Thomas E. Ferraro, Jr., to start up a private security and countersurveillance firm called, G. Gordon Liddy & Associates. The firm was not a success, however, and it filed for bankruptcy on November 12, 1988. ^[8]

In 1992, Liddy emerged to host his own talk radio show. Its popularity led to national syndication in under a year through Viacom's Westwood One Network and later Radio America in 2003.

In addition to Will and the nonfiction books When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country (2002) and Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style (2006, with his son Cdr. James G. Liddy, J. Michael Barrett, and Joel Selanikio), Liddy has published two novels: Out of Control (1979) and The Monkey Handlers (1990). Neither novel sold as well as the autobiography.^{[citation needed]}

In Oliver Stone's 1995 movie Nixon, Liddy was played by John Diehl.

In Andrew Fleming's 1999 comedy Dick, Liddy was played by Harry Shearer.

[edit] Controversial statements

During Liddy's tenure as a radio talk-show host, many controversial statements have been attributed to him, including causing the release of John Dean's home phone number in 1993 on the radio when Dean was threatening to sue Liddy for defamation and Liddy called Dean's home on the air to only reach his answering machine that announced the phone number.^{[citation needed]} Some of his comments led to condemnation by then President Bill Clinton who was under scrutiny by conservative talk radio.^{[citation needed]}

• August 26, 1994 - Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests." ... "They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that, because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shots, head shots.... Kill the sons of bitches.

• September 15, 1994 - If the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms insists upon a firefight, give them a firefight. Just remember, they're wearing flak jackets and you're better off shooting for the head.

Liddy claimed that his detractors omit some important context: ^[9]

“

I was talking about a situation in which law enforced agents comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.

”

Additionally, Liddy has said that, as a child, he grew up in a German-American community that included many admirers of Adolf Hitler, and that listening to Hitler's speeches "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before." As an adult, however, he came to condemn Nazism and Hitler as "evil."^[10]

• May 29, 2009 - on the confirmation process of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States: ""Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when [Sotomayor]'s menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

[edit] Acting career

G. Gordon Liddy has acted in several films, including The Highwayman, Street Asylum, Camp Cucamonga, Adventures in Spying and Rules of Engagement^[11]. He also appeared in the television shows Airwolf,18 Wheels of Justice and MacGyver, had a recurring role on Miami Vice, and guest starred in Al Franken's TV show LateLine. On April 7, 1986, Liddy appeared at WrestleMania II as a guest judge for a boxing match between^[12] Mr. T (with Joe Frazier and The Haiti Kid) versus Roddy Piper (with Bob Orton and Lou Duva). Liddy appeared on a celebrity edition of the NBC TV show Fear Factor on September 12, 2006 (filmed in November, 2005). At 75 years of age, Liddy was the oldest contestant ever to appear on the show. Liddy beat the competition in the first two stunts, winning two motorcycles custom built by Metropolitan Chopper. In the final driving stunt, Liddy crashed and was unable to finish. He is a commercial spokesperson for Rosland Capital selling gold in television commercials on Fox News Channel.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: G. Gordon Liddy

• Official Website
• G. Gordon Liddy at NNDB
• G. Gordon Liddy at the Internet Movie Database
• FAIR Article on G. Gordon Liddy Talk Show Statements