Part Four: G. Gordon Liddy: The Fascist Behind Watergate

want to deal with here. So I got some I got some policing we need to do here because people are people are people have gotten too Twitter brained, right, And I say this as someone whouses Twitter too much. You know, I'm not. I'm not coming out of this from like a moralizing standpoint, right Like I'm I'm let me start this by saying, like I've definitely you like have a problematic relationship with Twitter. I'm not trying to be judgmental, but like, this shit needs to stop. And specifically,

I think that made me realize it. As we record this, it's like a day after the United States Marine Corps, like an airbase announced like Hey, guys, one of our F thirty fives went missing. The pilot leapt out during flight for reasons that we will not explain to you, left it on autopilot, and we don't know where it is. We don't even know if it's crashed. Like, we have no idea where this amazing multimillion dollar like it cost a trillion dollars to eighty million dollars to manufacture plane win,

no idea. If you see it, give us a call at this number, Like it's a cat, Like it's someone's cat who got out. They're just like, hey, guys, mister sniffles, the F thirty five is lost. Give us a ring if you see him. Don't try to chase him, Like.

sure they don't hit each other. Military and government aircraft don't have to have that right, and if you're running a stealth plane, you wouldn't necessarily want that on right, So I think that's probably anyway, it doesn't matter. This

is funny, and it's it's funny. Specifically, I made a comment online about like this being America being the only country that could both develop you know, this fucking trillion dollar like hyperadvanced weapons platform and lose it and need to just like go to Twitter to be like, hey, everybody keep an eye out right. No other country could do, and people like a bunch of people got like angry and started defending the like well trying to lose his

planes too. It's like that number one. It's not the point number two. Like they're like, why are you trying to, like, you know, defend the like why are you trying to like attack the US government over this, or like why are you trying to pretend the Chinese government is I'm not doing any of that it's funny, and it's specifically funny that we are treating a lost hyper advanced self

craft like a lost cat. That's all. That's all. Not making a point about politics, not making a point about like the d od not making any kind of political point. It's just kind of funny. What on Twitter has ruined our ability to just like laugh about this stuff.

normal pilot knows how to. I'm sure there's a bunch of special training to fly this specific plane, right otherwise it's a fucking death trap. I would just drag it out, like tow it out into my yard every couple of months and just shoot at it, you know, just just fucking shoot at it with my rifles, you know, just play around see what happens. In part because when I would try to make friends with the AI, turn it on, see if you can talk it out, ur chat gpt on it.

the Treasury Department. This is a real embarrassment for him, so he completely ignores it in his autobiography in favor of telling a long story about his sons getting bullied at school and how he taught them like, the only way to respond to bullies is like violence is immediately escalating to violence, And the school is like, that's not what we like our students to do here at this private school. We would prefer they not immediately go to violence.

And his wife is also like, I don't think this is a good lesson to give the kids, right, I think they're probably going to wind up creating more problems for themselves that they respond this way. And so when the school and his wife are both like, I don't think are at are to them as immediately respond to with violence to kids like making fun of them, Lyddy's response to that is that before World War Two, they French school started eduscate cating children not to respond violently.

They tried to stop kids from fighting in schools, and then in World War Two, the French lost because German kids had been taught to be aggressive and get into fights at schools. So I'm going to do what the Germans did and teach my kids to get into pointless fights. Now, first off, yet another unnecessary Nazi reference. Second's really what happened next? G Gordon Liddy Like, you're right, You're right. The French did lose the first part of that war.

What happened next to the Germans? How far did starting fights in every conceivable situation take Germany?

the local high school escalate and it's very funny. In his book, Lyddy notes that like like, when describing these teens that are gonna harass him and his kids at their house, he notes, many of them larger, are larger than me. Yeah, I am smaller than a child. So some of these kids escalate to egging his house and the family cars and throwing firecrackers at the Liddy house at night, I think because they realize that, like, the dad's a maniac too, so we can really fuck with

this family now. Lyddy knows he can't call the cops because, in his mind, we live in a dangerous part of and they've got enough on their plate. I gotta handle this on my own, right like he's he's, he's, And the way he writes this all out is very much like fucking Liam Neeson and taken, where he's like, I have a very particular set of skills that makes me a nightmare to a fifteen year old like you.

tells that stories if it makes him look cool. He never provides evidence that these kids actually had done anything, Like theoretically, he just chased down and choked a child, Like there's no evidence given to us that shows anything but that, like there's a real reason for him to chase these kids because he's a maniac, Like he just is pretty sure these are the kids, so he attacks them in the street.

point does this. This is not like whether or not he actually got the culprits. They don't stop throwing eggs at his house, right, Like, the minor vandalism continues, And here's what he writes about A week later, another egg hit the house. So I took to patrolling the alleys on my own. Now I was hunting them. That's just batman on them. He's like actively wandering the neighborhood at night looking for teenagers to fight. Oh my god, that spoiled all their fun and I assumed one complained to

his parents. One evening, as I was cleaning my gun collection, which was spread out for that purpose over newspapers on the dining room table, many of the pistols disassembled. I received a telephone call. A neighbor wanted to talk to me about my nocturnal activities. I told him, fun, come on over figuring he was one of the father of one of the vandals. I wanted to talk to him. So first off, in the book, Liddy lays out all of the different guns and descriptions of what and by

the way, nearly all of them German. Right, all of these are like fucking lugers, Like they're all old Nazi guns. That's the only kind of gun he buys, Cowboy revolvers and Nazi pistols. That's it for g Gordon Lyddy. So he lays out all of this and he like spends all this to tail on these guns that are laying out, and then this guy comes over and Lyddy, he clearly is like wants us to believe that like this terrified the man that he like sees, Oh my god, Lyddy's

got all these guns. I better not fuck with him. There's he doesn't even provide in this story and the evidence that this has an impact on the guy, right, Like the dude is like, you need to stop hunting children in the night, right, And yeah, Lyddy is like, I don't want to stop hunting children in the night.

And the guy says, well you should, and like it's kind of over, like there's no evidence that his guns had any influence on any of this, Like, we don't need to know this, it's completely irrelevant, right, But eventually kids stop egging his house, like, not even immediately. They keep going for a while, and I think it just peters out because children don't do anything forever. Yeah, And he's like, it was clearly because I how scared this man was of my guns. It's like, no, man, they

kept egging your fucking house. You did nothing. You had no influence on this situation.

not relevant. There is no question that is answered by the fact that he theoretically has the CIA badge, Like, he doesn't do anything with that. We don't ever need disinformation. He just cannot he like it is he he emotionally he needs us to know he always had a gun on him, Like he can't stand the fact that we wouldn't know that. It's so funny.

One of the stories he tells is that like one night, this like black man knocks on the door and G. Gordon Liddy pulls a forty five and threatens to shoot him with it, and again provides no evidence this man wanted to do anything illegal, that like this was anything but like a guy coming to his door by mistake, but by god, G Gordon Liddy is going to point a firearm at a stranger. Great man hero.

to find something else. So don't let it be too long. Right, And it just so happens that this is this is the point at which Liddy wipes up in the Nixon White House. Right, So this is the at this point his career is was an FBI agent, got forced out for incompetence, was a worked for the DA's office, probably got forced out for incompetence, ran for office, lost badly, And then was that the Treasury apartment got forced out for incompetence. Right? That is g Gordon Liddy's working career

at this point. Right, luckily for you know him, unlucky and luckily for his coworkers at Treasury, but unluckily for Richard Nixon and the rest of the country. The collapse of his career at Treasury occurred right alongside an event of much greater historic importance, the release of the Pentagon papers. I have you heard about this? Do you know what? Like the Pentingon papers were.

But this is a reasonable thing to do. Right, You've just had this big disaster of a war, right, and it's like it's going terribly. It's been going terribly in nineteen sixty seven, it's still going on. Should probably sit down and like try to lay out all the facts about what happened and to figure out like what the fuck went on here? Right, reasonable thing to want to do.

Pentagon Papers. The papers also contained evidence of US involvement in the nineteen sixty three South Vietnamese coup and the assassination of President DM. And there's always been like these theories that did the US have this guy fucking iced and like yes, basically yes, right. And there's a bunch of other very shady or outright criminal acts that are kind of revealed in the Pentagon Papers because these are not meant for public release.

was pretty intimately involved in everything that's going on. And as a result of kind of that process of some of the things he sees, and as a result of being part of the assembly of these Pentagon papers, he gets against the war. Right now, there's some other again, we're not going to give a comprehensive thing here, there's some other like arguments over like Ellsberg and like why he did what he did. But that's the broad story

and it's generally accurate. And in nineteen sixty nine he leaks some of these papers to a New York Times

journalist and the whole thing blows up from there. The time starts writing these stories about all this shady and illegal shit that people had suspected for years about US conduct and Vietnam, and because Nixon's the president, all of this shit kind of winds up on his desk and it it super charges the protest movement, the anti war movement, and suddenly like they're surrounding the White House and like fucking box trucks and National guardsmen to keep away the

crowds of protesters, Like it's this massive mass of Like the Nixon campaign, it has fears that, like the protesters might breach the fucking perimeter, right, Like that's a worry for a while that they've got. Well that's crazy, that'll never ever, that'll never happen again. So what's relevant to us today about the Pentagon Papers is that they have a massive impact on the paranoia of one Richard M. Nixon president. Right. This is when you hear about Nixon

being a paranoid maniac. The Pentagon Papers are a big part of why, because he becomes convinced they don't know for a while who's done it. They've become eventually aware it was probably Ellsberg, But like there's all these fears about like who's a leaker? Who can we trust? You know, they're trying to screw us, however, trying to fuck me out of the White House. So I'm going to quote now from a very readable history of the Watergate scandal,

a book called King Richard by Michael Dobbs. When The New York Times began publishing a classified history of the war known as the Pentagon Papers in June nineteen seventy one, Kissinger exploded, this will totally destroy American credibility forever, he raged, no foreign government will ever trust us again. The president needed little persuading that draconian action was necessary. According to

Haldeman and Haldeman's Nixon's a chief staff. I think Henry got Nixon cranked up, and then they started cranking each other up until they were both in a frenzy. This in turn inspired the creation of a special investigations unit to track down leakers of government documents. The teams set up shop in a war of offices on the ground floor of the Executive Office Building known as Room sixteen.

Because they were charged with plugging leaks, unit members jokingly affixed a sign to the entryway that went read simply plumbers. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were among the first recruits. So pretty reasonable, Like understand not reasonable, We understandable. Story, Right,

there's a leak. Nixon goes crazy. He's like, I need guys to fix leaks, and g Gordon Liddy, how are because he's being forced out, Lyddy gets stuck in in this job, right, like this is where he gets moved to, and this is kind of a dream for his Like a guy who fucks up as much as Liddy, you probably shouldn't reward with a white House gig, but they do. So. Yeah, this is his dream. This is his chance to do all the spy shit that he dreamed about, all the shit he'd read about in books as a little kid

and stuff like. Now he's got a chance to be that guy.

organization belonged to by some acquaintances of mine, Odessa. On the blackboard in German. For clarity and added security, I diagrammed the new Odessa organization. Have you heard of Odessa? Andrew, do you know who these guys were? Oh?

them out of Europe and generally over to Latin America. Right, So, Lyddy is like, I want to base our intel network on the group that helped SS war criminals, some of whom are my friends get away from Europe of void justice. Yeah, you know the guys who Adolf Aikman and Joseph Mangela get away. That's who I want to And it's also yeah.

leaks for one thing? Is that Odessa. Again, it's not an actual organization, but in the post war era, all of these spy books pretend it is because it's a great bad guy for your spin norml Right, if you're writing like a bunch of pop boiler James Bond type books, the organization of SS Veterans, great idea for like these will be our bad guys, right, these old Nazis and stuff,

you know, this secret Nazi organization around the country. That's why he that's why he focuses on them, because like he'd read all these books as a kid, where they were the bad guys, like Odessa is g Gordon Liddy's generation's Cobra, right, yeah, and so that's like that who he wants to be, yeah, clespect right, Yeah, and he is he is the He is the same as modern fascists who like play Warhammer forty K as kids and then like decide Trump is the god em right, Like

that's all he's doing is he's like I want to be like these guys and these fictional novels that I thought are cool. So yeah, that's literally what's going on here. Lyddy's partner in this endeavor, in this plumbing endeavor, is E. Howard Hunt, and Hunt is an interesting guy who's kind of in some ways weirdly similar to Liddy.

the Bay of Pigs, which does not go right. That's kind of the end of his like, you know, career for the CIA, of like meaning anything in it right now. The thing is, though, Will Hunt is definitely involved in doing a bunch of crimes for the CIA. He's like a paper pusher, he's like a logistics guy. He's not doing cool shit. He's not kicking indoors, he's not assassinating people. He's certainly not romancing exotic ladies spies, right he is. He is the spy. He's the spook equivalent of a

middle manager, right yeah, which is obviously necessary. Right, if you're running an illegal spying organization that's committing crimes against humanity, you need a bunch of pap Most of what you need are paper mostly, right, That is mostly of the job.

So Hunt Hunt, you know, despite the fact that on paper his background's legitimate, he kind of always feels like he missed out on getting to have the exciting spy career. Part of how Hunt deals with that is he is an author of spy books, like the same kind of

books that Liddy reads as a young man. He published He's published like forty different novels by this point, and they're all like kind of James bond Ish, right, like slightly worse than Ian Fleming's novels, but like mid gra airport fiction grade like spy thrillers, right, And so Hunt is he's got some backstory, he has some connections, but he's also, like Lyddy, kind of insecure about his lack

of doing anything cool. And so you put both of these guys together, and that's a fucking disaster, right like, because they're just going to lead each other into fucking calamity well beyond their degree of competence. So the disaster starts right away with their project of destroying Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon papers leaker. The way they decided to do this is they're going to break into his therapist's office and steal the file on him, with the idea that

like this probably contains something damning about the man. Right now. In his book, Lyddy lovingly describes all of the spy cameras they get to buy and how they work, and all the different gear, this listening devices he talks about he has, like this terrible wig. There's a photo of a minute this like horrible wig that he want that looks like fucking shit, and he has this gait altering device that he wears to make him like force him to have a limp so that it'll disguise him, and like,

none of this winds up working. Like all of the shit that they buy is pointless. Right because on their first break in, which is the only one where Lyddy does any actual spy work, they like bust into this guy's office illegally and take photos of a bunch of paperwork. And Lyddy doesn't know how to use the spy camera, so the photos they take don't work. There's like nothing in them. Right, he gets a bunch of blurry pictures of track. Right, that's all that is the extent of

his real career as a spy. Right is he fails to use a spy camera properly and pointlessly breaks into a therapist's office. This is like any reasonable person would be embarrassed of this, Right, this is shameful. Lyddy describes it as a successful op where he proved that he really had what it took to be a spy. We can see this evidence of this in the fact that his boss, Bud Krogue, who was the White House FBI liaison and thus did know real g men, right, like

Krogue knows actual spies. Immediately told them, you guys can never do an entry again, Like, I don't ever want to hear that you've broken into a place. You are employees of the White House. If you get arrested, if an employee of the White House gets arrested performing illegal surveillance that could ruin the whole administration, you're not allowed to ever go in on this again. So Lyddy goes over to Hunt, and Hunt has friends, Cuban friends from

the Bay of Pigs. Right, These like criminals who had tried to overthrow the Castor regime and failed. Right, most of these guys are some kind of gangster, right as well as being you know, want to be revolutionary. So he has Hunt call up some of these Bay of Pigs guys. And again, also, I don't know, man, if you're if you're looking at like an op that went well, that you might want to like hire dudes from Beya Pigs prolays in the op, right, Like, yeah, the famously

successful Bay of Pigs. So they bring in these Bay of Pigs guys and they just spend tens of thousands of dollars on even more fans see camera equipment and lyddy, he's not allowed to do anything, right, So he decides, I'll be their backup, right, I'll hang around outside of this of this building that they're breaking into to try to get papers with a weapon in case I got to kill somebody to keep quiet. Right, And so he

goes through how like he thought he should. He wanted to bring a gun, but the only gun he has that'd be good for this, he's got a He has an unregistered CIA nine millimeter that was manufactured specifically for assassinations. But god, it couldn't take a silencer, right, So he brings his next best weapon, quote, a folding Browning knife, deadly and quiet, a pocket knife. He calls it like a Browning knife because browning also makes sense. He brings

a pocket knife. You take a pocket knife to your spy mission in case you need to murder someone on the street.

be loud and horrific because you're stabbing someone. Like, yeah, maybe there's the odds spy out there who really can quietly use an eye. But like you, if you read actual stories of spies, very uncommon for knives to be used to this situation.

like maybe murder a fucking dude. Walking his dog. If they come out right, and he writes this about this moment, I can run for miles. And there were numerous deeply shadowed hiding places in the area from which I could pause to warn them in inside with the transceiver. Only if there were no other recourse would I have used the knife. But I would if I'd had to. I had given my men my word that I would protect them. Great, totally believable, Gee Gordon.

He doesn't do that, because Daniel Elsberg wasn't a fucking idiot. So after ransacking this office, they leave a bunch of random pills to disguise the break in as having been carried out by a junkie. And this is what's said, A man with a history of addiction is arrested for the break in and coerced into confessing. He goes to prison because of this, like just some random dude. Lyddy has absolutely no sympathy for this guy because he's a junkie,

you know. So he goes. He and Hunt go back to the drawing board, and according to Hunt, Hunt tells Liddy Elsberg is scheduled to speak at a fundraising dinner that's going to be held in Washington, and they decide like, oh, this is a good opportunity to discredit him, right, we can, like, we can embarrass him at this dinner in a way that will make people less likely to trust what he's saying. It's going to be the dinner's going to be attended by media, you know, taste makers and shit, and so

this is a good opportunity. And the suggestion some guy's Chuck Holson at the White House as is like, hey, could Liddy, could you guys drug Elsberg to make him appear that he's like an addict and not trustworthy. So the plan that fucking Liddy and Hunt work up is to have the same Cuban guys to dress them up as waiters and have them drug Elsberg with acid and his champagne never gets past the drawing board because it's

a terrible plan. So next they decide to start, they drop plans to start fucking with the Brookings Institute, which is this liberal think tank that Elsberg is involved with. Right and Liddy suspects Elsberg hid his copy of the Pentingon papers in their safe right, so he thinks there's the full copy of these documents that he can lead to the Times. I believe they're hiding out at the

Brookings Institute. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to firebomb the Brookings Institute, and then we're going to buy a brand new fire truck for the Cubans and we'll train them all as firefighters and they'll be waiting around the corner and will be the first responders to the fire. And then while a fire is going on and they pretend to fight it, they'll bust in and crack the safe to get whatever's inside it.

might have been part of it. I also think that even Dick Nixon was like, so, you want to light the building on fire, bring in fake firefighters, have him cracked the code before real firefighters show up, and like, then ditch a brand new fire truck and hope that nobody ties it back to you.

his psychiatrist. If you had just done that, you had carried out these burglaries and gotten away, would you a destroy all evidence that might link you to this crime later or b take multiple pictures of yourself wearing disguises, including a hideous wig, and holding break in equipment at the site of the break in and then send those photo negatives in with pictures of private documents you found in the break in to the CIA to get developed.

Which of those two would you do? They take pictures of themselves and the documents they stole with their illegal equipment the White House paid for, and they send those photos to the CIA to get developed. So the CIA has a copy of photos proving that Howard Hunt and g Gordon Liddie were connected to these cribs.

has destroyed them every time in the history. Right, they're not they're not actually able to accurately determine whether or not they're taking unreasonable risks, whether or not they can handle like they can't they can't understand the real like forces raid against them because of something about like the way in which fascism fundamentally deranges its adherents, right, yeah.

this crime you're committing. But Lyddy's like, no, we need to people need to know that I had all this cool spy gear right at some point, I want this on the historical record.

them out so quote. I got awfully tired of stories about giant rallies with all the balloons going up in Unison. Finally I had enough of it. Hey, you guys, I said, one day, you want to see a real rally. Curious they asked what I was talking about. One of the advantages of living in Washington is the availability of the museums,

art galleries, and libraries. One of my favorite haunts had been the National Archives, and I subscribed to the little schedule of motion pictures to be shown that the theater there. I had taken my children to see Lenny Reefenstall's cinematic masterpiece, Triumph of the Will. I called the National Archives and set up a special showing for the White House staff. About fifteen people attended. Oh my god, gotta show your man.

All these people are calling us fascists. We better go watch Triumph of the Will.

Nixon had no use for him. So by nineteen late nineteen seventy one, after a couple of years of the Pentagon papers being out and like, you know, this really supercharging protests, Dick Nixon is as paranoid a man as has ever held the presidency. He was, among other things, certain that Howard Hughes, the billionaire, was funding a secret war against his reelection. He was convinced that during his sixty eight election, Democrats had paid for protesters and funded

secret espionage against his campaign. And like you get a lot of statements from people that like, well, everyone knew that everyone did this kind of stuff. The kind of shit that happened Watergate was common. Perhaps it was I'm not gonna I'm not gonna take bat for like fucking any anybody who's in power at this point that they wouldn't do some of this shit, right, But that is the I don't know that they did either. The fact that Nixon believes this, though, he's a big part of

what why Watergate happens. Why everything that comes is that he is number one. There are real leaks, There are definitely people who don't want him to win reelection. And he's convinced that he got spite on in sixty eight, so he's justified in doing it now. Right. So Nixon is obsessed with the fact the idea that he needs to fight back and build an apparatus that will warn

him of any future leaks before they happen. And as he's putting together a list of task forces before the end of nineteen seventy one for his campaign the next year, he tells his chief of staff and political soulmate, Bob Haldeman, make sure we have a political intelligence capability better than we had in previous campaigns. Now. Haldeman is an interesting guy. Bob Haldeman is about his power, hungry, a political climber

as has ever existed in DC politics. He is Nixon's top They're often described as soulmates, right, Haldeman and Nixon like they are just they were born waiting for each other, right, and like Nixon is. Nixon's a big picture guy, right, He's a visionary, whereas Bob Haldeman is a put the screws to people get shit done. Fucking that kind of dude is very practical, like make things happen kind of dude.

So they fit together pretty well. Haldeman spends his first couple of years in the White House kind of devouring the portfolios of other cabinet members right expanding his territory like a medieval lord. He's a he's very much like an internal politics kind of guy. And while he's doing this, Nixon obsesses over these conspiratorial fears of his ever widening

circle of enemies. Nixon is the kind of guy who's unethical enough to approve an illegal dirty tricks section of the campaign, but it's sammy enough that he doesn't want to be on record saying that, right, so he and Haldeman he Mixon tells Haldeman, I want a dirty tricks

chunk of the campaign. I want people who can spy on the enemy for us, and Haldeman uses his doesn't want to just say, hey, guys, make us a crime division, so he uses this organizational structure he had created within the Nixon White House in order to kind of push his people to develop this without directly tying it to him, and the name of this structure. This machine that Haldiman builds within the Nixon White House is called the Tickler

by former White House counselor John Council John Deane. At its core, the Tickler is half phone tree, half harassment campaign. Right. Men will be given in person, will be told something like, yeah,

I want you to make a spy division of the campaign. Right, and then Haldeman will task other members of the White House staff with calling this person every couple of days and be like, Hey, you've done that thing for Bob yet, you've done that thing for Bob yet, Right, And this is meant to escalate over time so that the calls get more and more frequent, Right, in order to kind of push people, give them this ticking clock, make them like kind of work obsessively towards this end. Right. That's

the way that tickler works. Right. You're never just sort of writing saying I need you to do this. You're kind of like using people's peers in order to develop this sense of urgency in them to act. Right. So, in his own yeah, yeah, this is how Aldaman works. And in his own memoirs, John Deane writes the Tickler was an extension of Haldeman, and was probably more responsible for the Chief of Staff's awesome reputation than was his

own aluminum personality. It was a self perpetuating paper monster with a computer's memory and a Portuguese man O War's touch. Often those who were ticklers made calls for the sake of making calls to impress Haldeman with their efficiency. Their machine never forgot or tired. Once a staff man was nailed with the responsibility for the slightest project, the tickler would keep pestering until it was fed something, a status report, a piece of paper, a bit of information to chew on.

No one could ignore the tickler, because no one could afford to ignore Haldeman. That's how the Nixon White House works. That's right, That's how Big Bob Haldeman works.

this organizational structure. One is people will in order to get this thing off their back, right, to push back this harassment campaign, they will they will feel pressured to just do something, to show up, shot out something, even if it's not ready, even if it's not a good idea, because you need you need to present the tickler with some evidence that you're making progress.

So you might have a situation which people might approve shit that's a bad idea, just to get the tickler off their back without watching what's happening. Right. That's how Watergate is allowed to happen. Right. It's because of this structure that Haldoman has built. And we'll talk about exactly how that results in Watergate. But first you know who is actively spying on the Democratic National Committee.

government agencies, is funny. Right, that's it. That's it. I don't have a specific beef with the FDA. It's a bit again people like anyway, whatever everyone happens, it's okay, take it seriously. I do, in fact want to carry out terrorist attacks against the FDA. That's that's the point of that joke. It's a real statement of my political beliefs. Good times, everybody, Good times. I can't wait for that FDA raid to hit. Now now that I've admitted that online.

distorted both ways. Right, So no one's getting accurate information about what is being developed. But something is being developed because you have to provide responses to the tickler, right. And Holdeman has not really specified what kind of intelligence Nixon wants, right, And his hope is kind of that by keeping continually poking the guys who are running the committee to re elect the president usually just called Creep.

Who are the two guys running this who are getting harassed by the tickler to make this intelligence division are John Mitchell, who's a close friend of Nixon than the former attorney general, and Jeb McGruder, who's like the deputy manager or whatever of Creep. Right, And basically they're being pushed finds. Their reaction is like, we have to give the White House something. Let's just find some maniac who will break the law in creative ways and like give him,

you know, the job of running intel. And the guy who gets that job is going to be g Gordon Lyddy. Right, that's result of all this, he found his perfect place. You know what I will say is this whole this whole vibe is also very Silicon Valley. This is like indistinguishable from break breakfast, move.

was never the case. No one ever told Liddy he was going to get a million dollars. What happened is that, Like, so there's this. The first person to kind of propose a dirty tricks campaign for the Nixon White House is this dude named Clawfield, who was put forward as director for the Alcohol Tax and Firearms Division of the IRS, right, and the IRIS commissioner had blocked call Field from getting the job because Callfield is a maniac.

on them. Now a lot of people are like, well, this is a good idea, and especially once Nixon says I want a Dirty Tricks Division, they're like, well, this is what Nixon wants, so we should make this thing happen. But everyone agrees Caulfield doesn't know what he's doing, in part because he's not a good old boy, right. Callfield does not come from any ivy league school. He's not part of like the family of people who should be

trusted with a job like this. Whereas despite all of the time Liddy tries to make himself out as like an outsider, he very much is an insider, right. Yeah, So Magruder, the second man at CREEP, eventually comes to John Dene and is like, we need someone to run this crime department, and we don't trust this guy who pitched us. You know a pretty good plan for doing it. We love his ideas about crimes, just not him. Who else can we get to do the job for him? Right?

And so, because he's also being harassed by the tickler, John Dene goes back to Bud Krogue, who had been Liddy's boss at the plumbing White House Plumbers, right, and is the li is onto the FBI, and Bud Krogue is like his Crogue wants to get rid of g. Gordon Liddy like everyone who works at him does. Crogue is like, oh, you need a guy to do dirty tricks. I know what, dou REPI guy. He's got this reputation

being a wild man. But he's a great lawyer. And because John Dean is also one of these like Ivy League, Pricks is like, oh uh, he's this guy. Went to a good college, right, he went to Fordham. You know he's got a great and he's got it. He's a lawyer. Hill. This is the calm hand that we need on this program to really make sure nobody goes too far with anything.

So that's how Lyddy gets hired to run this, right, and you know, Krogue seems to It's it's kind of unclear if Krogue thinks that Lyddy will accomplish anating or just wants to get rid of him, you know. For Wisworth, Jeff McGruder, who's running the committee to re elect the president more or less, is like is like most people. Uh,

he's immediately off put by Lyddy. And this paragraph from the book King Richard get because because Bud Krogue writes one book about Watergate, I think that's the one the show with Justin throw White House Plumbers is based off of. And John Dean writes another book about his experiences, and I believe that that's the book that the other Watergate show is based off of. I've read a number of different accounts, large pieces of them, from all the guys involved.

None of them are trustworthy, right when it comes to like who is right here, Well, they're all liars, right, These guys were all mixed and administration's.

He boasted about his method for killing people with a pencil. Hold the eraser end in your hand and ram the finely sharpened point into your victim's neck just above the Adams apple. And again, Lyddy never kills a man with a pencil, nor was he trained to do it. Obviously, Yes, you could, in fact kill a man with a pencil, right, that's a thing that is theoretically possible. Lyddy is no more capable of doing it than anyone at your middle school.

He has never provided any evidence to the contrary. So there is there's a moment in one of the Watergate shows where like Lyddy get winds up in a room with John Dean after they've both gotten in trouble and like Deane's rolled on the Nixon White House and Liddy picks up a pencil and like threatens to stab him with it. That never happens. In Lyddy's autobiography, all he does he writes about how he wanted to do that when they're in this room together, but ultimately he was very polite.

come to the conclusion he's like the fascist Walter Middy. Right, Like every moment he is nothing but like a bureaucrat, But every single second when anything happens, he has these big fantasies of being a hero. Right. I do kind of want Ben Stiller to play g.

on him. It's try, but there's this, there's a difficulty in separating what does Liddy really think is happening with the smoke and mirrors that he presents, because it's his

image now, right. And the thing is Lyddy is, despite all of his his inanity, a committed ideologue with a hardcore of belief, and most of this belief is based around his revulsion at the Left and the Vietnam protests, right, and he comes to believe, he writes in his book, he thinks that permitting the spirit, lifestyle and ideas of the sixties movement to achieve power would be as horrifying to him as the thought of surrender to a Japanese soldier in nineteen forty five. Yeah, so hey, he finally

compared himself to a fascist. That's not a Nazi. Guys, we did it, We did it.

There's no no action, no matter how dangerous or immoral, that isn't justified in his mind by beating these hippies, right, uh, and of hold him his aides Gordon Strachan, who's involved intimately in Watergate, puts he says this when mcgrider tells him, like, maybe we should get Liddy out of this department, maybe he should not be involved in committe crimes for Russ Strakean says, Lyddy's a hitler, but at least he's our hitler. Why do you need a hitler? Why do you want to hitler?

So Dean decides we'll give Lydia a shot, and he offers him the job, right, And for a while, Lyddia is kind of working as a lawyer for the campaign, but Dean keeps getting poked by the tickler to get this in Hell operation up and running, and so he brings in Gordon and he's like, put together a proposal for a dirty tricks campaign, right, and Liddy's like, how

much money could I have? And Dean's like, well, this other guy said half a million dollars, so maybe we could do half a million dollars And Lyddy's like that must mean a million dollars. So I'm gonna build a plan that will cost a million dollars. So the the what results is he calls an Operation Jymstone, and it is both incredibly profoundly illegal and so far beyond g Gordon Liddy's limited competence that I think I wish it

had gotten greenlit. Right, Some of the stuff in there is that like we're gonna drug hippies and we're gonna sneak them into opponent George McGovern's campaign headquarters so they can piss on the floor, right, Like, well, he's being interviewed on TV, right, which is he might have gotten it away with that that that's with possibly within his

limited competence. But there was also outrageously ambitious shit like this plan related by John Dean and his memoir quote he had consulted specialists, one of the world's leading experts, and solve the problem of finding untraceable equipment. Then he launched into an extremely technical description of microwave telephone communications, speaking of relay stations, routing frequencies, and the difficulties of

intercepting non cabled signals. His point became clear when he said there was equipment capable of intercepting all communications between an opposing candidate's airplane and the ground. Then intercepting equipment was required to be near the airplane, but not within sight, of course. So Lyddy proposed hiring a Chase plane to follow the Democratic campaign planes and make transcriptions of all

airborne comman. He wants to have a plane following in secret, hidden in the clouds, the Democratic campaign plane at all times to intercept their comms. There is no way he would have pulled this off. Not possible.

but I gotta. I want to fill it with high dollar prostitutes, right, and we're gonna sail it around the whole election to everywhere the DNC goes to, like they're you know, we'll have it just always import anywhere the Democrats do a big meeting so that we can we can pull in Democratic officials and then these these prostitutes can ply them for information and record it, right, and yeah, it's very funny. Everyone is like this seems like a terrible idea and that he's like, no, it's not. These

are the finest call girls in the country. You know. I can tell you from firsthand experience. They're not dumb broads. They're girls who can be trained and programmed. I've spoken with the Madam and Baltimore and we've been assured of

their services at the convention. Part of why they don't do this is because someone intelligent is like, hey, we don't want to like make a big deal about Democratic staffers utilizing prostitutes, because like everyone does, Like you go into any brothel in like a place where there's a big political convenment convention and it's an even list of dimson repul We don't want to. We don't want to tug that string. That doesn't work out for us in

the long run. Lyddy also had plans to utilize his dreamed of budget to hire thugs to do violence to protesters. Now the simplest version of this is literally higher CIA street fighters, as he calls them to beat up hippies and public at protests.

of a single one of our operatives. My god, And this is extra funny because of something else that Liddy says during this, Right, because he's g Gordon Liddy, and you can probably guess it's bringing the Nazis into it. Right. Here's what Lyddy writes about Quote, with Magruder and Dean out to lunch, I felt obliged to impress Mitchell with my seriousness of purpose that My people were the kind, and I was the kind and could and would do

whatever was necessary to deal with organized mass violence. Both Magruder and Dean were too young to know what I was talking about, but I knew that Mitchell, a naval officer in World War Two, would get the message if I translated the English Special Action Group into German. Given the history involved. It was a gross exaggeration, but it made my point. An einsatz group a general, I said, inadvertently using a heart for the word general and turning

it too into German. These men include professional killers who have accounted for between them twenty two dead so far, including two hanged from a beam in a garage. And like so, the Eydseets Group, if you've forgotten, are the division of the SS who carried out the first stages of the Holocaust, which was largely shooting babies and women and like women and children and burying tens of thousands of the mass graves. That's what he He names this operation to kidnap hippies after well.

need to have updates for the tickler. Right, So Lyddy gets kind of yelled out of the room and he comes back a few weeks later with a different idea, right, Operation Crystal, which is cheaper and involves installing wiretaps and democratic offices. Right, and this is what comes Watergate.

it is. It's very funny. So one of the dudes that he and Hunt bring in to carry out their crime plan to wiretap the Democratic National Committee is a man named Jim McCord. And of all of the adjacent man children in these plots, Jim McCord is the closest

to the real deal, which is not a compliment. Born in Oklahoma, he'd been a bombadier in the Army Air Corps in World War Two and had been joined the FBI and transferred after a little while to the CIA at kind of the height of its crimes against the humanity phase. He became AGS fifteen, which had him put in charge of the CIA's physical security at its Langley HQ. So he is running security for the CIA headquarters. Right, that's a big job, right, that is like a legit.

Gig Alan Dolas called him my top man, so he has the he has the kind of spy. Both Hunt and Lyddy want to pretend to be right, and McCord on paper should be a bugging expert. You know, I cannot blame Lyddy for trusting the man's credentials. He's got everything you'd want in the resume of a guy to handle bugging for you. So Jim is The problem with Jim is that he is the security head for CREEP.

So he is an employee of the Nixon Why House, right, well, not the White House, but of Nixon's campaign, right, He's directly tied to Nixon. So he does seem like an obvious guy to run the water tapping op. But he's also for the same reason why Lydia and Hunt aren't allowed to be doing physical ops together. He shouldn't be

on scene at anything. So Lyddy puts together a paired down version of his wire tapping plans and he gets approved a quarter of a million dollar budget, a significant amount of what he and Howard Hunt are spending Lots of this money on luxury hotels and fine dining, traveling around trying to find criminals to do.

And this is us to perhaps the most infamous story about g. Gordon Liddy is pinschant for lighting his own hand on fire. What a funny man, Oh, if you believe Liddy. In the late sixties, as he's continually trying to increase his will power and make himself a tough man, he decides, well, this war between us and the left is about to like, so I need to make myself hardened to torture, right, and the only way to do that.

He describes this as a technique recognized in the East for increasing willpower, where he burns himself for increasing periods of time to build up a tolerance for pain. Quote much as one might build muscles by lifting insane thing to compare lighting yourself on fire too, And like I also, I do really think there's any ancient Eastern technique for lighting your own hand on fire. But perhaps you know, perhaps, yeah, I guess maybe. So he felt that he needed to

harden his body to torture. So in nineteen sixty seven he starts burning himself regularly with cigarettes and matches, and he's always careful to light his left hand and forearm on fire because he doesn't want to damage his gun hand. But one day, Liddy relates quote, I made a mistake. I burned the underside of the second joint of my

left index fingers so badly it required surgical attention. Fortunately the surgeon was from India and familiar with the practice, although he found it unusual in and allcidental I told him. He told me that it would take a year before he could fully straighten my left index finger, and then only after repeated exercise to stretch the scar tissue that would form in the angle of the joint I had. It seemed nearly cooked out the joint and lost at tendon.

force me to disclose anything. I chose not to reveal. She didn't believe me, and I was casting about for some way to convince her. When I noticed she's I told her to light her cigarette lighter and hold it out. She did, and I locked my gaze upon her eyes and placed my hand palm down over the flame. Presently, the flesh turned black, and when she smelled the scent of burning meat, Sherry Stevens broke for my gaze and

pulled the lighter away from my hand. She seemed frightened badly, so I took pains to calm her, wrapping an ice cube against the burn with a napkin, and returning to my dinner. Pale. Miss Stevens said she was sure I would never betray her, but she excused herself as a candidate, invoking a just remembered plan to marry a Swiss airplane

pilot in September of nineteen seventy two. When I told her that I'd be glad to have her services through August at a very generous rate of pay, she refused and express a concern from my hand, asked to be taken home. Now, good on you, Sherry. That was the You're the only person in this entire series who's made an intelligent decision, Like if a stranger makes you burn his hand to the bone, you believe right A bounce.

my wrist to the bone without bleeding to death. Well that's great, but I don't want to work for you.

find themselves in the same situation. Deep Throat will later claim that he saw Liddy do this light himself on fire trick at a party right like he was. And like, so multiple men in politics, you know, powerful men are in the same situation, and they fail to act with the same perceptiveness Sherry shows. They're like well, clearly we need to be in business with this man.

assist me at the convention. What do you mean. Well, in my business, John, it's important that those I work with under stand I'm a man of strength, macho as they say. So to prove myself to them, I held my hand over a candle until the flesh burned, which I did without flinching. I wanted them to know that I could stand any amount of physical pain. My God, Gordon, I didn't really know what to say, so I told him I hoped his hand healed quickly, which he also

shrugged off. And again this lady, who is just like you know, kind of in the shadier part of the world, immediately recognizes Nope, don't want to John, Deane sees this as crazy and is like, guess I'll continue working with this man. Guess I'll task him with breaking the law for Richard Nixon.

So Dean claims that this moment is the point at which he realizes Lydia's nuts, and that Bud Krogue had pushed Lyddy off on him so that Dean would take him off of the White House's hands. Right, That's why Dean thinks all of this gets started, right, and so all of this shit, basically I think that's happened here is like this desire to keep pushing Liddy down the ladder where he's not your problem, and this tickler which is constantly forcing people to provide updates on this illegal scheme.

It leads to a situation where eventually G. Gordon Liddy is working for Creep and has a pocket full of cash to live out his Cold War thriller dreams. So while John Dean and Jeb Magruder and John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman and Big Dicky Nix himself are all sleeping comfy, Lyddy and Hunt are unguarded and unwatched as they send their cubans into the dnc HQ at the Watergate Hotel

on June seventeenth, nineteen seventy two. Bugs are installed in the telephones of several stappers and there are some fuck ups. Hunt and I think one other guy gets stuck in the Watergate overnight and like a closet with like all the liquor, and like Hunt winds up pissing in a whiskey bottle. But in the end they get out and you know, escape with the job done and nobody gets caught. Right,

that's the first Watergate break in. Unfortunately, it's a shit job because all of these people are buffoons, and like McCord, the bugging expert doesn't get like they pick the wrong bugs, the bugs aren't put in right, whatever the case, it's

kind of unclear as to why. But like most of the taps don't work, and the ones that do they just kind of have some random secretaries and shit bugged and it's mostly them like talking about who they're fucking right, It's like normal shit, right, nothing that's going to swing an election. So after all this goes down, Lyddy's superiors are disappointed. One of the bugs he'd spent thirty grand on did not even function at all. Jeb McGruder described

it as James Bond had been exposed as a bumbling clown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that should have been the end of it, right, But in spite of this, there's still this need to provide some sort of intel thing. So Lyddy gets even more money to go back to fix the broken bugs. And this time you're like, you know what, so we know we get something. Have your guys take photos of every document INDNHQ, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of shit.

So this necessitates number one, not just a quick break in, but spending four hours in the office. Hi, odds, you're gonna get caught doing that, and Lyddy becomes convinced because everything sucks up the last time, I need to put my bug expert McCord in the room. He needs to be in there to fix and set up these new bugs. Right, And the only absolute direct guidance Liddy's gotten is do not let this get tied back to Nixon.

But as Lyddy sees it, he has to break back in, not because it's likely to work, but because he and a Hunt will look like dummies if they don't right, they won't be taken seriously, they'll be exposed as buffoons, and he'll probably stop getting money. Right. This will probably be the end of his career if they don't go

and get something. In his book, Lyddy Bitch's endlessly about how his funding had gotten slashed and how you know I couldn't afford to put anyone but McCord in there, right, because they weren't paying me enough to get a really good criminal who'd be impressed with my hand burning. So he sends McCord in, and our boy Lyddy is responsible for that. And he's also responsible for the main tactical error that the break in team makes on the ground,

which is that they're trying. They don't want this door to lock after them when they break in, because it's going to make it hard to do everything they need to do. So they put a piece of tape across the lock, right, which is like a thing you can do, you know, it'll stop a door from auto latching. They pace the tape horizontally rather than vertically, so part of the tape is sticking out, which makes it easy for say a security guard to spot. Now that is in

fact what happened. A security guard notices the tape and busts them, right, or calls the cops and they bust them. But like Lyddy makes the call to place it horizontally. And he does this because of his perceived expertise as a spy. He has like a whole defense for why this is necessary. Here's what he says, quote taping was a common, if disapproved practice of maintenance personnel in large buildings. This should not have alarmed the guard, who could have

been expected to remove it. I saw no reason that the guard should think of anything other than that the maintenance people would have to be lectured. And he's like, maintenance staff always tape locks horizontally. Burglars do it vertically. Therefore, if he finds it vertically tape, then he's going to call the cops. But he won't call the cops if it's horizontal. This is totally reasonable and the only way things should have gone. It's like, well, that's not how

it went. Like you immediately got caught for doing this, So like why are you defending this that way? Like why are you acting as if like this is the way things should have gone. I was like, yeah, but it didn't. It didn't work.

I'm going to prison right like that. That night he tells his wife like something went wrong, they got busted. I'm going to go to jail, right, And the.

at right because he is a believer. He's a believer in the way no one else in politics is, really And every other member of the conspiracy save the Cubans, will immediately roll on their fellows, right they start making deals with the doj Magruder and Dean like, they all immediately like turn a fuck job on their own buddies, right, John Mitchell, like, they all roll right away, right, Lyddy from the jump says, I will not testify. I will

not say a word. I don't speak, you know, I don't testify, I don't talk to the FEDS, I don't nothing. And he doesn't like he does understand on that degree that is the he's a loyal henchman, right, Yeah, he does not fucking say anything. Now does that make him a good henchman? While he's the reason why Nixon resigns, right, he is the he is the whole cause of Watergate. Right, So I don't know if he's a good henchman, but he is loyal, right. Nixon seems to have recognized this

in recorded conversations. He starts talking about how Lyddy has a screw lose, he's not all there mentally, how did we let this guy be in charge of this? He's

clearly not like not like he's not doing well. This is especially the case when the CIA, because like, once this all blows up and it becomes clear that like the Nixon white House is fucked, the CIA turns over photos, the photos that they'd had developed like that show Lyddy there and like yeah, because he had sent participation evidence of his participation in a B and E to the Central Intelligence Agency. Oh my god, but he doesn't say shit. He keeps his mouth shut. His refusal to help the

investigation gets him this gnarly twenty year prison sentence. Now Lyddy gets off after like four years, four years in change, something like that. And it's because, in part because he's just the guy who doesn't roll, he earns a lot of sympathy in weird places. The New York Times eventually writes an article talking about how he needs to be pardoned, and like it's Carter who pardons him? Right, Like it's it's this gross.

give that. I will give him that, especially when you compare it to these descendants of his, like the jan six, people all of whom immediately rolled on their buddies, immediately disavowed, publicly said oh you know, even if they were like going on podcasts to talk about how I was just lying when I said that I'm ashamed of my behavior. They all claim publicly I did the wrong thing. This

was bad, it shouldn't have happened. Lyddy never apologizes, never pretends he's anything but proud of what he did, and he never rolls, And compared to a lot of like that is there's a thing you have to respect in that even if it's not not good, but you respect it, right, which I do, Like there is there was one honest, legitimate thing about geegword and Lyddie because he had always

and I think you get the feeling. Part of why he behaves so consistently in this regard is that he sees this finally is his chance to prove that he's He's not courage he's a warrior, right, never got to fight, never got to pull my gun on anyone, really, but I can refuse to talk, yeah, and be willing to do twenty years in prison, and he.

in part because of a rush Limbaugh. Yeah, all that is interesting. It's more toxic, certainly, it's valuable. But this should let you know who the man was and why he matters.

because he does. And it's one of those things where he's like he's totally time, like you know, there's a chance, you'll know, even get a pardon, right that that won't be possible. And that's fine. If I got to spend the rest of my life in prison for this, I'll do it, you know. Yeah, So there you go. The g Gordon Liddy story.