G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate thief turned controversial radio host, has died aged 90

G. Gordon Liddy, mastermind of the Watergate heist and post-prison radio host, died Tuesday aged 90. with her daughter in Virginia.

His son, Thomas Liddy, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause, other than saying he was not linked to COVID-19.

Liddy, a former FBI agent and military veteran, was convicted of conspiracy, theft and wiretapping for his role in the theft of Watergate, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.. He spent four years and four months in prison, including over 100 days in solitary confinement.

“I would do it again for my president,” he said years later.

Liddy was outspoken and controversial as a political agent under Nixon. He recommended assassinating political enemies, bombing a group of left-wing experts and kidnapping protesters from the war.. His colleagues in the White House ignored these suggestions.

One of his undertakings, the raid on the Democratic headquarters of the Watergate Building in June 1972, passed. The theft took a turn for the worse, leading to an investigation, cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

Liddy was also convicted of conspiracy in the September 1971 robbery of the psychiatrist’s office in Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.

After his release from prison, Liddy became a popular, provocative and controversial radio host. He has also worked as a security consultant, writer and actor. His appearance – piercing black eyes, bushy mustache, and shaved head – made him a recognizable spokesperson and TV guest.

On air, he offered advice on how to kill federal gun officers, mounted bumper stickers with the inscription “H20GATE” (Watergate) and he despised people who cooperated with prosecutors.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, George Gordon Battle Liddy was a fragile boy who grew up in a neighborhood populated mostly by German Americans. From friends and a German maid, Liddy developed a curiosity for German leader Adolf Hitler and was inspired by listening to Hitler’s radio speeches in the 1930s.

“If an entire nation could be changed from weakness to extraordinary strength, so could one person.Liddy wrote in his autobiography “Will.” His personal story was intriguing enough that “Will” was the basis for a 1982 TV movie starring Robert Conrad.

When I was small, Liddy decided it was essential to face his fears and overcome them. At 11, he roasted a rat and ate it to overcome his fear of rats. “From now on, rats could fear me like they feared cats,” he wrote.

After attending Fordham University and stint in the military, Liddy graduated from Fordham University Law School and later joined the FBI. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in New York in 1968 and helped organize Nixon’s presidential campaign in the state.

When Nixon took office, Liddy was appointed Special Assistant to the Treasury and was under the command of Secretary of the Treasury, David M. Kennedy.. He then moved to the White House and then to Nixon’s re-election campaign, where his official title was Attorney General.

Liddy was the head of a team of Republican agents known as “plumbers,” whose mission was to find information leaks that would embarrass the Nixon administration. Liddy’s specialties included gathering political intelligence and organizing activities to disrupt or discredit Nixon’s Democratic opponents.

By recruiting a woman to help him carry out one of his projects, Liddy tried to convince her that no one could force him to reveal his identity or anything else against his will. To convince her, he put his hand on a lit lighter. His hand was very burntat. The woman refused the job.

Liddy has learned to market his reputation as an intrepid, if at times overzealous, advocate of conservative causes. His syndicated radio talk show, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, has long been one of the country’s most popular. He has written bestselling books, appeared on television shows like “Miami Vice,” was a frequent guest speaker on college campuses, started a private detector franchise, and worked as a security consultant. For a while, he teamed up on the lecture circuit with an unlikely partner, 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary.

In the mid-1990s, Liddy told armed listeners to aim for the head when they encountered officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Headshots, headshots”, he pointed out and explained that most officers wear bulletproof vests under their jackets. Liddy later said he did not encourage people to hunt down agents, but added that if an agent attacks someone with lethal force, “you have to stand up for yourself and your rights with lethal force.”

Liddy has always been proud of her role in Watergate. He once said, “I’m proud to be the one who didn’t speak.”

In recent years, he has promoted the “Stacked and Wrapped” wall calendar, which he said featured “America’s most beautiful women, heavily armed”.

As a criminal, Liddy lost the right to own a gun, but found an easy way around the law. He told investigators he had no weapons, “but Ms Liddy is 27, some of which she keeps on my side of the bed.”.

Unlike other Watergate defendants, Liddy reveled in his celebrity status as the man at the center of a scandal that toppled a president and his reputation for pulling off such dirty tricks. His black Volvo sported the personalized H20GATE label. He admitted that this would likely have ended as a “political coup by Washington in and out of power” without Watergate.

“Things are going very, very well for me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I am very grateful. It was an accident of history.”

With information from AP and the Washington Post

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