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

How are you Where are you landing on that? I because where I'm sitting, I think it was pretty funny. I the the about face came so quickly that it was really like two days yeah.

you gotta acknowledge that. So when we when we last left off the g Man, uh, he had joined the FBI compared it directly to the s S in a positive sense, favorably, Yeah, favorably. Yeah, as America's protective echelon. So he's in Indiana a while, he learns how to cowboy gun fight from these great cowboy gunfighters and then the uh and then he totally gets super close to needing to use his handgun, but he never quite has to.

But what he does have like multiple stories where he like, it's everything up to and then like but then before I I could pull my gun, you know, the situation ended, so everything was fine. Well, maybe we don't need to hear about that. Then that's not very interesting. G Gordon Liddy. So he gets transferred to Denver. After that, he's involved in he is involved in the arrest of at least

one major criminal. One of these guys that's on the FBI's most wanted list, and then based according to his recitation of events, he gets transferred to FBI headquarters in DC, and he becomes incredibly close with j Edgar Hoover, so close that all of the older agents are jealous because Hoover wants to spend a lot of time with Lyddy

and not them. So that's not what happened. And again this is thankfully, this is what I'm not going into as much detail about what Liddy claims because we have other sources on his time in the FBI and they are very different than what he claims. So he is involved in one high profile arrest, but there's evidence that his superiors like they had issues with his errat and irrational behavior. One of his supervisors described him as a wild man and a super klutz basically just like, yeah,

this guy is kind of out of his mind. And he's also like he fucks up constantly, Like whenever he's given a chance to do something, he's going to make some stupid mistake. He's like a Nazi Elmer. That is like really, it's a great comparison. And so the kind of attitude that like some of these people who like supervise him is is like, yeah, he just he couldn't be relied on. And because it's you know, this is the FBI. Right, one thing the FBI, especially under Hoover,

was good at was not leaking shit. So we don't have as much detail as I'd like on what specifically he fucked up, But given that this is consistent with his performance later in life, I'm going to choose to side with his superiors here rather than claim that he

was just super good at the FBI. Yeah. Yeah, And this makes if he's if he really is just like kind of incompetent, it makes his transfer to DC makes sense because like that is kind of what they did a lot to guys who were bad at being in the field, Like you move from a place where you can kind of you can keep track of them. Like he gets he gets transferred to the record division, which is like that's where you put a dude you can't fire for some reason, but who like can't be trusted out with a gun.

big a deal. Wikipedia also lists those claims as citations needed, So again, not gonna go out on a limb and say he was definitely awarded by Hoover. Former FBI officials interviewed by journalist Anthony Lucas later would claim that Liddy got pushed out of the FBI because he was seen as dangerous and unreliable. You know, we don't get tons of detail on what exactly caused him to get pushed out, but there are some pieces from Lyddy's autobiography that may

suggest why. For example, this line, my son Jim was born in April of nineteen sixty one, and I was so elated at finally having a boy that when I thought about it the next day, driving through an unpopulated area, I stopped the car and fired three rounds into the air and a private ceremony of celebration, just firing his service weapon randomly into the sky to celebrate. Yeah, unpopulated area.

a specific way about himself. But like if you just had again, like a kid, just like shoving him into a locker at school, that's not going to work on this guy. You need there needs to be some more like art to it, you know. But really his dad, I don't know, I don't know how you like get Like I think if his dad had been more aware of the kind of shit going on in his brain, he could have like shamed it out of him, Like, right, what are you doing shooting your handgun in the air

to celebrate having a kid? Give me that gun? Give me that gun? Gordon like, I'm keeping.

come back anytime. We'd love to have you again. We've we've stamped your paperwork with a special thing that means you can come back anytime you want. People within the FBI are like, yeah, we were doing everything we could to force him to leave. So you know that said, I do think there's probably a good chance his family financial situation is not great one of these reasons might be and again this is a reading between the lines, but every time he talks about his gun collection, it's

like very large. So part of this may just be that he's spending all of his child money on new handguns. Now, the central issue is that Lyddy and his wife are devout Catholics. Now, I don't know if you know much about Catholics, but Catholics, like all humans, like to fuck, and Catholics, unlike most humans, are not allowed to use birth control. Right, So this is part of why there's

a round a billion of Catholics, you know. So Lyddy and his wife they try to use the rhythm method to avoid having more kids, and he can't write that like, well, the rhythm method's clearly bullshit, So he just writes that, like, well, it didn't work for us, you know, we had after four children, it had become clear that the rhythm method does not work for my Maybe it just doesn't work, g Gordon Liddy. Maybe it's a bad method of birth. God,

hey everyone, my phrasing hair was not great. I didn't mean to say that the rhythm method like can't work. You know, obviously biologically it does it's just that realistically, I don't think it is an effective method of birth control, particularly for people in long term relationships. I think G Gordon Liddie's case is a pretty good example of this. There are a lot of others, but obviously, like biologically, if you were to do it perfectly, it would work.

It's just not a very good idea compared to modern forms of contraception.

always present at home. I was also aware that children can be lost to sickness, accident, or war. And six would raise substantially the probability that at least some offspring would survive. Just as important, I recognize that a child can lose itself through failure of the will to achieve, and that having six would make it easier to accept

and write off such a living death as well. Yeah, you need more kids so you can write them off if one of them is a dead person while alive still, well, I think he just caught on some level.

to share enough liddies survive. Oh yes, it's it's it's a logic like this that has ensured that we still have g Gordon liddies today everybody. So yeah, Now, unfortunately, Fran's body does not handle multiple pregnancies in quick succession very well, right, And yeah, I don't say that to like make what four kids. I think eventually five in you know the space of like five years is too many kids, maybe, like maybe you shouldn't have that many

kids that quickly. That's a lot to deal with. She dealt with increasing pain each time, and eventually their doctor sits them down and is like she could die, right, like this is like she can't have any more kids, you know, like this is we need to stop here. So you know, eventually they shop around for a Catholic priest because they want a priest who will advise them that it's okay for her to take birth control, because

you know, these things go. They have one more kid during this process, but Lyddy decides to give up after that. And this may be the most like Moonman ass piece of reasoning that I have encountered in his book. Although one of the reasons I had chosen Francis to be the mother of my children was her size and strength, which should have enabled her to bear half a dozen hyperform Orman's children, I certainly had not intended to risk

damage by pushing her to her design limit. Oh no, you're not to talk that way about their wives, g Gordon Lyddy. He's like actual Marvin the Martian m He's talking like about his his his ill wife and his children as if he's like a fucking GM factory.

But he also writes that, like as soon as he gets to work there, they start fighting every It destroys their relationship because his dad like cannot stand him as like a business partner. And my guess is going to be because he keeps suggesting crazy shit that would get them both thrown in prison, and like his dad has constantly no, you have to not do that. Seems likely, Yeah, seems like good direction. She was like the g man. Yeah.

So his description is that despite the fact that he's very good at this job, he has to quit this as well to save his relationship with his father and go into public practice as a for a DA's office

in New York State in order to preserve their relationship. Now, by the point that he does this, this is like sixty two or sixty three something like that, the swing in sixties are well underway, and our boy is starting to pay attention to the resistance that has built in the country to the involvement of US troops in a little country I might have heard of called Vietnam. You know, if you're unaware, Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia that we had a disagreement with and they want Yeah,

so this had started. The whole kerfuffle in Vietnam had started due to the failure of French forces to maintain control of Indo China and a bunch of unhinged fears among US policymakers that the spread of communism in Vietnam would lead to a series of falling dominoes that ended with a unified communist Asia under China. Now, if you read Po Chi Minh, if you're aware at all of like Vietnamese history, that was never in the carts, right, The last thing anyone in Vietnam ever wanted was to

be part of like a Chinese dominated block. And they immediately go to war with China as soon as they kick us out, right, Like, that's the first thing that Vietnam does after finishing us off is fight with China and Cambodia.

this is their assholes. Yeah, this goes into we just talked about this a little on our episodes about Scott Adams's terrible books and his beliefs about the Muslim world. But like, one of the things you need to keep in mind, no matter what fucked up shit like a foreign country far away is doing to a group of people, those people are always in their hearts going to be angrier at somebody who lives next door to them. That's

just the way human being. It's like the United States, like we get we have our Panics over like Islam, or our Panics over China, but like fucking people in Texas always hate people in Oklahoma more than anyone else on this planet. Like that's just the way it is.

first highly successful. That was because they were using the foreign legion then manned almost completely by veterans from the most disciplined, ruthlessly efficient practitioners of all that warfare and history, the Waffen SS. It was only was made public and political pressure forced their removal that the French began to lose. He cannot, he cannot stop bringing up the SS. Like almost every chapter, the SS comes up, and there's never

a good reason for it. And it's like, this is the eighties, this is the eighties.

of the SS. They also have, you know, they exercise a lot of control over the industrial apparatus that was kind of the goal that Himmler was building towards. And in addition to using them to like breed more Arians, there are divisions of the SS that also fight as regular military units or kind of in a fashion similar to and these guys are called the waffen SS. Waffen just means weapons, right, So the Waffen SS is the weapons SS. Right now, there are a lot of like

lies and myths. As we're about to talk about about how well, the Waffen SS functions. The fact that the foreign legions, some of these guys after the war wind up in the foreign legion is not really weird, nor is it out. It's not specifically even because of World War Two, right, it's not because historically, if you look at the foreign legion, it's usually like half or more German guys. This is just like a thing about the way it has always been constructed. The French foreign legion

has always been heavily Germanic. About sixty percent of it in the post war period were Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian or most commonly German. And there's a good chance that about fifty thousand Germans cycled through French Indo China during the post war stages of the conflict there, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The Vietmen did like to claim that all of their captive French soldiers were SS veterans, but like that was a propaganda claim because no evidence

was ever provided of this. We do know that the French military scanned for SS veterans, particularly after nineteen forty seven, and since SS members had all had a tattoo, their blood group was tattooed on them, it was easy to find and deny them. Thus, the first wave of Legion volunteers in Indo China would have included a lot of Germans who had served who had been Nazi soldiers, right, But very few of these guys would have been SS.

Much more of them are Wehrmacht Nazis. Right, As this historian from the asked Historian subreddit noted, the Legion was recruiting about ten thousand many a year, many of them certainly Germans, but by the nineteen fifties, with the average age of a legionnaire in the very early twenties, most German recruits were young men simply trying to escape the bleak situation in their home country, and the extent of their involvement with the Nazi Party was their membership in

the Hitler Youth as children. Now, I'm not doing this to defend the reputation of the Foreign Legion, right, because there's a lot that's messed up about that unit. This is more important because of the specific way in which Liddy is wrong about like both the presence that like all of the guys fighting in French Indo China in the late forties were SS veterans and they were really good. You know, if they just stayed in there, they would

have won that war. The fact that he believes that in states that says a lot, right because this recitation that like the first Foreign Legion Units and Indo China URLSS veterans and they were masters of counterinsurgency is based upon one specific novel. I have actually traced back where Liddy gets this belief, and it's from a fiction book called The Devil's Guard. Now, I actually have not seen

this written anywhere else. I think I may be like the first person to note this publicly, but it's extremely obvious if you are familiar with the book The Devil's Guard. And I'll go into why I am in a little bit. But The Devil's Guard was a novel published by a guy named George Elford in nineteen seventy one. This is

about nine years before Liddy writes his autobiography. The Devil's Guard is based on the experience of a former wafeness officer who it starts with him like he's fighting in Eastern Europe, He's fighting in Russia, and then as the war ends, he kind of like fights and sneaks his way across Europe, eventually escaping the Allies and traveling to Indo, China, where he fights in a nine hundred man unit of

all former SS men. And they're just the best encounter and they're running circles around the Viet Minh using all these different they're combat skills, and they're so sneaky, and they have all these different plans and stuff. And because of how ruthless they are, the VIETMN just you know, can't do anything about them. Right now, Elford presents this this is a non fiction novel. It's supposed to be, but he claims that it's the result of an interview

with an anonymous, totally real Nazi. Historians now universally agree that this is a lie. There were no there were definitely SS men who served in the Foreign Legion. There was at no point a nine hundred man unit of former SS veterans. Right, that just did not happen. Right, that's from an Indiana Jones's sequel. That's from an Indiana Jones book. Like, right, yeah, it's also like another one of the reasons we know this book is full of shit is that he has these loving descriptions this is

like a Soldier of Fortune. As books, there's loving descriptions of all the different guns they use and how, and a bunch of the weapons he describes them using in detail did not exist at the time or were not in use by Legion troops at the time, right, They simply were not present in that conflict. He just thought they were cool guns, so he wanted to put them in his novel. Meanwhile, and there's also you know, a bunch of different genius count insurgency tactics shown in the book.

Like at one point, these SS guys kidnapped the family members of a bunch of Vietmen fighters and like stick them in vehicles that they're driving through a part of the jungle, so that if the Vietmen attack a convoy, they'll kill their family members, right, which is would be a war crime if they'd done it, But it's supposed to be like, you know, this is the kind of heart you can't you can't follow the law if you're

going to win an insurgency. That and a bunch of other tactics that are like that in the book are all taken directly from a different book about British commandos fighting the Japanese in World War Two, like they're lifted directly from this other book. Now, The Devil's Guard is also it's one of the fact that it shows, the whole premise of it is that the SS could have won the war in Vietnam if we'd let them. It's one of the most fascist books of military fiction and existence.

And again I have to I have to, I have to really emphasize fiction. It's claims too that it was real have spread myths about the incredible brilliance of the SS as a counter insurgence for generations in two thousand and six, and this is why I know about it. In two thousand and six, online bookstore A Books noted that it was one of the top ten novels sold to US soldiers heading over to Iraq, and the only

piece of war fiction on that list. Because again, you've got all these kids, they haven't actually been to combat yet, they're trying to know what it's like. They want, like, you know, advice, so they read this book about supposedly

the best counterinsurgency experts who ever existed, the fucking SS. Right, it's just this very popular book of lies, and Lyddy is kind of the first pop prominent guy who gets taken in by it, right, which is why everything he writes about Vietnam is very clearly just taken from this, this book of fiction. Now, I think it's worth spending a little bit more time discussing exactly why Liddy's conception of the Wathen SS is a historical First off, the

SS were dogshit at counterinsurgency. There is no evidence that has ever existed in history that these guys had any competence at defeating insurgencies. They are involved in one insurgent campaign in the history of the organization and they lose it, right, Like, they don't win at all. It's like saying the US is the best counterinsurgency army in the world. It's like, well, what the fuck are you basing that on?

captive populations due to their brutality. Right, the SS comes into all these areas like Ukraine right in eastern Europe, where because of sort of the relationship that area had had to the Soviet Union before the Nazis come in, there was a good possibility of like them taking over and being relatively popular, and they just massacre so many people pointlessly that they inspire like account like an insurgent

campaign against themselves because they're Nazis. They're terrible. That said, even outside of like if you're kind of taking it outside of their performance as a counterinsurgency force, there's this idea that's still pretty common even among people who don't like Nazis, that the SS were an elite combat unit that performed well above like the levels shown by their Verhrmacht counterparts. This is a lie as well. There were certainly specific SS combat units that performed well, right, you

know that exists. You can find some some SS military units that had very good battle records, right, But even that does not mean what you might think it means. Because SS divisions consistently received better gear and more of it. They were much more mechanized than their regular army counterparts. Because of the clout that they had with the Nazi system. And SS divisions were also larger than normal Wehrmacht Army divisions.

A Waffen SS division has ad had a standard size of about twenty thousand men, compared to sixteen thousand, five hundred in the regular army. So if you're saying, well, these WAFT and SS divisions performed better than these Fairmaut divisions, it's like, well, they were an extra like thirty hundred guys, and yeah, I mean it makes sense. Yeah, better take Well, you know.

But like, do they fit this sort of vision we have for how they should look? And I found another really good asque historians post on this matter, which quotes a February nineteen forty three inspection of an SS division by a Wehrmacht Army major quote. The commanders of this wap of an SS division did not seem to realize that brave and ideologically misguided young men were being selflessly sacrificed through insane arrogance and a lofty disdain for sound training.

Belief in the Fuerer was more important to them than professional ability. Shocked and sobered by the experience, I returned to headquarters, where I was given an opportunity to report my impressions to the chief of the general staff. In other words, officers in the Waffenss were often young men, likelyddy, filled with very irrational beliefs about combat and their own racial purity. The fact that they were brainwashed meant that they were incapable of judging threats adequately.

you know. Yeah, a couple more Nazis gonna put that whole house in order, like like we always say, that's all we need. Yeah. I do love the idea that, like the ss IS experience getting their asses handed to them and the steps of Eastern Europe would have prepared them for a jungle war Inva. Yeah, they were really ready for that. So by the nineteen sixties the mid sixties, the anti war movement has started to pick up serious

steam and Lyddy is horrified by this. Young people, as he writes, were quote eroding the national will and respect for authority. They were sinking into a nether world of drug culture. Also, you want to hear G. Gordon Liddy's take on the civil rights movement Andrew, Oh, I'm sure it's very measured. Yes, solid, it's gonna be good. Valid demands by blacks for civil rights were often resisted violently by whites, and in response, many blacks were adopting violence

as an offensive rather than defensive tactic. This is his you know, that's not all wrong, and that like, well, the fact that they were getting murdered led to like embrace of more radical use. I still would call that defensive violence, right.

kind of catch it here right now. Given his anger at the way things are going in the United States, Lyddy has come to feel that his only option is to get a job at the District Attorney's office in Poughkeepsie, New York in nineteen sixty six. And I hate typing the word Poughkeepsie, so I'm very unhappy that this is

such a part of the story. But he points out that like part of what he moves there is it's his wife's hometown, right, So he goes there and he becomes He describes himself as like an unorthodox but dedicated law man, respected by the local police and liked by the judges. And that is, to at least some extint true. A New York Times reporter who visited in nineteen seventy three and asked a round about Liddy got this description

of him. Lyddy led an unusual, even bizarre life. He liked to drive around town in a jeep, He cared a revolver at all times, even when prosecuting a case, and seemed to enjoy the kidding by the sheriff's deputies who would outdraw him. He would spend his off hours cruising the city with policemen. He's like always hanging out with them, and shit, not for because it's his job, just because he thinks it's fun. Oh my god, what a freak.

the basis of that stunt and opposing lawyer procalled. And another time he smashed a piece of wood over the jury rail while prosecuting an assault case involving the use of the plank. Lyddy paid for the repair to the jury rail. God, I love that. Yeah, he loses a case because he pulls a knife on the jury. What a clown. So funny, It's so funny.

I can't mild competence, right, That's all it takes. Yeah, that's the difference, I guess and not being a Nazi. Not being a Nazi, yeah, not using them to threaten people for no good reason. There's a lot of a lot of things, right, that you can do to not be like G. Gordon Liddy. You know, I also have read books about the SS that are not like strictly historically accurate, largely because I needed to understand aspects of like the growth of the fascist movement among you as

soldiers in the early parts of the global War on terror. Right. So, one of the most influent infamous stories about G. Gordon Liddy is that during one of his court cases, he drew and fired his revolver in court in order to like make a point. This you'll hear this summarized, like, Yeah, he fired a loaded handgun in a courtroom in order to like make an art, like emphasize an argument the court case. And it didn't quite go down that way, right.

So the court case that he's involved in, he's prosecuting a dude whose defense claimed that the revolver he'd been accused of using by the police was inoperable. So he couldn't have fired it because it didn't work. So Lyddy wanted to prove that it did work, and in order to do that, he loaded it with blanks, and he fired it during the climax of his argument.

So there you go. I think if he was a different guy who had not gotten in trouble for committing a series of crimes, this would be like, oh yeah, look at it, he's like this, you know, this would be kind of celebrated, right, I do think this is the kind of thing that would be celebrated if he was a normal dude, right.

and uncertainties that the rest of us have. It was hard to visualize him sweating.

on a number of occasions. And one of them shows him as like this this very like emotionally cool, calm, like idiot maniac, right, who is like like constantly is always in this sort of and I think that that's the justin throw version. I think that's closer to how

Liddy actually behaved. Right. I do think he he is very good at maintaining this like pool outside look right to other people generally speaking, even though he is it is very obvious a lot of the time that he's in over his head and incompetent, like he's always he always has this sense of confidence about him. Right. The most noteworthy moment of Lyddy's time and how Kipsie was his run in with doctor Timothy Leary during a raid.

And these two guys are really tied together. There's they will they will wind up touring the country doing a floor show together. Yeah, cam Lee here, And like Timothy Leary is kind of a left wing version of g Gordon Liddy. A lot of what Leary says and gets famous for is bullshit. He is a significant like Fabuloust, right, he is a little bit of a con man, you know, but he's also at the core of him he believes some things very genuine as an and is extremely committed

to those things. And obviously those are better because he's not a Nazi, right, so, but he is you do kind of get an element of like Leary's fundamental, like the fact that he's willing to tour around with Leary, this unrepentant fascist after both of them have gotten out of prison, says a lot about tim Leary. But their first run in is so there's this raid in nineteen sixty six on tim Leary's the place that he's living at the time that a lot of people consider like

the inciting incident of the acid era. Right, Like this is the if you're making a movie, right, if you decided to do a mini series about like the birth of the psychedelic drug movement of acid of like a lot of the things we consider core to like the hippie movement, you started at this raid in nineteen sixty six, right tim Leary. And the background of this is that like Tim Leary and a bunch of he was, you know,

a professor at I think it was Harvard. Yeah, maybe I'm wrong about I think it was Harvard, and he like becomes a way of LSD. He starts taking it, he starts doing studies with it. This is during a period where it's legal, right, it gets illegal eventually, which is why some other stuff happens. But after he gets kind of like pushed out at his college and is no longer working there, he and a bunch of his associates move into a mansion in Millbrook, New York. And

this mansion has bought. There's this like rich kid stockbroker who like continues to make a lot of money doing stockshit, Like he's never interested in anything but getting better at being a stockbroker. But he loves acid, right, so he's like, yeah, you can. I bought this mansion. You can all move in here and do your drug experiments in my mansion. Remember when the rich used to be cool? This guy does sound as cool as a stockbroker could be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's interesting. Leary's always kind of like baffled at the fact that, like this guy is so on board with the movement but also very comfortable and happy being like absolutely a part of the establishment. Like yeah, being this like soulless business guy. So this the leer in between thirty and sixty at any given point. Hippie dropout types live in this mansion and do hella drugs, right, mostly acid and wheat. From what we can tell, I assume

there's other stuff that gets thrown into the mix. So this is all well and good, except for Millbrook is kind of a small town. I think it's a little more affluent than your average small town. You know. It's in upstate New York. And the citizens of Millbrook are like, once they realize this famous drug wizard is living in their town, they're like, well, we're not really thrilled about this. We don't want Tim Leary living here with a bunch

of hippies, you know. And he's he is kind of he is by this point already gotten this reputation is like the devil to a lot of conservatives, right, he is the absolute worst person on earth. He's corrupting the youth. And so because he's got this, you know, reputation of spreading the gospel of acid, action is demanded by the citizens of Millbrook, And since g. Gordon Lyddiy is at this point a well known anti drug crusader, he winds up helping to organize the raid on Millbrook.

Like where you know? Well, while this is all going on, and it seems to go on for quite some time, Leary repeated that, like the cops are constantly like, hey man, would you put on some pants? Hey man? Like and Leary, this is one thing I will give him. I love this about him. He's like absolutely not, Like you are in my home. I will have my dick out if I want to, just repeatedly refuses to not have his

wig hanging out, which is honorable, I think. Yeah. It's also worth noting that Lyddy, who volunteers, he's not asked, like the only thing he's needed therefore is to make sure that like legal procedure, But he volunteers to help the cops survey the hippies beforehand for no reason and nearly blows the whole op as a result of this, because he's bad at everything. Quote, and this is from

the New York Times. It seems that Lyddy and some policemen complete with binoculars and walkie talkie, were staked out in the bushes of the estate when a young woman stepped completely nude from one of the tints on the grounds. A lot of funny things were going on at that place, a deputy explained. Anyway, they became so preoccupied with this girl that they gave their height out away and blew

the whole bit. They nearly exposed the whole operation because like he and these cops can't stop oggling this naked woman.

degeneracy and leftism. And the way he's going to do this is by running for Congress. That's how he describes it, right, that after a couple of years, he's like, I'm just not doing enough to fight against this, So I've got to get into politics in order to like, really really, you know, make a difference here. That's how he describes it.

The Times has a different story. They note that late in his run for the DA's office, a local resident had complained about Liddy's actions in a narcotics case, and that like that wound up becoming an official complaint to

the State Commission of Investigation. The case gets dropped for lack of evidence, but this quote from that lawyer, mister Tepper, who he had worked against Liddy, gives us an idea of how he kind of might have gotten forced out, Like he may have run for office because it was he was almost known to him, there's not going to be a space for you here forever. Quite right, he was always expecting the big narcotics bust, mister Tepper said.

Gordon kept pushing pushing all the time. He probably bent the rules a bit now and then to collect evidence, but I can't recall anything specific now. His autobiography makes no mention of this, but we do know there were complaints against him, and we do you get the feeling that, like, yeah, maybe he was kind of pushed out to an extent here at least there was some like he had the feeling, I'm not going to always have a role here, right

right right. So Lyddy now thirty eight, decides he's going to challenge the leading Republican candidate in New York's twenty eighth congressional district, the relative of one of our former guests, Maggie Mayfish, Hamilton Fish Junior. So these guys are related to that serial killer and the political dynasty, the Fishes. Yeah,

so that's cool anyway. Hamilton Fish Junior is kind of like an establishment Republican, right He's He's probably someone who would like was closer to the Dims than like a dude like g. Gordon Liddy. And so Lyddy is kind of running against him on a very extreme right wing platform. His campaign had three planks, taxes which were too high, crime, and Vietnam right on crime, Lyddy presaged much modern right wing discourse when he said, God help us if the

thin blue line of protection crumbles. He's a thin blue line guyon it is funny, like all of the thin blue lionist guys wind up in prison for committed crimes. Yeah, do love how consistent that is. Meanwhile, on Vietnam, he was clear that he supported US commitment to the war effort quote, but not our conduct of the war. And whenever you hear that, what that means is he thought

that we hadn't committed quite enough war crimes. Right, if we'd massacred another couple of million people, we would have won it. Yeah, Like that's how I was taking. We needed more SS guys out in the jungle. Uh, so give it. Yeah, Yeah, it's very funny. He would have liked. If he had gotten any chance to weigh in, he would have pulled out that fiction book about the SS and slammed it on the table. So Lyddy lost badly and eventually was forced to drop out and Backfish in

order to have a future in the Republican Party. His supporters called him a sellout, but he got a job running the Dutchess County Nixon campaign. One law you're interviewed by The Times called it a deal. Right, So basically, look, man, stop making trouble for this guy who is Yeah, he's not far right like you, but you know he can win unlike you because you're a maniac. And if you, if you play ball, you'll get a job running the Nixon campaign in this other county. And he says, yes,

you know, he is always a team player, right. That is you got to give Liddy. He's gonna get you in trouble because he's a maniac. But like he will do what he thinks is best for the party, even if it's not what's best for him. Like that's kind of what he's famous for. So he's a toady. He's an ambitions Yeah, he is a hinchman. Right, he's got a hinch ye. So Lyddy is an adequate performer in this role. Nixon was more impressed by his loyalty and his willingness to take a personal hit to his pride

for the team than anything else. Right, this is the thing, Dick Nixon is a guy who respects loyalty to him, right, and that's what he sees from Lyddy and so you know, it becomes it kind of like gets through the grape vine, like all right, he's somebody that we can trust in

the Nixon White House. And as a reward, when Dick Nixon wins office, Ge Gordon Lyddy is given a position as Special Assistant for Organized Crime to the Secretary of Treasury, right, which is this is kind of a dream gig for him. He loves the idea of being like a drug warrior, of like being you know, fighting the gangsters and stuff. And he, you know, he sees this and I think it probably was there was this idea, well maybe this guy's got a future. Maybe one day this guy could

even have a cabinet position. So let's try him out, you know, at a lower level, see how he works. Lyddy instantly proves himself to be the kind of guy that cannot be trusted with power he developed. He gets in a lot of trouble very quickly at the Department of Treasury because he keeps trying to set policy right on his own, the sort of apropos without any backing, like saying, this is our stance on guns. We won't

pursue these kind of gun control laws. He will give like all these speeches at like gun control lobby events saying that Department of Treasury will never do this, and then his boss will be like, the fuck are you talking? Like you never cleared this with anybody, Like you're not supposed to be saying these things. He was also bad

at being a drug warrior right now. Because he had experience as an FBI agent, he was asked to help organize an effort to reduce drug smuggling across the Mexican border, Operation Intercept. The goal of this plan was to punish the Mexican government for refusing to allow US air power into their country to spread poison on crops. The response, Operation Intercept is to punish Mexico by shutting down the

border with legal gridlock. The idea is you have the police question and search every single person who comes in from Mexico, right, which is includes Americans and absolutely this is a busy reason. There's a lot of region, there's a lot of business that comes through in here, there's a lot of tourism. It just shatters the way the region functions, right. It's a calamity for all of these The US side of the border too. Right. It fucks up the local economy, It does a lot of damage,

and it's there's no like, nothing but chaos. As the result, The New York Times summarizes border communities were disrupted by lengthy searches. Traffic across the frontier was halted for hours, tourism suffered. Liddy sought to justify the confusion with patriotic speeches in the local communities. He was dismissed as a Treasury man in nineteen seventy one. Now, for his part,

Liddy describes Intercept as having been a success. Right. The people who thought it was a failure just didn't understand the goal, which was to fuck up life for everyone on the border. Right. His idea was like, well, look, yeah, it fucked up everything for Americans, but it fucked them up worse for Mexicans, and they the Mexican government could handle the disruption less well.

Operation Intercept. I guess you can debate, you know, like there's there's there's definitely like an argument to be made that like, well, yeah, you can some of their goals were achieved by creating this much chaos. But like the Treasury Department considers it kind of a disaster at the time because of all of the complaints that it generates, because of how much it pisses people off. So I don't think it was considered that by anyone but Lyddy.

One of the good decisions that Liddy cites as like the thing that drove his boss crazy was the Customs Division Department is like trying to figure out how to arm air marshals at this point because there's a lot we talked about in are like episodes on the Golden Age of terrorism, a lot of planes getting hijacked at

this period, late sixties or early seventies. This is the golden age of hijacking a plane to nothing, to hijack a commercial aircraft in this period, And so we're starting to put air marshals on planes, and we're you know, it's a when you're considering what firearm to give a man who would be expected to shoot it in a plane,

that's a complicated thing to decide. That's a lot more a lot more difficult than just deciding, like what's the best gun to give a cop right where it's like, yeah, no, there's a lot of like a lot of very complex engineering questions about like and today, by the way, our air marshals are armed with firearms that have very specific kinds of bullets that are made to function in a certain way on planes to minimize dangers of depressurization, over penetration,

all that kind of stuff. So they're trying to decide what's the best thing weapon to arm these guys with, and Lyddy is like, you should give them three fifty seven magnum fire arms loaded with hollow point. Now he picks there's not actually a good reason why it should be a three fifty seven over like a nine millimeter. Lyddy just loves revolvers, and he loves the three fifty seven cartridge because it's the quote unquote most powerful gun in the world. It's the only reason he picks the

three fifty seven. Now, he is right that hollow points are a better choice than full metal jacket, and the reason for this is that hollow points are less likely to overpenetrate. Right, The point purpose of a hollow point is that it expands more when it hits meat. Right, It expands when it hits meat, and that transfers more force from the bullet into the body of whoever you've hit, so it's less likely to go through them and then through something critical on the plane. Right, That is accurate.

Lyddy claims that there's like this big debate, you know, over it, and nobody believes him all by that just because it's actually weirdly it's if you study the history of how people learned about how bullets function, it takes a weirdly long time to figure out anything about bullets. So I'll give him. That may have been the case.

But the evidence that he cites to make this case, if he was actually making this argument, you know, as opposed to everyone being like obviously, hollow points are less likely to over pendray if he is not lying about that, the evidence that he cites in his book is how he made the case about hollow points being of interput. It's nuts, it's and I'll give you one. I'll give you one quote like guess as to how it's nuts.

Andrew to the fire, got on a plane. No, no, no, but he brings up the Nazis again, comes into it again. That's his other move. His other move. He either shot a gun or brought up the SS right quote. Here's Lyddy making the case for why air marshals should carry

hollow points. I cited Nazi experiments using live Jews that determined one seven point nine millimeter balls solid bullet from a Mauser rifle could pass through in gillup to sixteen humans lined up in a row and solid point round through the fuselage wouldn't result in compressive decompression of the aircraft.

It might well sever a vital control cable. Now that's fucking nuts number one, completely irrelevant, right he is We are talking about a handgun and he is talking about the penetration of a write right, right, Totally different different planets in every way ballistically a rifle down versus a handgun round. It is not relevant in any way to be like, you know, when the Nazis shot lined up Jews in the end, they were able to kill sixteen people with a single that has nothing to do with

the question. G Gordon Lyddy, that's a crazy thing to bring up here.

guns have to be returned to the factory. Lyddy presumably knew they were going to do this, but didn't think to check on if it would matter, because he just loves revolvers so much. Like again, even in his recitation of events, to make himself look good, he gives them advice on what kind of gun and round to use, and it is such a disaster that they have to recall all of the firearms. Like that's the best that this goes for him? Is he's completely wrong, Oh my god.

And it's like the thing he loves the most. He's come on very funny. Oh my god, so bizarre. Anyway, I think that's gonna that's gonna close us out on episode three of the g Gordon Liddy Story, How are you feeling, Andrew?