You wouldn’t think that a conviction for conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping would be the springboard for a career in media that included TV, radio and movies. But that is exactly what happened to G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy worked for the Nixon Administration. He was a member of the White House Plumbers, a group supposedly formed to stop damaging leaks of information. He was both the mastermind and the bungler of Watergate, the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, an act that eventually ended the Nixon administration and that landed Liddy in jail. He was also involved in the break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist a year earlier. (Ellsberg released the Pentagon papers which detailed the thinking behind the U.S. war in Vietnam).

Liddy was sentenced to a 20-year prison term for his role in Watergate. He ended up serving 4-½ years after JImmy Carter commuted his sentence. He was also convicted in connection with the Ellsberg caper, but received a suspended sentence since he was already in jail.

Prior to his work with the Nixon administration. Liddy had been a lawyer, prosecutor and FBI agent. Once out of jail he leaned on that resume to start a couple different businesses. 

One of those ventures was G. Gordon Liddy Associates Inc., described in a Los Angeles Times story (Nov. 30, 1981) with the headline “Former White House spy becomes a franchise:”

“G. Gordon Liddy, the master of domestic espionage who helped make Watergate a household word, is cashing in on nearly 10 years of notoriety. He is the latest thing on the American franchise market — the Col. Sanders of franchised private investigators. From a modest eighth-floor office in a suburban Chicago shopping center the fledgling firm of G. Gordon Liddy Associates Inc. is marketing exclusive territories in the United States and overseas to selected private investigators.

“For fees ranging from $5000 to $25000, qualifying investors can open branch offices under the common banner of Gemstone Security Ltd., a Liddy Associates subsidiary specializing in such services as industrial counterespionage. executive protection and sophisticated bugging detection and prevention.

“But because G. Gordon Liddy is a convicted felon he cannot be a licensed private investigator, a technicality circumvented by naming his wife Frances as executive vice president of Liddy Associates. The family’s financial interest in the firm is through stock held by Mrs. Liddy. Her husband is a consultant for both Liddy Associates and Gemstone Security.”

I found a paid advertisement in the Miami Herald (June 15, 1986) for the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security and Private Investigation. A program was offered at a cost of $2,700. The ad suggested that the course “is specifically designed for the executive who has overall authority of their corporate security unit, but has little background in security.”

A few weeks later, UPI reporter Bill Lohmann, wrote (July 27, 1986): “Ten students paid $2700 each for the three-week course in Miami where they were to learn investigative techniques, counterterrorism tactics, weapons training, electronic eavesdropping and hostage negotiating. The ‘faculty’ includes Israeli ex-commandos, former Drug Enforcement Agency investigators, security experts and Liddy himself.

”The other new Liddy endeavor raising curiosity across the nation is his ‘Hurricane Force.’ The 10-man strike force — including Israeli, British and Cuban former commandos — is billed as the only private anti-terrorist team of its kind. The unit will go anywhere in the world and do just about anything including deliver ransoms, rescue kidnap victims and coach executives stationed abroad in techniques to avoid abduction.” 

I could find no evidence of anyone actually engaging this ‘Hurricane Force.’

For a side hustle, Liddy sold ‘Stacked and Packed,’ a calendar that featured photos of the country’s “most beautiful women,” heavily armed.

Shortly after getting out of prison, Liddy wrote and published an autobiography titled “Will.” Vinton Supplee, a reviewer with the Arizona Republic (May 18, 1980) was unimpressed:

“His prose is flat, even pedestrian. His obsessions with ‘genetic destiny’ and proving his masculinity through his ability to endure self-inflicted pain are either ludicrous or Nietzschean, depending on your point of view.

“Personally, I think his triumph of the will adds up to less than zero. But at least he took Nixon with him.”

Liddy was active also as a public speaker. One of the more curious of these engagements was a traveling debate with Timothy Leary, the former Harvard professor who was best known for his advocacy of LSD. A couple decades earlier, Liddy, working for the prosecutor’s office in Dutchess County N.Y., had been involved in a drug raid on Leary. 

A biography.com story by Tyler Piccotti (May 1 2023) said of these debates: 

“The debates, which featured creative taglines such as ‘Nice Scary Guy Versus Scary Nice Guy’ and ‘The State of the Mind Versus The Mind of the State,’ pitted conservative Liddy against his progressive foil Leary in discussions about national security and civil liberties.

“‘He’s Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker,’ Leary once said of Liddy.”

Liddy also had a number of TV and movie acting roles. Soren Anderson of the Tacoma News Tribune (March 15, 1989) caught up with him in one of his roles:

“It was night. I was down by the waterfront. A figure emerged from the shadows. It was G Gordon Liddy. Yea that G Gordon Liddy. The very man who supervised the burgling of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, who concocted an elaborate scheme of political dirty tricks to discredit the Democrats during the 1972 presidential campaign, who masterminded twin Watergate break-ins at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and who was imprisoned from January 1973 to September 1977 for his role in the conspiracy that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Liddy was in Gig Harbor late last week and he was up to no good. He was in town to fake his death. It was part of a scheme to throw the cops off his trail so he could make a huge drug score. It was all very sneaky and underhanded. This time though it was all make-believe. Liddy, 58, is working as an actor these days playing the heavy in a movie called ‘Nowhere Man’ that’s being filmed in Gig.

“Liddy spoke with especial relish about his role in an as-yet unreleased movie called ‘Street Asylum.’ ‘I play a corrupt megalomaniac, a former police official now running for mayor who has formed a sinister alliance with a female mad scientist. In my spare time I am also a sexual pervert. There’s absolutely no redeeming social value whatsoever in that character’ he said in a voice that assured you he would have it no other way.”

Liddy once commented: “I played only villains, and that way, as Mrs. Liddy says, I don’t have to act. I just go there and play myself.” (Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2021) 

But where Liddy would achieve the most success is as a radio personality. He presaged the right wing talk show commentator we are so familiar with today, trading in conspiracy theories and stirring the cauldron of resentment.

“On his radio show, which aired from 1992 to 1999, he bragged about how he could put a lighter to the palm of his hand and how he offered to take the blame for President Richard Nixon’s misdeeds. He picked on John Dean incessantly. He promoted what today would be called ‘toxic masculinity’ and generally bowled over people he didn’t respect.

“Liddy seemed to enjoy a good-natured, high-spirited debate without ever descending to the depths Rush Limbaugh would plumb—or, for that matter, former President Trump.” (Brian Karem, the Bulwark.com, March 31, 2021)

“For 4 hours every weekday, G. Gordon Liddy uses his Radio Free D.C. talk show to make life a political hell for the First Couple. With surprising wit and charm, this quintessential tough guy delights in bedeviling not only President and Mrs. Clinton but the whole Washington establishment. So much of it is ‘Bravo Sierra’ B.S. as Liddy barks frequently into the microphones at WJFK radio station with a voice that is part carnival huckster, part Ted Baxter.”  (Cox News Service, May 15, 1994)

Liddy would have to replay Watergate in a courtroom one more time, in 2001. He was sued for defamation by Ida “Maxie” Wells, who at the time of Watergate was a secretary at the DNC offices there. Liddy, it seems, accused the DNC of running a call-girl ring out of their Watergate offices (remember PizzaGate) and Wells claimed that he identified her as the person securing the prostitutes. The jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case. The judge initially declared a mistrial, but then dismissed the charges.

Liddy was 90 when he passed away in 2021. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Writing his obit in Politico (Dec. 21, 2001), Joshua Zeitz had this to say:

“He was a showman to the very end — an outsized personality who both profited from the conservative political reawakening and influenced its direction. Yet, it seems safe to say that he was an original. There will be many imitators, but there was only one G. Gordon Liddy.”

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