Also media Ah, welcome back yet again to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about g Gordon Lidty.
You know, we initially did four parts, and I was like, that's probably about as much g Gordon Liddy. I had hoped to cover his whole life in full part four parts, and I just I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop getting into these little rabbit holes, kept getting pulled into things.
He's just too interesting, and I'm always, you know, whenever we have an episode that runs into the multi parts, I get kind of anxious because I'm afraid that, like you know, no episode is everybody's favorite, right, and so we try to we try to have variety. We try to go back and forth between you know, we got cult leaders, business monsters, Nazis, you know, quack doctors, all that sort of stuff, so everybody gets someone what they like. So I get worried whenever we start going too long
on one guy. But I listened to the first four episodes and I kept feeling like we were we were doing a disservice to the audience by not finishing the G. Gordon Liddy story.
You know, I I will admit it didn't feel like there was like plenty more to do. There's so much more, I think to your to your point, you know, it does he does cover. He's like a real like multi hyphen it in terms of yeah fuck yeah, true true fuck faces in the twentieth century.
And we're missing still. You know, Watergate is quite a thing, and his just his his fascinating brain is worth studying. But we're missing a whole chunk of his career, which is where he kind of invents the modern concept of a right wing influencer in a lot of ways. So Andrew, welcome back to the show. Now, folks you you may have noticed the absence of a of a certain voice in the audience today. Sophie is not here. She was taken into custody by Nicaraguan authorities after a brief gun
battle last weekend. She's fine. We're working on on on getting her out.
Uh.
You know, it's just a misunderstanding to do with some just.
Some paperwork that needs to be foed.
Yeah, sure, paperwork, paperwork, Yes, that's it, that's right. Sorry, I yes, paperwork, not kidnappings. So Ian Ian Johnson are our inimitable editor is sitting in for her today. How are you doing?
Ian I'm doing pretty good. Excited to learn more about the g man you know, is burning himself, lighting his hands on fire. Yes, I love it, so let's keep it coming.
You know, I'm kind of low key glad that that Sophie wound up trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government last weekend, because this is an episode that does need a little bit of a boys club, because we're going to not just be talking about g Gordon Liddy, but a lot of concepts of masculinity in our society, and I think he kind of embodies pretty well. So this will be good. This will be a good, good time for the bro squad.
Okay, we're gonna brow down.
Yeah, Okay, oh yeah, we're gonna brow down hard everybody. Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, Ian, when when I was trying to come up with ways to introduce this show last night, I was thinking of nicknames for you in my head. Since I haven't gotten to do that much, I'd.
Love to hear well.
I was gonna go with Ebao the Letter, which is a reference to an r EM song about Ripper Phoenix that that like four people know today. All of the people who listen to that song back in the nineties are dead now except for like me, and I'm going to guess dan Aykroyd he was one of Ripper Phoenix's friends, right.
No, maybe one of the guys in or they don't even know it anymore.
No, no, no, there's no way Michael Stipe remembers this, not with all of the Michael Stipe induced brain damage he has. Are we are we ready for the last of Lyddy?
Yes?
Oh my god?
Okay, okay, okay. When we left off with the g Man, he had just been convicted and sentenced to like twenty years in prison for his many crimes, many incompetent crimes. And obviously Lyddy does not do close to twenty years in prison, but he and his family don't know that where he goes inside and to all. For everything I can tell, I believe he was fully willing to serve that amount of time. Right. One thing you can't take away from the guy is his commitment to the BIT.
And the BIT, of course, is fascism, so I don't really respect it, but I do respect the commitment, you know. Yeah, you just kind of have to pass a certain point.
Look, I'm worried that I have said made this analogy or repeated this analogy before on this very show. But it's a little bit the same as like the like nine to eleven hijackers. Everyone constantly the calls those attacks cowardly.
Absolutely not.
The one thing they absolutely were not is cowardly.
Look, it wasn't a good thing to do, but it was not cowardly.
Yeah, it was very brave.
Yeah. Well that I think this goes into actually something that's very relevant to these episodes, which is that our culture places a moral value on concepts like courage and courage. Physical courage is an absolutely a moral value. The SS. A lot of guys with physical courage in the SS doesn't matter, doesn't make them good. Is not like a redeeming trait. And it's the same. Yeah, you know, when I say something is respectable, respect does not imply morality.
It's like, if somebody is incredibly good at breaking and entering into houses in order to like take people's valuables, that may not be a good thing. He's probably hurting a lot of people, but you have to respect the degree of skill in busting through a lock, you know.
Ye. Also that one isn't as ambiguous, unambiguously.
Bads, No, it's not. I don't know.
We've been a breaking an entering. It's all where it goes a little.
Bit of B and A yeah. I guess it depends on the B and the E.
Yeah.
So back to Lyddy. So he he goes inside and his wife takes a job. I thinks he's a sixth grade teacher and is completely the one taking care of the family while he is at She has some help from Gordon's parents, but his father, Sylvester is going to die about halfway through his time in prison, which I think seriously reduces the ability of the in laws to
kind of take care of them. This also means that Lyddy is going to be left without the let's say questionable moral support that his dad was able to That was like the one thing holding him back though right. I think if his dad had been alive, he probably would have given his dad a copy of the autobiography before what published, and his dad would have been like, you got a D. D. Hitler This thing by about fifty percent.
Everyone needs that person in your life to just say just a less Hitler, less Hitler. I know we all want to Hitler a time.
Yeah, count up, the Hitler references in your book. Cut him in half, you know what, cut him in half? Half as much Hitler? Fair enough.
It's like Coco Chanel for Coco Chanell.
Yes, yeah, that's right. You just just the Chanel, leave the Coco out. I think the problems are in the co co So Lyddy's lawyer during this period is a guy named Peter Marulis. And if you comb through old New York Times articles or their contemporary Watergate coverage, you'll see Marulus mentioned a lot. He had a reputation for being mild mannered but persistent. He was apparently pretty good looking.
It's hard to judge his actual competence from this case because Lydia doesn't really give him a chance to be a great defense lawyer. Right Lyddy is like, I am guilty and I will say nothing else, which is, to be fair to Peter, a difficult position to be in as a defense attorney. You don't have a lot of wiggle room there. It is really funny the way in which the g Man describes his for because Marulus is his former law partner and his best friend. Quote a tall,
powerfully built man with a Clark Kent face. And glasses under thinning sandy hair. Peter Marulis will correct anyone who refers to his ethnic extraction as Greek by advising sternly that he has a Spartan. He was my best friend. I wasn't sure we were going to get a Sparta reference in here, but there we go, there we go, We got it. We did it everyone.
It's good to know. And this five goes back literally as to Herodotus, people who call themselves a Spartan are the fucking worst.
Oh yeah, anyone who because like they weren't good at like their period of time, as like it like objectively dominant in the Greek peninsula was like roughly the period of time Martin Scorsese has been making movies right like it's it's not like that long a span of time. And I think Scorsese is more impressive as like a force in culture. But Marulus is not a Spartan. Of course, he is from Poughkeepsie, which is the opposite of Sparta.
I think, probably in a good way. But whatever, when he first went away, when Liddy first goes away gets locked up, he's sent in a local jail kind of as his case is winding its way to completion. He gets a period where he's like he's convict did but he's not like permanently sentenced in everything here, everyone, Robert here,
I actually got this wrong. I double checked, and Sparta's period of military dominance in Greece was something like a little over thirty years, whereas Carsese's been directing for like fifty something years. It would have been better if I had compared the length of time that Sparta was the dominant military power in Greece to like the run of
the Simpsons at present, although they'll eat it soon. And he describes himself during this early period of incarceration as totally at peace because while he had abandoned his family and left his wife defend for their five children completely alone, it was all in service of a greater cause, and
that greater cause was Richard Nixon. Now, Lyddy was not unaware of the fact this is an unfair thing to do to your wife, right to abandon her for half a decade in order to protect Dick Nixon, the man least deserving of loyalty of anyone who has ever lived. But yeah, at one point he seems to have been somewhat aware dimly at least that this was not a morally clean thing for him to be doing. And so at one point this is one of the things that's
interesting about it. But at one point he sits down with her on a visitation day and is like, look, I know this is not what you signed up for. This is not fair. If you want to leave me, get a divorce, find someone new, you know, that's totally fine with me. I'll sign the papers, I'll do whatever. And fran opts to stick by him, which is I guess, at least proof that even the sickest weirdhouse on this planet can find true love. I don't know what you
want to like interpret from that. I don't find it optimistic, but it is a thing way. It's pretty sweet, but it's true. It's a deeply sweet thing to do. Again, I hate that this incredible gesture of love is on behalf of Richard Nixon, at least partly, so like, that's not great, but it is what it is. It is so. Gordon does not describe his experience in prison as bad. He does, however, describe it like a white guy raised
on Clint Eastwood movies from the seventies. Right, this is like, I don't know the degree to which I know that he's not telling the full truth. I suspect he is censoring his true feelings about his time behind bars significantly and consciously aping movies from the nineteen seventies in this book that he writes because he knows that that'll sell with conservatives. Right, there's a lot of dirty Harry in a number of chunks of this book. Here's one line
where he talks about his early days in jail. In here, people wore all neighbors and it was like old Home Week. I couldn't understand most of what was being said. It was all in black dialect, and I didn't speak it. I have sense of necessity become fluent. I don't think that's the case because he writes, and I'm not going to I'm not going to read him writing what he calls black dialect. But he does attempt to at several times, and I do not him credible.
I'll say that, yeah, this is surreal. I speak jive. It is come up before Airplane.
I actually don't know that. I'm not exactly shore when that movie came out. It's pretty embarrassing to read. Again, I'm not gonna like go too much into it because of how embarrassing it is. But you should know that this is not just not just the thing he does once, but a thing that is like repeatedly a part of this chunk of his narrative. So, because Lyddy and McCord and Hunt all got caught and charged so far ahead of the bulk of the Watergate scandal breaking out, there's
this long lag time. And this is one of the things that the two different TV shows we've talked about really fuck up. I mean, I don't think they fuck it up. I think it's a narrative choice they make, but they really mess with the timeline for the purposes of making it seem like guys like John Dean and Erlikman and whatnot getting in trouble times up with the break in, and with guys like Hunt and Liddy getting
in trouble much better than it does. In reality. The shit with Hunt and LIDDI happens well ahead of the rest of the scandal breaking and so these guys are all kind of in jail while the Nixon administration is falling apart. Lyddy is determined to prevent this, to prevent
Nixon from getting forced out of office again. The whole thing that was kind of like keeping him together was the idea that by sacrificing himself and his family, he could keep Nixon in office, that like the chain of custody would stop with him, and that Nixon wouldn't get in trouble if he went away. And he kind of comes to the conclusion that if McCord or Hunt in particular break, that's such a danger to the administration that
he would have to murder them, you know. So he claims that, you know, he says that he makes because he claims he's very popular with some of these other prison guys, and he claims that one of these dudes, and he always tells you that these are black men, tells him that the price of a murder is two
cartons of cigarettes. He works out like a plan basically where he'll assaulted guard to get sent to solitary for a few days, and then this friend of his, who's totally his buddy, will murder whichever one of his co conspirators that he needed dead. Knowing Lyddy, knowing his general level of competence, I wouldn't be surprised if he got a dude to say, yeah, man, give me cigarettes and
I'll totally murder a dude with you. Send yourself to solitary, and I'll make it happen, right, Like, I would not be surprised if someone scammed him as a spoiler. He never comes close to hurting anyone in prison that we can prove in any way, shape or form. I think a lot of this is just bluster, and this dude, having watched a lot of prison movies.
Really look, I just back of the enveloping a little bit of even with inflation, how the fuck you gotta try to get away with two cartons of cigarettes? Is the price? Like, get the fuck out of here.
I think the idea is that, like, well, if you're if you're a lifer or whatever, it doesn't really matter either way, whether the cigarettes or whatever. But like, I think they're gonna take your cigarettes, right, Like, if you murder a guy, they're gonna throw you in side. I don't know, it doesn't seem that that, especially since we're
talking about like very high profile prisoners. Yeah, it's one thing if it's like, yeah, if you murder this other dude who's a lifer and who nobody on the outside cares about and you can probably get away with it because the prison authorities aren't going to investigate if you murder e. Howard Hunt, Like yeah, they're not just gonna pretend that didn't happen, you know.
But also people know what kind of money you have access to and what you're trying to do. You don't think the price is going to be one hundred K to my family on the outside.
You don't think anyone's going to like foya to see, like, hey, this guy got murdered right after g Gordon Lyddy gets put in solitary. Did he buy anything for another prisoner right before?
Like?
Is that documented? Like every journalist in the country would have poured over this anyway, whatever, But again Lyddy never does anything. Gordon claims that during the of his time in prison, he is because he's a white man in
a jail, the subject of numerous racial epithets. During the start of his time behind bars, he says his new neighbors were particularly angry because, and this is his fault, he would walk naked to and from the shower, which he thought was fine because of his experiences in high school gym. But like it's apparently rude in a prison now again. Prison mores change regularly and differ from region to region. But this seems like a pretty easy thing
to know. If it's like getting a bad reaction to people, just don't walk naked around it. Put a towel on, man like, it's not that art anyway. His decision is not to just put a towel on. He says that after a week or so being basically being called honky, he decides to fight back. And I'm going to give you one guess as to how he decides to fight back against anti white racism. What he describes is.
That did he light himself on fire?
No?
Oh, that was the other likely No Ian, No, it's Nazi, it's Nazi stuff. He does a Nazi again.
He's got one play, and he loves the play.
He's right, he's got two he has bringing up the SS and lighting himself on fire, Like those aren't the only two plays he ever developed.
Well at that point that was also the kiing Nazi move.
Yeah yeah, let yourself Yeah yeah, that's what Hitler did to the whole country. Yeah, so quote I seethed then an idea he seethed after getting you know, yelled at yeah. Then an idea hit me. They wanted race, I'd give them race. My mind reached back thirty five years deep into my childhood. In my head, the shortwave of my mother's old Emerson snapped on. The music started and I
started to sing, sing as I hadn't in years. I roared out into the chaos about me, the anthem of the nation whose psychotic obsession with race sent millions of those believed inferior to their graves. And then he starts singing the horse wessel Ride.
Oh my god, by the time, even as far as Nazi shit you could do in prison, that is impressively.
And He's like, there was something so powerful about the music that they all stopped yelling at me as soon as they heard it, even though they didn't speak German. And it's like, no, they look, I'm gonna yeah, of course, I'm gonna guess most people in the DC jail did not speak German, but like they knew this was Nazi shit. It's not that hard when a guy starts singing a Marshall Germans song, you get what's going on?
Yeah in a jail.
Yeah, Like so this is where I Yeah, it's it's it's pretty fun. So after some time in the DC jail, he gets sent to a larger facility, dan Berry, and he's he's still kept out. He's in a bigger facility now, but he's kept out of the general population because he still hasn't been sentenced. He claims that during this time he met another Nazi, the son of the s SH
Gestapo commander of Brussels, who became his chess partner. He's like, yeah, I met the son of this SS Gestapo commander in Brussels, and we started becoming like, you know, chess buddies.
Quote.
Yeah, we get on famously. He knows more songs than I do. And shower time sounds like the invasion of Poland. My god, that's the sins you should not ever write now.
These two naked Nazis belting out fucking Wagner there.
Yeah, first off, comparing your shower time to the invasion of Poland. Let me remind you all three million Jewish Poles are murdered during the Nazi occupation, along with at least one point eight million non Jewish Polish citizens. That's a little bit political, right, Like the Polish state will say it's about three million Polish citizens. Honestly, that doesn't really sound impossible to me, Like a lot so many
Polish people die as a result of the occupation. More importantly, though, we can actually drill into the accuracy of this Claims claimed that he was buddies with the son of the s S Gestapo commander in Brussels, because that's a job. We know who did that gig right, The head of this Gestapo in Belgium was a dude named Constantine Kanaris. Now you may have heard of a guy named Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris was a Nazi who was one of the guys that was kind of part of the plot
against Hitler. That's in that Tom Cruise movie. He gets a little rehabilitated for this. That should not be the case. Wilhelm Canaris is like not one of the worst Nazis, but was definitely definitely a Nazi. He worked very closely with Ryan hart Heidrich, architect of the Holocaust. He's one of these dudes who doesn't like Hitler at the end because he thinks Hitler's losing the war, and he gets executed, by the way should have been executed and was fucking executed.
His nephew is a Constantine Canaris, who is the head of the Gestapo in Brussels during when Brussels is occupied by the Nazis. Constantine is also a fucking war criminal. He gets sentenced to twenty years hard labor for a number of things. He's responsible for the execution of a number of political prisoners. He's also he plays a significant role in the roundup and deportation of Belgian Jews. He is one of the guys who helps do the Holocaust,
right Constantine Canaris. Obviously, he's the gestapohead in Belgium. He's not a good person. Constantine serves half of his sentence and then dies in nineteen eighty three, which is three years after Liddy's book was published. I have a little trouble nailing this down entirely, but his German Wikipedia entry says that he has multiple sons, but it only names two of them, and of the sons that I know he had, neither of them ever spent any time in
a US prison. Klaus Wilhelm was a legal scholar and a professor who spent his entire life living and working in Germany. Volker Canaris became a director and produced a famous movie about the Commandant of Auschwitz. He also spent his life in Germany. I can find absolutely no evidence that Constantine Canaris had a son who went to the United States and was put in a DC area jail
or prison. No evidence whatsoever that this happened. I believe, based on what I can confirm, that G. Gordon Liddy is lying about this, or that's some random deald like about being this guy's son.
You know, Yeah, it feels like at this point it's you know, hey, the guy that was singing fucking Nazi songs in the other prison before I got transferred over. I'll just tell of as a regular as American Nazi that I'm a special match.
Yeah, that I'm Constantine Kenaris's son. Anyway, Yeah, again, he's lying here or I think that, like, there's a pretty good chance that Liddy is lying, because he does lie regularly in his memoir, and I hope that keeps in your head as we investigate the wackier claims he makes on his journey. Anyway, moving on, Liddy says that due to his familiarity with FBI studies on interrogation, he knew that the ideal time to interrogate and break a person
who has been locked up is after six weeks. That the FBI likes to leave people in custody for about six weeks because there's this kind of initial period you get when you move into incarceration where you get like extra resilient and like tough and like I can take this, I'm gonna and that After about six weeks, the kind of natural boost you get from that wears down and
you're at the lowest point in your psychological defenses. So he figured that they were going to wait until he'd been in there a couple of months, and then they were going to try to break him right and get him to talk, because that's when he would be at his most vulnerable. So he decides that he has to build up his willpower to fight back, and the first move he takes to do this is to become honestly,
you know, I hope you know. If you've got an eating disorder, we're going to talk about that a bit here. He decides to cut his food intake to six hundred calories a day and starve himself while doubling his daily exercise routine, and like he describes this as a mental exercise to increase his willpower. As someone who has had an eating disorder, this all reads to me like a guy describing his descent into anirexig mania in order to have more control over his situation after being locked up
like that. That is how this reads to me. And I'm going I'm gonna read you a segment from that quote. My mood remained steady. I was getting along with all the other prisoners. Things were going very well, too well. I decided I needed more stress to bring my will to maximum power. I turned to my old reliable method of ordeal by fire. This test would have to exceed all others in destruction of tissue and time of severe pain.
I selected a particularly strong willed black bank robber and named texts with whom to engage in a battle of wills. Ready with a box of wooden matches, I got him into a discussion of the subject and pressed him to the point where he expressed disbelief and challenged me. Because I had been warned never again to indulge in that practice near or on finger joints, and my palm was already burned out Jesus Christ Gordon, I had to go
back to where I started years before. My forearm. The scars there were light strike a match, I said to text, and locked my eyes onto his. He struck it and held it out, not knowing what to do next. I put the unburned outside of my left forearm directly over the flame. As the fire burned through my flesh and melted it back into a black and depression. A look of horror came over Tex, but he stayed with it. The match burned down and scorched his fingers before he
dropped it. I grinned his him as he looked at the burn unbelievingly, then looked ill, got up and left.
So I know this is somewhat you're excerpting of this book, but it is a little telling that I feel like, over about four some hours now, the only moments of human intimacy he seems to have is while he's burning himself.
Well, he's laying himself on fire.
Yes, yeah, it's really shocking.
This is both the kind of and well, I'm going to starve myself to damage my body by by starving myself, and I am going to engage in these kind of self like this is the same as cutting I think yeah, I think there's a lot of that going on here. He has to frame it as this, like this is wheel power.
I mean, or you know, it's like in as clearly this is a very like you know, this autobiography is unedited. Essentially, this is clearly what he's telling.
This is what he has to believe about it, right, But like this is also something he pretty consistently goes back to in times of like stress and anxiety. Speaking of self harm, you know what, and human intimacy and human intimacy you know what's fundamentally well, I don't know. Self harm is much more complicated than that. But what's not complicated is these ads, Oh we're back, We're back, and we're talking about g Gordon Liddy, who you know.
I will say this, I bet one of the things that will stop people from fucking with you in jail is lighting yourself on fire while staring at them. That does seem like an effective way to make someone be like this guy's not worth it.
Like that's that is The weird thing is it's like like he has he has this desire to cultivate this like I survived prison, tough guy shit and the shit that he's actually doing. He just like it's it's so weird what he chooses to frame in which way, because I just feel like this was how I chose to.
If he had really like, yeah, yeah, I wanted to scare people, so I lit my I it permanently damaged my skin without breaking eye contact. Because I thought the end, like I would believe that I would be like, yeah, man, does sound like something does sound like people would probably give you a a little bit of space. Lyddy also tells several stories of fights that he got in and
I don't really believe. Yeah, I will say I believe he got in some fights because most people who spend years in prison wind up having an altercation or to a very least right, Yeah, these are never particularly glorious stories. He tries to punch them up, like there's one where somebody steals something and so we used to go and like fight that guy is that other people weren't messed with him, and he describes it as like a fair fight.
But he gets cut up hard prob Because this dude has a fighting ring, which is a cheap ring with the stone remove that will cut an opponent if you punch them with it, and so he goes into loving detail about how he like talks his way into buying a fighting ring. He spends like a meaningful amount of time telling us about how he gets this fighting ring
for himself, but he never uses it. Like he talks a lot about all the weapons he acquires in prison, and he doesn't he doesn't ever do anything with him.
He just needs tok in.
He needs you to know he has him knife catalog guy, knife cat very very strong knife catalog guy energy. Yeah, this dude has a knife shaped like an eagle with an American flag. Absolutely yeah. So while his skill at letting himself be severely burned for no reason convinced Liddy that his will was inviolate, E Howard Hunt is not doing so well right. Hunt is notably less satisfied spending the rest of his life behind bars. He's got several kids. And you know Hunt, you'll know this, at least if
you watch the White House Plumber show. His wife dies in a mysterious plane crash, like while she's taking money in between a member of these Watergate convicted guys. It's very shady.
You know.
Hunt kind of made some statements about having knowledge of the JFK thing. It's all a messy story. Hunt's also a famous liar and fabulous, so I don't know how much you want to read into that, but he is in a bad position here, right, and he starts to unravel pretty soon after they all go behind bars. Now, Gordon becomes convinced that Hunt's betrayal would destroy his beloved Nixon, so he starts preparing to carry out an assassination against
his old friend. Because Liddy is starving and deranged by this point, she starts looking for hidden messages in his limited communications with the Nixon people and mostly in newspaper articles. He's sure that the Nixon campaign is going to send him a message to kill e Howard Hunt via like statements made to the papers and shit. Yeah, So he sits down with his friend, this gangland figure who told him that you can kill a guy with the price
of two cartons of cigarettes. He tells the dude, Nixon hasn't told me through like the fucking Washington Post to murder E Howard Hunt yet, but it's surely coming.
Yeah, let's get it on the schedule.
Yeah, let's get it on the schedule. Quote that precaution out of the way. We decided quickly upon the method. Hunt received special meals because of his history of ulcers. In the parlance of the DC jail, it was a diet tray. It was served to him in his cell rather than in the CB four mess hall on the first floor. Should I have ordered to kill Hunt, he would be served a special meal. Indeed, it would contain
a legal poison. It's like nicotine, right, they're gonna like because you can if you have cigarettes, you could like basically concentrate the nicotine oil and pure nicotine. It's pretty easy to kill someone with. That's his plan. Again, I don't actually know that he knew anybody who had the capacity to do that. Yeah, this is more bluster for the book. The reality is that Hunt told Liddy, like what actually happens. He talks a lot about how ready he was to kill this guy, all the plans he had.
What really happen spens his Hunt tells Liddy, hey, man, fuck Nixon, I'm gonna rat. You know, I'm gonna rat for a better deal, And Lyddy pouts and refuses to ever talk to him again. But he doesn't do anything else. Nothing happens again, all hat no fucking cattle is the way to summarize this guy's whole life. The most important thing to know about Liddy's time behind bars is that it served as a surrogate combat experience for him. That's
why he's so dedicated to this. Right, he never gets to go to Korea, he never gets to fight anybody, he never gets to kill anybody, but he has this public chance where all he has to do is sit and be quiet, and he will build the reputation he's always wanted as a hard, dangerous tough man.
Right.
It's really, it's quite easy. His wife has to go through hell, right, his kids have to go through hell. All he has to do is sit quietly in a room for several years, and then he gets this thing that means more than anything to him, proof that he's a hero. Right, That's all he has to do. Is really, in a lot of ways, the fact that he gets caught and charged for Watergate is the best thing that ever happens to him. Right, Yeah, Like somebody wants.
A psychological twist in that, Like, yeah, this is definitely the best shit that's ever happened to him.
There's this, there's this, do you guys ever you guys ever listen to the band DAWs.
Nope, not familiar.
Yeah, it's a I don't know, kind of a folk, bluegrassy outfit. They got a song called When My Time Comes that I think there's a line in it that really well sums up kind of the young male attitude about bravery, the attitude about like courage and heroism that you have as a kid, as a dumb kid, that I think leads a lot of people to like, you know, joining the military and stuff like that. It inspires a lot of Actually some of our worst behavior, there were
moments of dreams I was offered to save. I lived less like a workhorse more like a slave. I thought that one quick moment that was noble or brave would be worth the most of my life. This thing that like, and what's going on what they're talking about here is this like this realization you get in as an adult how complicated and difficult and messy and gray the world is, and how nice it is to feel like you can
do just one thing. Yeah, if it's the right thing at the right time, and then you've you've succeeded it being a person, right, like, even if you die doing it.
At least you don't have to think anymore. Like, and the reality is that like doing good is hard and complicated, and like what his wife does, what Liddy's wife does is by every measure, much more impressive, right yeah, Like it's it's not fancy, it doesn't get you a career as a media influencer, but like committing to care for children for four and a half years alone, five kids is so much more braver than sitting in a cell alone.
Right well, I think it's like the like thenita shortcut silver bullet, like shoot the moon, of having a worthwhile life, Like these fucking clouds are not even clouds. Lots of people feel despair, and it's just like, well, this thing will make me a person, This will do it. Just get the lottery, Just get the right meaning of life lottery ticket.
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's it. And he's gotten his lottery ticket, So that's I do believe to an extent that he's he's got morale behind him in this because he's he's getting everything he wants from it. So I do suspect that eventually, though, like like with anyone, like just being locked up, being behind bars, being this situation, he does start to grow deranged. And some of this is probably because he's starving himself, which is not great for your
mental health. And Lily doesn't have the self awareness to recognize this, but you see pieces of it in stories he tells. Probably the best one that best embodies this is he he tells one story of a time when he's out, he's jogging in the yard. They've got wreck time,
so they're kind of outside. He's doing laps, and he sees a dead rat on the ground right, this huge, nasty, decompo dead rat, and he becomes instantly convinced that there's another prisoner who's like kind of sitting nearby, and that this guy picked up the rat from somewhere else and put it down where Liddy would see it to fuck with him, which is insane, Like, it is a prison, there's rats, rats die, there's no reason for him to
think that another prisoner stuck the rat there. And also it's like, so he just placed the rat kind of vaguely near a chunk of the running path that you might pass, Like, yeah, that doesn't seem likely, g Gordon Liddy, that doesn't really seem like a taunt, even what.
From like putting yourself in their shoes, Like, what the fuck was the plan? Dog?
So he gets so angry at this that he he steps on the rotting rat to squish it and like mash it up. And he picks up this like rancid, decomposing, fetid carcass and he walks over to the guy with it and he's like, here's a rat. And the guy's like, what the fuck, I'm just trying to get some what are you doing. And he's like, oh, the guard did it, you're saying, And the guy is again like I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Man.
Like it is again, even from Lyddy's pros, it's very clear that everyone else is like, oh, this guy's fucking lost it.
Yeah, and telling this story after the fact is what I mean.
Yeah, that's something you keep to yourself.
I think that is that's something you never tell anybody. Yeah, maybe if you're like having an emotional conversation with your loved ones afterwards, to tell them how bad it got. Anyway, whatever. Lyddy is also peculiar in his time behind bars because he is not just an unrepentant fascist, he's also a lawyer, and he he does care to one extent about the letter of the law, even though he's always even behind bars,
a strong supporter of mass incarceration. He's livid every time his fellow inmates have their rights abused because he knows what the jails and prisons are supposed to provide, and he knows when they're falling short, and he can't stand for it, and so he becomes a jail house lawyer for everyone inside. And from everything I've read, he really does quite a lot. He helps a number of these guys.
This is probably more than anything why he doesn't get fucked with much, because like he really does provide a service after a while to a lot of dudes. You know. He helps them work through their cases. He gives them advice on how to appear in court, he helps them file motions and stuff to get things that they need. He makes complaints, like on behalf of this, there's this Jewish prisoner who's not getting kosher meals. He like gets forces the prison to give this guy kosher meals. He
develops feuds with a couple of different prison officials. He's in like eight different facilities, and I think his reasons are genuine. Some of these prisons, like people get killed doing dangerous work, and he's angry about that the food is not of sufficient qualities, stuff like faucets and shit in prison facilities aren't being maintained. And he understands who to send letters to, what kind of letters to send, who to threaten in order to force the system to
take action. And I think he's actually quite good at this, And it's evidence that, like again, had he been a better person, a guy like Lyddy with these skills could have helped a lot of people in his life.
You know, it's like so close, and it's so telling that his own autobiography doesn't see what could be good about him and what could be redeeming about him.
I think he's so weird. Yeah, he sees this as good because it's bad for the system not to be consistent. And he sees this as good because these people deserve anything. But you know, maybe I'm being too negative. Probably the height of this behavior is when Gordon and more than five hundred fellow inmates, he basically helps forces like a hunger strike at a facility he's at. He gets five hundred fellow inmates to refuse to eat food for several days.
It's the longest of three strikes at that facility that year, and Liddy's leadership seems to be why the prison officials are so frustrated with him that he gets transferred to a maximum security facility afterwards. This is like, when he's at a minimum security place, he does spend a period of his bid behind bars in California because you know,
you remember he broke into that psychiatrist's office, Daniels. So at a point in time he gets like sent over to California because you got to do some time there because some of your crimes are over there. He claims that by this point he was famous in the prison system, and he gets gifted with treats by his new neighbors when he arrives. I don't disbelieve that necessarily. Number one,
he's probably got a good reputation. He helps people. He's also famous, so like yeah, you know, straight up, yeah, just straight up, like fame gets you places, right, But then he goes into what is definitely a lie. He tells an elaborate story about how one of the fellow inmates in California is a kung fu master who just happened to be locked up to and this guy is from like you know, this guy is from China. He's
like traveled to the US and mysterious circumstances. But then he gets locked up and like we become friends, and Lyddy writes one of the most embarrassing paragraphs I've ever read in my life. We worked out at the weights together and finally at his side, and it might be mutually advantageous to exchange instruction. He hesitated, then took me aside and told me that he had never imparted such knowledge to an occidental and friendship, was not sure he
ever should. He paused and studied me quietly. Finally he spoke, you are a very violent man. I can see it in your eyes. I control it, Lyddy said, you must. If you ever use when I teach you to take advantage of the week, I'll find you wherever you are and kill you myself. Of all the things that have never happened, this is the thing that's least happened in the history of things that did.
Oh my god, it is like a cut scene from Mortal Combat.
Embarrassing. That is embarrassing. G Gordon Liddy under no way did any of this now, it's not impossible that he just met a Chinese American man who got locked up and was like, yeah, light of this guy, Like, yes, am I going to do Prison's boring? Right? Who believe anything I say? Not a zero percent chance. Also, I love the like you're a very violent man. No evidence that g. Gordon Liddy successfully did violence on anyone in his entire life, not one piece of evidence for this. God,
it's so funny. A sad thing to say. Yeah, speaking of sad, you know what isn't sad the value that our sponsors bring to our listeners' lives. In fact, I don't know, Ian, would you say that our listeners' lives actually have no value whatsoever if they don't purchase the products that sponsor our show?
I think legally I have to say yes.
Yeah, I think you do, based on the contract you had designed to get healthcare. Yeah. Anyway, here's a here's ads. Oh what a good time? Feeling good, feeling fine? Has everybody else great? This is amazing.
This is like one of the funniest things I've heard all week.
So good good stuff. So, after meeting a kung fu master and learning the secrets of the orients, Lydia round up back on the East Coast. He was briefly released due to like there's some court motions. I think this is evidence that Peter Marulas is a pretty good lawyer. He basically gets him a few weeks out of prison to like be with his family based on the technicality and like they know this isn't gonna last like this, this is the kind of stuff a really good lawyer can do for you, right.
Right, So spring break from prison.
Yeah, you get a little spring break from prison. Then he goes back in and he serves another two years. He does fifty two months in total. On April twelfth, nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter, History's greatest monster, commutes his sentence from twenty years to eight quote in the interests of justice. Now, this is one of those moves that I never understood, right when my knowledge of Woody and Watergate was a little more casuals, Like, what the
fuck was Carter? Why would he do that? Like he's not an idiot? Why would he Why would he pardoned this very unbelievably guilty man. Hey, guys, Robert, here I misspeak. The sentence was commuted, as I noted just a second ago, I use the word pardon here. That's incorrect. A commutation basically means that you're not questioning whether or not they were guilty. They're still guilty, they're just out of incarceration
or whatever. This is significant in part because Wddy was not legally able to own firearms for the rest of his life. Although he still kept owning guns, he just said they belonged to his wife. He shouldn't have been able to like use them. But people don't come after conservatives who get in trouble or hold them to any of the standards of their bail or whatever. But Carter, that always surprised me. Right Why Jimmy Carter, Why would
he get this guy out of there? The White House spokesman said that the decision was made quote based on a comparison of mister Liddy's sentence with all of those others convicted in Watergate prosecutions. In other words, I think it was Carter's personal sense of fairness. I believe this is a bad call, but I get where he's coming from.
Right Lyddy, despite being in a repentant fascist, is the most respectable of the White House people who go away because he doesn't lie or obviously he's like, yeah, I'm guilty, put me away. I will say nothing else. I'm not gonna roll on anybody. And the fact that all of these guys who I think are kind of worse in a lot of ways, you know, right Dean. Maybe Dean is pretty consistent after Watergate of speaking out against the
extremism for up to the present day. Right, he's a major figure of sort of being anti the modern Republican Party. I think he might actually have eventually had kind of a real change due to his conscience. Possibly, I'm not certain of that. But all these other guys Erlickman and Magruder and fucking E Howard Hunt, these people are fucking trash.
Haldomen And the fact that Lyddy does more time than them, I think it may have just kind of frustrated Carter because he was aware of that, and so he weirdly thought it was unfair for Lyddy to stay. And I don't think that's a good call, but I think that's from everything I've read, I think that's why Carter made it.
It's the rest of the justice system is so fucked that those people didn't go away for longer.
Yeah, I still think Carter perfectly fine to be critical of him for this choice, but I think that's why it was made.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Lyddy gets paroled and his wife picks him up from jail. He had had plenty of time to think while in prison, and I think he had developed a pretty new wants to understanding that his future was in media. He's watching TV and stuff, He's getting letters from his family. All of these other Watergate guys are putting out books that are often best sellers. So he's wearing number one. Probably I need to write a book about this. There's probably a lot of money in that.
And number two, I can't work for a campaign anymore. I certainly can't be a lawyer anymore. But I can charlay my fame and my fame, particularly for being this like hard headed, unbreakable soldier of the far right into a career. He understands, as long as I stay consistent, this can keep me fed forever. Right, And you know, he is very famous. There's a crowd that gathers at the prison on the day of his release, and when he does like a press conference, when his wife picks
him up and reporters her questions at him. Everyone wants to know where he's headed. Liddy gives a cryptic answer to that one. He says east of the sun and west of the moon. Now, any time he says anything that he clearly didn't write it, I'm like, gotta know if that's some Nazi shit it is not. This comes from a Norwegian folk tale. I went in and read it just to be like, is there any like racist stuff in there? Not that I saw. It's seems to
be an adaptation of an older Greek myth. One of the things I learned looking into this is that researchers, scientists, or whatever who study folk tales, I guess anthropologists have a classification system where they like group different kinds of folk tales by their type, and this one qualifies as type ATU for twenty five A. The Search for the Lost Husband or the Animal as Bridegroom. The gist of it's a little bit of a Beauty and the Beast
kind of story. The gist of it is that there's this white bear that comes to a poor family and it's like, if you give me your your daughter's hand in marriage, I'll make you rich. The bear is secretly like a cursed prince, right, and when she finds out, he's like, look, if you as long as you if you don't follow these very specific rules, I'll be sent to live with an evil witch and she lives east of the on and west of the moon. Anyway, that's
where the line comes from. Nothing Nazi that I found in it.
But it feels like, given the way his brain works, that was supposed to be some kind of code to the true you know someone's and it just will never know whatever the fuck his trade of thought was impossible.
Yeah, he doesn't give a good explanation as to why he picked that one to reference. It is a pretty good cryptic sounding thing to say. I'll give him that. The other question he gets asked is how it feels to be out of prison, and Lyddy replies in German, what does not kill me makes me stronger. And it is true that, like Hitler, Liddy seems to mostly have
benefited from his time behind bars. This seems to work out a lot of times for fascists, especially when you cut their sentence in half and don't just really put the screws to the fuckers. Maybe a lesson for other folks. The Washington Post sat down with his family right around then, and they published an article that gives us some fascinating
glimpses of their lives. While Gordon was away at the house in Oxen Hill, the color television was on yesterday and a sound tape recorder was nearby so the boys could capture any reports concerning their father's release. Two dogs relaxed on the living room couch outside the famili's fifteen or twenty cats minded their own business. Just had to tell you that last bit there. The ladies have fifteen to twenty cats.
That's too many cats.
I love cats. That's too many cats.
That's hard.
That's a crazy amount of cats. Yeah, anyway, good to know, though, interesting color on the family here. So this piece reveals that the Liddies had purchased copies of every other Watergate memoir they could get their hands on. I think this is so that they can help their dad when he has to write his own memoir. And you know, I'll give him credit. I've read a number of Watergate memoirs. His is the best. Not in terms of its accuracy, none of them are trustworthy, but it's it's the most readable.
You can't put it down. He is actually this is one of the things he is actually good at, one of the only things that he's legitimately a skilled with. He's a pretty good writer. Like he's he's effective. He's not like an artistic writers, like he's not fucking you know, Cormack McCarthy or whatever, but he is. He's extremely effective. He's very clear, he understands how to pace things. You're
never bored, you know you. I read the whole book through cover to cover, and I was at a pretty consistent level of interest the whole time, partly because it's so crazy. But he doesn't get in his own way right with his pros, So I'll give him credit for that. He's not a bad writer. The most interesting thing that Washington Post Piece gives us as a snapshot is an understanding of how deep the Liddy family's Nixon derangement went.
Quote Jim and Tom Liddy said they had watched the end of the first episode of Washington Behind Closed Doors. They said they are not angry at Nixon for referring in the Frost interview to those involved in the Watergate operation as nuts. I don't blame him for anything. He's gone through so much, said Dom poor Dick Nixon, the real victim of Watergate.
Oh, just the ultimate, the ultimate fascist since.
These people, yeah, it is. It is remarkable. I didn't know people could be that fascist, But by God, now the most important thing you get here is an understanding of what a nightmare this whole period behind bars is for missus Liddy. In addition to being the breadwinner, she has to raise their adolescent children alone. Quote their mother, Tom Liddy said, is having it harder than we are holding the place financially together, Jim said, finishing his brother's sentence.
There were ups and downs, but she went through all of them. And then the mentions of the Liddy marriage have always been kind of confusing to me. They are together for fifty four years. I have heard speculation that he cheated on her at one or more points. It's common enough that I think there might be something to it, but I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence of it either, certainly nothing that's like conclusive. Some of what he writes about her does seem to me to be
borderline abuse. Of the clearest example of that comes right after his release, when she picks him up from prison. Lyddy saw what, he claims, as she's driving away from the prison, he sees four he calls them, four cream colored Ford Grenadas with New York license plates that identify them as press cars that start following him, tracking him as they're leaving the jail. Now I looked into it.
New York does issue special marked plates for journalists. You know, you have to be with a pretty big outlet to get them, but that is a thing that they do. Lyddy claims that he had Fran drive slowly at first so they could all get a shot of him, and he hoped they would leave, but they keep following him. Fran tries to lose them, but Lyddy writes, quote, she's
just not cut out for that sort of thing. So Lyddy the man has to take charge and save them from these these journalist cars that are tracking them, because obviously he's got the FBI. We're gonna talk in part two about his FBI driving. We get a chance to test him when he's on fear Factor. As a spoiler for a where this whole episode is.
Yeah, that's right.
We come to a Joe Rogan point at the end here, panning off the fat but anyway, so Lyddy the man has to take charge. Pull over? What you heard me? Pull over? We're putting in the first team, but you're not even ensured. Don't argue with me. Goddamn it. Pull over.
God.
So he takes over behind the wheel, but he can't lose the tail, right. It doesn't matter that he's taken over, because he's no better at this than her. And an honest observer might conclude from this that, like, maybe you don't actually know anything about losing a tail, ge Gordon Liddy, maybe you have absolutely no skills driving in this manner.
But he can't admit this, and he writes that he told his wife, I know they've got more cylinders and radios, but nobody stays with me when I don't want him to. There's something wrong here. I know, I guess they do. His solution to this problem is to drive like even more of a maniac. He like does a one point eighty in the middle of like a busy.
Street, like and shit.
This terrifies his wife. She has spent close to half a decade dealing with all of this unimaginable stress on his behalf. She picks him up, probably not entirely certain how the man that she married is going to be different after five almost five years a prison, and then he immediately goes insane on the highway, shouting about imaginary people following them.
I mean, to her comfort, it's nice that he hasn't changed in prison.
I guess maybe quote it was a challenge. I couldn't resist, and I took off, hitting over seventy miles per hour through city streets, going through red lights deliberately and taking turns at the limit of adhesion. By the time I got into Jersey, there were only two tails left, and Franz, scared at her wits, was crying uncontrollably.
Oh my god.
So's his wife is just sobbing, and he's like, no, I did a good job. Only two guys are still following us.
Yeah, two out of four. You know that radio exist.
You are still being tailed ge Gordon Lyddy. Lyddy eventually claims he lost the tale. I don't think he relieved. I don't believe that at all. Maybe they lived in Jersey and we're glad like yeah. After an extremely long journey, which he says that his basically him failing to lose this tale, and traumatizing his wife is a victory, a symbolic victory of his triumph over Judd Sri Rika Quote and his allies in the press. And I love that he sees it that way because it's like, man, the
New York Times argued, you should be released. The press are your only real friends. Yeah, like Nixon threw you under the bus. The media held you up because they wanted to like make money writing stories about you. Your whole career came from the fact that the press were your allies. Anyway.
Whatever, Although that's classic, I mean that playbook gets repeated so much more in the people who he influenced.
Lyddy is so overjoyed at his victory over this tale that he starts singing the lyrics from his favorite song, which comes from the play. Now this comes from I expected him to like sing, I don't know my country tis the He picks a song from the musical Cabaret, which he had and it's a song that he modified quote to suit myself. The lyrics go America, America, show us the sign your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is thine. Tomorrow belongs
to thee. Now that could be kind of innocuous, right, But when I saw that line, especially the part about how he had reworked the lyrics of the song to see himself, I had to look into it a little deeper. The song he was singing that he had modified is called Tomorrow Belongs to Me, which could be fascy, and in fact is because it's from a nineteen sixty six Cabarets, a nineteen sixty six musical, and it's written by two Jewish musicians right, who are lampooning at the fascist qualities
that they and American nationalism. The specific song Tomorrow Belongs to Me is sung by a Nazi in the play. It is specifically a Nazi song about his view of patriotism that Lee has modified and is kind of like unronically singing because he is such a fucking fascist, and in fact he's not the only to do this. Nazis love this is an example of like kind of failed satire,
because Nazis love the song Tomorrow Belongs to Me. They love it so much that they have been adapting it for their own albums and pre printing lines from it in their propaganda since the nineteen seventies. The first use of the song by a white power band that we have documentation of was the year before Liddy published his autobiography Will nineteen seventy nine, when British Nazi band Screwdriver does a cover of it. Screwdriver are like hardcore fucking
fascist musicians. Swedish Nazi singer Saga also records the cover of this song, which is cited by Norwegian mass shooter Anders Brevik as one of the things that inspired him to gun down like seventy children. So yeah, great love that she Gordon Lyddy is singing this.
I mean, so unsurprising, but.
Very very This might be the most direct Nazi thing that I've seen him do.
Right, And that's pretty impressive, pretty.
And that he's said a lot. Lyddy claims at the end that after belting out this fascist anthem, his wife looks over at him with tears in her eyes and says, God, after all these years, you haven't changed at all. She blew her nose lustily than side. I don't suppose you ever will. I grinned over at her. Bet your ass, kid, Oh my god.
How does someone blow their nose lustily?
That's a great question, Ian, I don't think they do, but maybe snot perverts right those have Yeah, there's gotta be there's there has to be a thriving online snot pervert community definitely, like that has a larger GDP than Liechtenstein, right, the number of the amount of money and snot pervert stuff. You can you could start your own city outside of Sicton Valley. That's where we're going to close things out for today because this is basically where his book ends.
Don't worry, we have a lot more to say about g Gordon Liddy, but this is kind of the endpoint of his his autobiography. Will so Andrew you anything to plug?
Yeah? Yeah, since the last episode, we triumphed over the fucking AMPTP asterisk.
You know, eat their asses?
Yeah, better better than anyone ever thought labor fucking works. Yeah, Strike is over. I don't know. I'm not going back to a writer's room, so I'm back to just the hustle. But I don't know. Still still Jos, this racist still got premium shows. We did a little Strike wrap up that I think people found informative, So I don't know, check it out.
Yeah, Hi, hire Andrew put him in a room. I know David S. Goyer always listens to the podcast, so you know, bring him on.
Well we still got, we still got you know, if we can just get someone to see the vision of super Soaker full of piss, there's two options. A lot of irons of the fire, a lot.
Of irons in the fire. I'm pushing Goyer specifically because it's my dream that you'll get You'll get staffed on Foundation and then I can parlay that into having lunch with Lee Pace, which is my life.
Said well, yeah, that my promise to you. I guess we'll do that.
Yeah, there, there we go, just a minute out Burg. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, you know, it can be fancy Lee if you want it to be ye any to you. This has been behind the Bastards. If you want to listen to this show and all of our other shows free of ads. Cool Zone what do we cool Zone? Cooler Zone thanks a Cooler Zone Media subscribe. It's not very much money and there's no ads.
So if you're doing a road trip, if you have a long if you have like a nine hour drive, and you're like, you know, it'll get me and my family through. This nine hour drive is learning a disastrous amount about g Gordon Liddi.
You can do that.
Without ads, you know.
Yeah, anyway, so it's fifty cooler, all right, Everybody go to Hell. I Love You.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast