George Gordon Battle Liddy (born November 30, 1930) was the chief operative for the White House Plumbers unit that existed during several years of Richard Nixon's Presidency. Along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy masterminded the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972. The subsequent cover-up of the Watergate scandal led to Nixon's resignation in 1974; Liddy served four and a half years in prison for his role in the burglary.
Liddy later became an American radio talk show host, actor and political strategist. Liddy's radio talk show is now syndicated in 160 markets and on both Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio stations in the United States. He has also been a guest panelist for Fox News Channel in addition to appearing in a cameo role or as a guest celebrity talent in several television shows.
Liddy has said that, as a child, he grew up in a German-American community that included many admirers of Adolf Hitler, and that listening to Hitler's speeches "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before." As an adult, however, he came to condemn Nazism and Hitler as "evil".
He graduated in 1952 and joined the United States Army, serving for two years as an artillery officer at the time of the Korean War, but did not leave the US due to an injury. He returned home in 1954 to study law at Fordham, earning a spot on the Law Review. Graduating in 1957, he went to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover, but his work at the agency prompted a supervisor to describe him as "a wild man" and a "superklutz". At age 29, Liddy became the youngest Bureau Supervisor at FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C., earning multiple commendations from J. Edgar Hoover. He left the FBI in 1962 to practice International Law in Manhattan.
Liddy worked as a lawyer in New York City and a prosecutor in Dutchess County, New York. In 1966, he organized the arrest and unsuccessful trial of Timothy Leary. As an assistant district attorney, he fired a gun into the courtroom ceiling during jury summation. He ran unsuccessfully for the post of District Attorney and then for the United States House of Representatives in 1968, but used his political profile to run the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon in the 28th district of New York.
In 1971, after serving in several positions in the Nixon administration, Liddy was moved to Nixon's 1972 campaign, the Committee to Re-elect the President (officially known as "CRP" but to opponents known as CREEP), in order to extend the scope and reach of the White House "Plumbers" unit, which had been created in response to various damaging leaks of information to the press. At CRP, Liddy concocted several plots, some far-fetched, intended to embarrass the Democratic opposition. These included firebombing the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (where classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsberg were being stored), kidnapping anti-war protest organizers and transporting them to Mexico during the Republican National Convention (which at the time was planned for San Diego), and luring mid-level Democratic campaign officials to a house boat in Baltimore where they would be secretly photographed in compromising positions with call girls. Most of Liddy's ideas were rejected, but a few were given the go ahead by Nixon Administration officials, including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. Ellsberg had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.
At some point, Liddy was instructed to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel.
Also in the early 1980s Liddy joined forces with former Niles, Illinois Police Officer and co-owner of The Protection Group, Ltd., Thomas E. Ferraro, Jr., to start up a private security and countersurveillance firm called, G. Gordon Liddy & Associates. The firm was not a success, however, and it filed for bankruptcy on November 12, 1988.
In 1992, Liddy emerged to host his own talk radio show. Its immense popularity led to national syndication in under a year through Viacom's Westwood One Network and later Radio America in 2003.
In addition to Will and the nonfiction books When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country (2002) and Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style (2006, with his son Cdr. James G. Liddy, J. Michael Barrett, and Joel Selanikio), Liddy has published two novels: Out of Control (1979) and The Monkey Handlers (1990). Neither novel sold as well as the autobiography.
Contrary to popular belief, Liddy has remained a Roman Catholic throughout his life.
In Oliver Stone's 1995 movie Nixon, Liddy was played by John Diehl.
In Andrew Fleming's 1999 comedy Dick, Liddy was played by Harry Shearer.
Liddy claimed that his detractors omit some important context:
I was talking about a situation in which law enforced agents comes smashing into a house, doesn't say who they are, and their guns are out, they're shooting, and they're in the wrong place. This has happened time and time again. The ATF has gone in and gotten the wrong guy in the wrong place. The law is that if somebody is shooting at you, using deadly force, the mere fact that they are a law enforcement officer, if they are in the wrong, does not mean you are obliged to allow yourself to be killed so your kinfolk can have a wrongful death action. You are legally entitled to defend yourself and I was speaking of exactly those kind of situations. If you're going to do that, you should know that they're wearing body armor so you should use a head shot. Now all I'm doing is stating the law, but all the nuances in there got left out when the story got repeated.
Additionally, when Liddy spoke about listening to Hitler on the radio, he stated that it "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before. Hitler's sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body."
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