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

G. Gordon Liddy is finally given the job of his dreams: managing a dirty tricks campaign to spy on "the left". He is as bad at this job as it is possible for a person to be.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mhm, welcome back to Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
That's your normal voice.

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Robert does it.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Robert does a different voice for when he's when he's.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
But that's the actual voice. I sneakily revealed it. So
now you can ai my voice and convince my loved ones.
I've been kidnapped and ransom. Why not it's fun not
for it will be fun ish, Yeah, because you're the
one who's gonna get get robbed, Sophie, I know, speaking

(00:37):
of things getting lost, I gotta I got something I
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

(00:59):
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

(01:20):
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,

(01:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
For real, high is that possible, like that something can
be lost in airspace. I just assumed it crash when
I saw the eject and from the headline, I assumed.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
It probably has. But like they so, it's a stealth plane. Right.
One of the reasons why this is the problem is
that like that is legitimately an issue. So most every
plane that's not like an army plane, right, that's not
some sort of like government you know, jet has what's
what's called an ADSB. I think that's the name of it,
Like it's a transponder that lets you know where all

(02:29):
of the aircraft are, right, because that's important to making
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

(02:51):
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

(03:13):
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

(03:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
We lost. So here's what happened. We misplaced our F
thirty five. Not a big deal. Not a big deal.
If anyone sees that shit, hit me up the deed.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
Like, yeah, Like my dream is that the auto pilots
set it down safely somewhere in North Carolina and it's
just in a man's barn. Right now, some guy just
tell that ship back and it's like, I don't know,
I haven't made up my mind as to how I'm
going to deal with this, but I got it now.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
I mean this would. Yeah, this is such a great
opening to an actual James Bond movie because now it's
just this person should really just in the interest of
everyone learning their lesson, try to sell it to Russia
at this point.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, just try sure, just like a maring call the
Russian embassy. Hey, guys, I got something you might be
interested in. Like I will tell you right now, if
this were me, you know, if I if I lived
out in the in the boonies and gained control of
an F thirty five, the only thing that I would

(04:55):
do with it, because I think it's really the only
thing to do with it, because I don't know how
to fly a plane. I don't know that like any
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

(05:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
I think we could. I think we could iron giant
it with the AI. I think you turned this one
into the good play super mun Yeah, there's a lot
of ideas.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
There's a lot of ideas, folks. Sometimes you need to
just be able to enjoy the world when beautiful things
happen beautiful things like the F thirty five going missing,
like like doing a homeward bound with our Apocalypse fighter
gott to get led back to home by like a

(06:02):
fucking rogued chinook.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, yeah, so cute.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, So we're talking about g Gordon Liddies still for
so many, so many five hours now something like that anyway,
I don't mean close. Yeah, when we left off, he
had just gotten shit canned by the Treachery Department for
rank and competence and repeatedly comparing stuff to the Holocaust
for no reason.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Well, it does seem pretty clear he was never fired
for the for the SS stuff. Yeah, is the weirdest
part of all of that.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
That is fair? Yeah, because like I feel like there
is an amount of comparing things unnecessarily to the SS
that you should be fired for. Right, I don't know
what that amount is. Precise is really low. I don't
think it's high, right, I think it should be once yeah, once, Yeah,
you get one freebie and then everyone's like, man, stop

(06:59):
falling asleep to the fucking History channel.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
Like comes past. He's past where I think the number
should be significantly.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Yeah, that's good to know. I'm glad that we're I'm
glad that where it's like you're it's like your fucking
Kevin Bacon number, right, you're here your unnecessary SS references number.
So Lyddy is getting forced out of the UH of
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

(07:28):
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

(07:50):
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.

(08:12):
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.

(08:33):
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?

Speaker 2 (08:43):
It's really just like, like, imagine being so convinced of
your rightness and having so little attention Spad that like, yeah,
he's like a real like first act of every movie.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yeah a guy, Yeah, what happened? Let's say two years later?
Gordon Lyddy like where were where was Germany? Then? And
obviously this works the same way for his kids pretty
much that it does for Germany. And that the fact
that they're told like escalate physically, and like they're not
big kids, right, I think they're getting made fun of

(09:16):
and like, so they start escalating things physically and it
doesn't work out well for them, and in fact, not
only do kids not stop bullying them, but teens from
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

(09:42):
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

(10:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's true. That is undeniable.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
He starts staying up at night and like waiting for
the kids to show up, uh, and then like when
they come out, he like chases them and gets one
of these children in a headlock. And then he he says,
one of the kids pulls a knife, and he explains
in detail, I will break that knife into pieces and

(10:41):
use him to like like cut this kid, Like I'll
kill you if you fucking pull that knife out on me.
And like Number one, I don't I don't really believe
that a knife got pulled on him. Number Two, he
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

(11:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
There's like no version of this in the real life
version that didn't end with him getting pantsd right.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
No, for sure, they fell down as he was chasing them.
Like I don't know that I actually believe any of
that he actually even caught a kid. But if he did,
and if a kid pulled a knife. My guess is that,
like these kids were walking past the house and he
suddenly runs out, screaming and attacks one, and some kid
pulls a pocket knife because he's like, I don't know
what else to do in this situation. Yeah, and yeah,

(11:42):
like that's probably how it goes. Nothing like, at no
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

(12:03):
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

(12:24):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:05):
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.

(13:26):
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

(13:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:59):
That's really arkable that he didn't wind up getting like
his ass kicked by the neighborhood dads.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
I think he might, I don't. I think there's a
non zero chance that, like one night, when he's going
batman on some children, he gets hit in the face
with an egg and gets like a staph infection in
his eye. Look, there's as much evidence for that as
anything Lyddy.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Claims for real. Jesus Christ, what a maniac.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
What a funny funny man so. Lyddy also claims that
he found during his time before getting shit Canned a
stack of Treasury Department badges laying around the office that
weren't real badges that were made up for the CIA
for CIA men who needed a cover, and so he
stole one, and that allowed him to carry a gun
anywhere in the country. Again, at no point does g.

(14:45):
Gordon Liddy ever do anything involving a gun. This is
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

(15:05):
on him, Like he can't stand the fact that we
wouldn't know that. It's so funny.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Also, I kind of don't believe that, Like I believe
the CIA gave people fake covers using other government agencies. Absolutely,
I don't believe that they left their badgesting out in
the Treasury Department in a big bile where G. Gordon
Lenny could grab one. I do believe that he illegally
carried a firearm for years. I'll give him that. I'll
give him that. I bet he's I bet he broke those.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Laws just like a stack of fake badges. Yeah, somehows
would let you carry a gun illegally, just sitting by
the coffee machine.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, yeah, just like hanging out. Oh yeah, that's our
Cia badges. Don't take one g Gordon Lenny to let
you carry a gun anywhere you want. So again he
dedicates pages after this to talking, like telling all these
fake stories about how bad his neighborhood is in DC,
and he he cannot again every time he encounters a
black person, he lets you know, right, and he tells.

(16:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
So Lyddy gets pushed out of the Treasury Department. And
I'm not sure why. Maybe it's that he had made
enough friends, maybe it's that he had some lingering family connections.
But they can't they don't feel like they can get
rid of him entirely, right, So instead of immediately pushing
lyddy out. They like, they find a job for him,

(16:47):
they get switch him to a new boss, and they're like,
you can stay here for a while, but you need
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

(17:08):
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

(17:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Was not enough? Actually, I'm happy to learn.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
I'll give you an overview here because people need to
know this, especially since Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who's kind
of behind the leak of these, just died very recently.
The Pentagon Papers were an internal history of the Vietnam
War from nineteen forty five to nineteen sixty seven, commissioned
by the Defense Department. Right, it was this kind of thing.
You know, again, the Defence Department is completely morally in

(18:06):
the wrong about most conflicts it's in post World War two.
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.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
So.

Speaker 1 (18:27):
Among the fun facts revealed in the Pentagon Papers was
the fact that, despite President Johnson's claim to the contrary,
at no point were we involved in Vietnam to help
South Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
The papers include the admission from the US government we
were there because we were in conflict with China.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and others had come to
a view China as a Nazi like expansionist threat to
the entirety of Asia, and that's why we got involved
in Vietnam. It had nothing to do with supporting democracy
in South Vietnam, especially since South Vietnam was not really
functionally democracy or at least most of its history, Like
it was just because of our fears about China. Right,
That's one of the things we get out of the
Pentagon Papers. The papers also contained evidence of US involvement

(19:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
The guy, one of the guys who compiles this report
is a Rand Corporation employee named Daniel Ellsberg. Prior to
working for the Rand Corporation, Elsberg had worked for the
CIA on a rural pacification campaign in Vietnam, so he
was one of the guys doing shady, dangerous shit for
the US in Vietnam. He had also been an aid
to Hank Kissinger, So like, this is a guy who

(19:48):
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

(20:10):
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,

(20:33):
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

(20:56):
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,

(21:17):
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,

(21:38):
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

(21:59):
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,

(22:21):
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,

(22:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
So, Lyddy proved the FBI right for firing him almost
instantly by sitting down with his new colleagues and insisting
there investigations unit should be based on. You want to
make a guess as to what he thinks they should base.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Their new unit on.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
You want to make a guess, Andrew, what organization do
you think he argans back to in a history? It's
the SS Yeah, yeah, once again, it always he does.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
It's so weird that he's not aware that they lost
the war.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
Yeah, that it didn't work, that it was that the
whole country gets destroyed, that Germany is shattered in a
way that almost no nation in history has ever been shattered.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
But uh no, he's like, you know who, I think
we should take a page out of their book for
our our illegal spying unit in the White House is
the fucking SS. Here's what he writes. Our organization had
been directed to eliminate subversion of the secrets of the administration.
So I created an acronym using the initial letter of
those descripted words. It appealed to me because when I organize,

(23:56):
I'm inclined to think of German terms. And the acronym
was also used by a World War Two German veterans
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?

Speaker 2 (24:16):
My god, I mean not enough?

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, So Odessa is not a real organization. For one,
it was never like a group called Odessa. It was
a code name US Intelligence came up with to describe
a mix of different smaller organizations and like escape plans
by different Nazi war criminals, specifically generally members of the
SS who had been responsible for the Holocaust. Odessa was

(24:39):
the name that intelligence gave all these plans to get
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

(25:02):
get away. That's who I want to And it's also yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
That's no just fucking oh god, it's Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
What a note. What a fucking note to have be
the only thing that you do. And we'll talk about
one other thing that g Gordon Lyddy does. But first, Andrew,
maybe two plugs you know, we might have a couple
of plugs in there.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Well, we're not plugging leaks.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
We're not We're not plugging leaks. So we're back from
outer space. Andrew, I just walked in. Wow, I think
I've made that. I think I made that reference before. Anyway,
you definitely have.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
I definitely have at least once. But it's so natural
that just just go.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
On, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
So Lyddy, so he decides to make his his own
Odessa organization for the Nixon White House and like it
is funny, like the reason why he picks Odessa because
it really doesn't have anything to do with what he
wants to do, right, It wasn't an organization for plugging
leaks for one thing? Is that Odessa. Again, it's not

(26:16):
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

(26:38):
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

(26:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Now.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Hunt is a former CIA man, right, he was with
the company for a long time. He had worked overseas.
He was there during in Guatemala. He played a role
in the in the coup in Guatemala. I think also
in Chile, and maybe I'm wrong about that one. But
he's involved in a lot in these decades of fuckery
in South and Central America by the CIA. And then

(27:40):
he torpedoes his career because he's also deeply involved in
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.

(28:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:21):
You never need the other shit.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
You very rarely need a jam like and that's usually
not it. Usually it's just like, well, we have a
lot of guns, let's just keep giving them the guys
in the jungle and like, you know, using our contacts
to give him a place to train in the nearby country,
and eventually they'll over there. Of the government, right, Like
that most of what goes on in these actual cases.
So Hunt Hunt, you know, despite the fact that on
paper his background's legitimate, he kind of always feels like

(28:44):
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

(29:05):
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

(29:26):
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

(29:49):
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,

(30:09):
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

(30:30):
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

(30:52):
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

(31:14):
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

(31:34):
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

(31:55):
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

(32:17):
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,

(32:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
I mean, also, given his early history, I guess he's
probably physically capable of doing me. Maybe maybe not may.

Speaker 1 (33:01):
It's actually, if you use the thing, it's hard to
kill people with a knife, right. It is not a
quiet weapon. Number one. Most of the time, when somebody
pulls a knife and uses it on another person. Both
of them get stabbed. It is a weapon that leads
to a lot of screaming. Right, you can't even with

(33:21):
an unsilenced weapon, you can shoot someone with it and
they can drop immediately, right without making any noise. Right,
it's possible with a knife. It is always going to
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.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, not the tool of choice.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, Lyddy certainly not qualified to use this. Right, it
doesn't matter though, this is all alarm because again, well
he describes this because he wants us to know he
totally might have killed a guy. All that actually happens
is he hangs out outside this office while his guys
are breaking in for a couple of minutes with a
pocket knife on his bait. And to make it even nerdier,
he has a holster for it on his belt. He's

(34:08):
like wearing a pocket knife and a fucking holster to
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

(34:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
So his team does succeed at the operation because it
turns out, I mean kind of right. They get in there,
they get pictures and stuff of a bunch of papers,
but like, and they get his file, but like, none
of it. There's nothing in there, right, because Ellsberg there's
nothing really impeachable about him, and he certainly he didn't
go tell his therapists like, so, yeah, I'm committing a

(35:00):
crime by leaking classified data to the New York Times.
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

(35:21):
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,

(35:42):
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

(36:04):
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

(36:26):
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

(36:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Genius, that is.

Speaker 1 (37:11):
That's a thing that could happen.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
G Gordon, little boys reading comic books.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
And they present this plan to Nixon, and Nixon's like, fuck,
that's right with you people, No, of course not. Lyddy
is like they just weren't willing to spend the money.
It was too much money for the Nixon administration. 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

(37:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
It doesn't seem like a good plan to me. I'm
just Dick Nixon, though, So one fact makes the case
for Hunt and Liddy's fundamental incompetence better than any other. Now, Andrew,
I know you have limited experience in clandestine operations, but
if you know, think back to they carry out these
like first two illegal burglaries on a fucking Elsberg and

(38:10):
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

(38:31):
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

(38:53):
has a copy of photos proving that Howard Hunt and
g Gordon Liddie were connected to these cribs.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
Oh my god, why did they do that? I mean never,
I just listen.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
I mean that's the the A and B side, and
I think we may it may wasn't It was it
you and I that had this conversation on Twitter potentially,
which is like the clownishness of fascists is only really
overshadowed by the fact that, like non fascists are barely
winning some of them, yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, occasionally barely winning. It's it's not a it's not
an optimistic thing. What do you think about it? But like,
one of the things, the thing that repeatedly fucks over fascists,
not as often as it should, but ultimately always does, right,
is that they're incapable constitutionally fundamentally fascists are incapable of

(39:44):
estimating threats correctly. Yes, right, like that, that's that's the
way it is, right, and that's the thing that ultimately
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

(40:07):
way in which fascism fundamentally deranges its adherents, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Well, or it's the over over like you know, the
over reliance on the power of Marshall.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Yeah, like general, Yeah, you see that a lot in Lyddy,
where like he just there's a lot of own goals
constantly because he can't he can't actually tell what a
good idea is. He can't tell what a realis is. Right,
any reasonable person would be like, I don't know, man,
it kind of feels like that's going to get you
in some trouble. I kind of feet It was like,
you shouldn't have any photos that could tie you to

(40:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
This is important.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
While Niddy is playing dipshit James Bond, he continues his
irrepressible habit of inserting his weird Nazi fetish everywhere possible,
and in this case that now means the White House.
So this is happening while there's all these protests developing around,
like the Vietnam War, and it's like really bumming everyone
out right as you'd expect, Like all these guys yelling
at you and calling you baby killer, like that bums

(41:13):
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

(41:33):
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.

(41:55):
All these people are calling us fascists. We better go
watch Triumph of the Will.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
My Nazi movie night was not as well attended as
I house I have thought.

Speaker 1 (42:05):
And he's like, everyone was very impressed about how good
the Nazis were, like forming a rally. Maybe you know what,
I'll give you this that you may be telling the
truth about this. I do believe you could find fifteen
people in the Nixon White House who could be legitimately
impressed by Triumph of the Will. I'm not gonna question
g Gordon Letty on that fact he didn't lie about
everything right, right, right right.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
That seems like a reasonable claim.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
Oh my god, Now you do get the feeling that
like shit like this, maybe because again, only fifteen do
you show up and like the fact that he's failing. Right. Ultimately,
nothing that he does works and it's all very expensive
and part because of all of the fancy spy gear
he has to buy. This kind of gets he and
Hunt pushed out of the White House and the same
way that Liddy had been pushed out of the Treasury

(42:49):
not all that long ago. Unfortunately, this didn't mean that
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

(43:11):
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

(43:31):
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

(43:52):
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,

(44:13):
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

(44:34):
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

(44:57):
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

(45:17):
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,

(45:38):
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

(45:59):
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

(46:19):
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

(46:42):
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.

(47:05):
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.

(47:29):
That's right, That's how Big Bob Haldeman works.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Oh my god. Right, it is just like just like
the type of bureaucracy that's you know, this is what
Republicans are actually talking about. What they say big government
is inefficient or insane.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Yeah, And when you think about when you think about
this organizational structure, right, I think a reasonable person can
predict two things are going to be the result of
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

(48:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
So number one, people might get pressured into like approving
or allowing things just to have done it right, even
if it's not a good idea. And number two, this
is a great way to harass people into action. But
there's no it does not provide any actual oversight over
what's being done right because the product doesn't matter. Making
progress matters, right, Like, That's the way in which this works.

(48:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
I'm gonna go with.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
A variety of people, but probably a variety of people,
but almost certainly the good people in blue apron right. No, yeah, well, actually,
probably shouldn't continue that because again, people are incapable of
recognizing jokes. Yeah, there's somebody somebody on the subreddit the
other week being like, why does Robert hate the FDA,
and people being like, oh, you know, it's because he's
a like, we make jokes about the FDA because the

(49:27):
idea of going to war with the FDA, of all
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.

(49:51):
Good times, everybody, Good times. I can't wait for that
FDA raid to hit. Now now that I've admitted that online.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
H.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Ah, we're back, So let's let's let's keep on talking.
So Haldeman, you know, the tickler kind of starts the
process of bugging these guys lower on in the White
House list. Make a spy division right, make a spy division,
you know. And again, one thing you might note about
the tickler is that while it's effective at pushing people

(50:23):
into action, it is also effectively a giant game of telephone, right,
And so inevitably when you're playing telephone, the message gets
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

(50:44):
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

(51:04):
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.

(51:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Fast break breaks.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
Yeah. So, in his autobiography, Lyddy claims that he gets
this very prestigious job as a reward for his hard
work at the Department of Treasury. It came with a
huge pay bump. He claims he's making what would be
the modern equivalent of like a quarter of a million
dollars a year, right, He also claims which is like
thirty grand or something at that time. He also claims,
in addition to this, that he had been prom a

(52:00):
million dollar budget for his dirty Tricks project. Now, this
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,

(52:24):
and the IRIS commissioner had blocked call Field from getting
the job because Callfield is a maniac.

Speaker 2 (52:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
So Callfield comes up and is like, hey, guys, I'm
going to start a private security firm since I didn't
get that job, and maybe you guys can be the
first people to hire me. I've got this great idea.
We're calling it Operation sand Wedge, right, and if you
give me a half a million dollars, I'll hire double
agents and infiltrate them into the Democratic Party and carry
out all of these different schemes to like illegally spy

(52:50):
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

(53:11):
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.

(53:33):
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

(53:55):
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.

(54:16):
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,

(54:38):
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

(55:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Now point they're all liars generally they're here.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Triangulate truth by kind of going through all of them.
And so I'm going to read a paragraph from the
book King Richard that gives an idea of how Jeb
Magruder responds to the g Man in a professional setting.
Letty struck mcgreeder as a cocky little bantam rooster who
liked to brag it out his James Bondish exploits. An
exercise fanatic, he had a disconcerting habit of dropping to

(55:41):
the floor and without notice performing one hundred push ups.
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,

(56:01):
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

(56:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (56:33):
That's again the perfect like the perfect kind of like
mix between the claims of Lyddy and sort of this
pop culture image of this dangerous mad man he's gonna
stab John Dean to death in the reality, which is
like he thought a lot about threatening him with a
pencil but did nothing. So, yeah, I get the more
I learn about fucking g Gordon Liddy, the more I've

(56:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Gordon Lyddy in a movie now, Yeah, it is that
like seething small man rage. Yeah that, Yeah, I guess
except for all the Nazi stuff. Ben Stiller is pretty perfect.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Yeah, he could do it. He could do it. So
not long after their first meeting, Magruder makes the mistake.
He puts a hand on Lyddy's shoulder when they're like
they're working in the office, they're going over illegal breath.
Lyddy calls him over and he like puts a hand.
I'm not gonna say you should do that, but not
like an abnormal gesture, right Lyddy. Lyddy yells at him, Jeb,

(57:48):
if you don't take your arm off my shoulder, I'm
gonna tear it off and beat you to death with it.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
Again. Jef Magruder, I think is a pretty big guy.
Lyddy is five foot nine, so yeah. Anyway, One tricky
thing we've come up against over and over is separating
Liddy's performance of bad Assy, which does seem to have
worked on Jeb Magruder, because Jeb is one of these
soulless Ivy League pranks with the h and Magruder, by
the way, is widely considered to be the second dumbest

(58:15):
man in the Nixon administration, like universally regarded as a
feel so I'm not surprised that Liddy's bullshit like works
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

(58:37):
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

(58:59):
compared himself to a fascist. That's not a Nazi. Guys,
we did it, We did it.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
I mean right, the asterisk. I would have loved to
surrender soldier.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
And he's talking about like, it's as horrifying to me
to do this as it would be to a Japanese Americans. Yes,
that is that is the one time. Yeah, yeah, he
has like nightmares, its nightmares of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi.
He's convinced that the US is having a cold civil war,
right that that's that's going on right now, And so

(59:33):
he's willing certainly right about that. Yeah, yeah, he's willing
to blow up anything right in order to prevent this.
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,

(59:56):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
It's like, I mean, that is it truly is like
so mind bending to me that, Yeah, you'd think there
was a brief moment in time when the right wing
at least had like a sense of optics. But I
guess not. I guess that's the answer is they never
have ever.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
It's like if you're running a bar and your bartender
is like creeping out all of the clientele and like dangerous,
and you're like, look, so and so is a Bill Cosby,
but at least he's our Bill Cosby. Well do we
want a Bill Cosby at this bar? Do we need
a Bill Cosby? Like? Yeah, maybe that's a bad thing
to have at the bar. No one ever suggests that.
So Dean decides we'll give Lydia a shot, and he

(01:00:52):
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

(01:01:13):
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

(01:01:33):
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

(01:01:55):
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

(01:02:15):
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,

(01:02:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
So amazing what I mean, right, he is just this
is just blowfeld shit. Yes, yes, I yeah, I guess
you got a dream. You gotta have a dreamer on
every campaign. You know, I don't know that you do.
But but he is there.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
He is there. So another plan that he prefers is
to rent an expensive house boat, and and Lyddy is
constantly being like, we got to rent this now, I
got a handshake deal with the owner, you know, give
me the money, now give me and like Jean Dean's like,
we don't even talk this through man, and Liddy's like,
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

(01:03:27):
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.

(01:03:47):
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

(01:04:09):
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

(01:04:31):
street fighters, as he calls them to beat up hippies
and public at protests.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:04:36):
But his more advanced plan is to hire a second team,
who will be paid for by Richard Nixon, to kidnap
American citizens and traffic them into foreign countries.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
These teams are experienced in surgical relocation activities. In a word, general,
he's calling Mitchell general. They can kidnap a hostile leader
with maximum secrecy in a minimum use of force. If,
for example, a prominent radical comes to our San Diego
convention to marshal his army of demonstrators, these teams can
drug him and take him across the border into Mexico
until the convention is over. He'd never see the face

(01:05:10):
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

(01:05:33):
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

(01:05:55):
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

(01:06:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
And also to be like, and you know who's going
to be impressed by this? A World War two.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Veteran, World War two veteran, This, Yeah, and Mitchell he's like,
I could tell he was impressed, and for all we
can know, Mitchell gets angry about this music. Get this
fucking dude out of here, and they do again. Because
none of them are very competent. They're like, come back
with a plan that doesn't cost him million dollars, right, Like,
cut some of this maniac shit off and try to

(01:06:57):
bring us something else, right, in part because they just
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Right, Listen. Basically it's just Crystal with a C.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yeah, Thegul's Crystal with the fucking sea.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
In his autobiography, Lyddy makes it clear that as soon
as he got told to start drawing the shit up,
he assumed he had a million dollar budget. So he
has a hunt, start paying retainers to his cubans and
promising all these guys money. And then he's like freaking
out to Dean, like I promise dangerous men money, like
they have to get paid, you know. Yeah, it Dean's like,
but we never told you you had a million dollars.
Why are you paying people already? Oh my god, it is,

(01:07:47):
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

(01:08:09):
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.

(01:08:30):
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

(01:08:51):
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

(01:09:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
They can help themselves, they cannot.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Help his defensive This is that like, well, no serious
criminal will trust us if we're not spending a lot
of money on nonsense. That's right, Yeah, maybe maybe maybe
Lyddy got added to the van. Yeah, so this is
somewhat counteracted. The fact that like this is the only
way to make people trust them is a little counteracted
by other claims Lyddy makes about his recruitment efforts and

(01:09:56):
how he tried to get these criminals to impress him.
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

(01:10:17):
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

(01:10:37):
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,

(01:10:57):
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

(01:11:19):
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.

(01:11:40):
It seemed nearly cooked out the joint and lost at tendon.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
Oh, I mean that sounds delicious, of course, it sounds
like yeah. Nice.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
Thankfully the doctor was Indian, and so he'd seen many
men light their own hands on fire, as everyone does
in India.

Speaker 2 (01:11:59):
The fuck amazing, how many, like casual clear, cries for help.
This is yeah, himself admits to constantly.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
I'm so rarely like the whole process of involuntary commitment
is real fucked up. But like, I don't know, Man,
if a guy comes to me saying I have developed
a habit of lighting my hand on fire to increase
my will power, yeah, maybe that guy. Maybe that guy
needs to be in medical care if he doesn't want
to be, he needs some sort of help.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:34):
That is, he's a danger to himself and others if
you're doing this, right, this is not reasonable behavior. This
is not healthy. This is not certainly the behavior that
a man with five children should be carrying out.

Speaker 2 (01:12:47):
Yeah, it's bad news, and you gotta.

Speaker 1 (01:12:51):
Yeah, the way he describes this too, I think this
is compulsive. I think there is something compulsive in his
need to scarfy and injure himself. Right, yeah, this is
far beyond any kind of actual will power building, right,
I mean, look, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
It does seem like like over the course of this tale,
between the like animal mutilation at the top and this shit,
it is like a little like of the Bastards and
I've been party two and the show has been Party two.
I guess it's just like his sheer incompetence and cowardice
as what prevented. I mean, he has a lot of
other tool He has a lot of other character tools

(01:13:30):
that Yeah, this potentially could have gone a lot worse
for humanity.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
This could have gone like Lyddy does not go as badly.
And I think maybe his dad is credit for that.
Maybe he's constantly held back from like setting off a
series of bombs in like the fucking White House lawn
by the fact that his dad wouldn't have been proud
of that, right, Like that we may like that may
be the maybe, like we were just I was criticize

(01:13:55):
the family a little bit, like maybe this is the
best case scenario for Lyddy because he had that teeny
bit of restraint on his actions.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Yeah, it really is like so hard to know to
go back and just go to the other timeline where.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
Maybe a little bit of a dexter situation, right, I
guess we never know, are we currently don't know? Maybe
we can't know. Yeah, So, despite the fact that he's
permanently injured himself doing this, Lyddy keeps burning himself both
as a hobby and in the days before Watergate, as
a recruitment tactic.

Speaker 2 (01:14:30):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
She was flashily good looking, young, and had secretarial skills
and expertise, and appeared able to attract men sexually if
she wished, possibly even the candidate that means Nixon's opponent.
At dinner, Miss Stevens seemed reluctant, bulking at the risks involved,
and when I told her her identity would be revealed
to no one and she could walk away any time
if she feared exposure, she pointed out that I would
know her identity. I told her that no one could

(01:14:53):
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

(01:15:13):
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

(01:15:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:15:56):
Again, he's telling this story. It is I it is
so incomprehensible to me that like, from doing this to
telling anyone about it. I don't know what is more bonkers?
What a yeah, like bragging about this particular story, even
if it's made up, It's so fucking nuts.

Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
Because he does brag about it. He's like, yeah, to
do this, you know, I'm dealing with some real hard people.
This is the only way to take convince him I
was serious, But it doesn't work. Yeah, like a normal person.
She sees a man light himself on fire during a
job interview, and it's like, probably don't want to be involved.
I don't want to be in business with that dude.
But if you put in your LinkedIn, I could cut

(01:16:39):
my wrist to the bone without bleeding to death. Well
that's great, but I don't want to work for you.

Speaker 2 (01:16:44):
Like, yeah, yeah, I think I'm out.

Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
I think yeah, I may be out of this one.
So and again, one thing that's funny about this to
me is that, like, You've got this lady who's you know,
living on the wrong side of the law, but she
sees this man do this and is like, oh, I
don't want to be anywhere near that guy. This guy's dangerous.
At the same time as this is happening, multiple Nixon
staff members, men have privileged pedigree with ivy league degrees,

(01:17:08):
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

(01:17:30):
need to be in business with this man.

Speaker 2 (01:17:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
By way of an example, tough, Here's what John Deane
writes about his first experience with Liddy's burning fetish. As
he spoke, I noticed a bulky white bandage wrapped around
his fist. What happened to your hand, Gordon? He shrugged, Oh, nothing, really,
it looks serious. Well some might feel that way, but
I don't. It was necessary. You see that I proved
my strength to the men I'm thinking of recruiting to

(01:17:53):
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

(01:18:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
It must just be that this woman actually knows tough
people as yes, yes, ide, it's like, well, this is nuts,
fun It is in fact tough.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
Having made a number of mistakes in my life. Like,
the last people who are ever going to do something
like this are dangerous people, right, people who can someone
who like actually might be able to murder you and disappear.
The body is not going to try to prove that
to you by lighting themselves on fire. Right, They generally
don't need to lie actively. Yeah, they're actually real people. Right.

(01:19:07):
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

(01:19:27):
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,

(01:19:49):
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

(01:20:11):
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

(01:20:33):
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

(01:20:55):
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

(01:21:17):
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

(01:21:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:55):
McCord is running security for Nixon's re election campaign. He
is also a former CIA man and a sitting lieutenant
colonel in the Army Reserve with a public history as
a spy. Like, there's no way this guy gets arrested
and it does not immediately expose the president to unacceptable risk.
But as Lyddy sees it, he has to break back in,

(01:22:16):
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,

(01:22:37):
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

(01:22:57):
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

(01:23:18):
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.

(01:23:41):
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

(01:24:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
It was like you failed his I mean, it's it
is just like so childish, the like like justification of
everything in a way that is genuinely impressive. It's like,
how yeah, again, this is like fascists are some of
the least competent people on earth, and somehow and yet

(01:24:37):
and yet we're barely keeping them at bay. We're not
going to belabor this point. The Cubans and McCord get busted, right,
Lydian Hunt escape and Lyddy he seems to have immediately known,
I'm going to prison right like that. That night he
tells his wife like something went wrong, they got busted.

(01:24:58):
I'm going to go to jail, right, And the.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
Way he describes it, he immediately recognizes as soon as
this happens, I am the highest up person in the
Nixon campaign involved in this. None of the others know
the full story or know who else approved this. So
I'm the turniquet, right if I keep my mouth shut,
this can't go any higher than me, you know. And
this gets us to the last thing and the only

(01:25:20):
thing that's exceptional about Liddy, right, the only he's good
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,

(01:25:42):
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

(01:26:02):
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

(01:26:24):
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

(01:26:48):
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

(01:27:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
That's also classic classic democrats.

Speaker 1 (01:27:28):
Classic democrats, like well, you know, he did the wrong thing,
but he wasn't a bad man. No, he's a bad
man needed a bad thing. And like like, yes, there is,
I will say, you know, as again, as a guy
who's been shady for a chunk of his life, there's
a thing that's respectable about refusing to roll. Right, I'll
give that. I will give him that, especially when you

(01:27:48):
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

(01:28:09):
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

(01:28:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:28:50):
Was I can be a good soldier.

Speaker 1 (01:28:51):
Finally he is, and he is in this regret it's
bad up to that point. Yeah, he is the reason
all of this happens. But that's the one thing about
him that's real. You know, yeah, I listen.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
I still going back to what we said earlier, I
still think, having heard more of this story, there's a
real chance this is probably, even for humanity's sake, the
best case version of the g Gordon Liddy story.

Speaker 1 (01:29:18):
I think so, right, I think that may actually still
be the case. Now he's going to be more toxic
actually later in life. You know, we'll talk about it.
We'll talk about one of these We'll come back later.
I don't want to do more than two weeks in
a row on lady. His time in prison is a
fascinating story. He's a really interesting guy there, his time
after prison, his you know this, this speaking tour he

(01:29:39):
goes on with Tim Leary and his he helps to
invent talk radio. He actually gets his job in radio
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
Yeah, Jesus Christ, Yeah, fucking I mean again, it's the
I guess you can't say sniffling, but whatever the fuck
was wrong with him, just what a what a little wiener?

Speaker 1 (01:30:11):
Yeah, that's he is a wiener. He is a weirdo.
He is also somehow more honorable and respectable than every
living member of the Republican establishment today.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
Yes, yes, all those things are true.

Speaker 1 (01:30:25):
An objectively bad because again there is some degree to
which he was willing to sacrifice for something greater than himself.
Yeah that was Richard Nixon. But because again the man
had terrible judgment. But that is something, right, It's more
than like Enrique fucking Tario. Ever, Yeah, I would have managed,
you know, right, like all these folks like, it's not

(01:30:46):
it's not cynical. He's a very like, you know, fifties
version of this fucking her not at all fucking cynical. Yeah,
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

(01:31:12):
g Gordon Liddy story.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Oh, I mean, it's it's it's fucking bonkers. That's not
even the whole of it. But yeah, no, no, certainly
plenty Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
I you know, I didn't think I thought we would
do an episode on his life before getting into the
White House and then an episode that's the White House
in Watergate? Right, And what do you cut out? Really,
what do you cut out of this man's story? Should
I have not given it? Every single time he brings

(01:31:42):
up the SS it was too many times to not
talk about, like.

Speaker 2 (01:31:46):
And truly this is just in his book that needs
he did it codsway way more times. Yeah, God, because
an editor for sure was like, I got a I'm
holding you to a tenth of the SS stories. Gee. Yeah,

(01:32:08):
there's no fucking way.

Speaker 1 (01:32:10):
No fucking way. So funny, all right, Oh that's gonna be.
It's gonna be it for us at Behind the Bastards. Andrew,
you got anything to plug? Yeah, same old. Thanks for
having me? Yosis Racist is my podcast?

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
Uh? The Entertainment Community Fund. I don't know that's it.
Maybe maybe by the time this comes out, we'll have stuff,
you know, we'll be done striking faster risk almost certainly not.

Speaker 1 (01:32:36):
It's possible, uh, and it's but not probable. Look, if
you want to make the strike end, find the most
dangerous and irrational person you know, and give them a
quarter of a million dollars to try something. You know,
I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
There's a I realizing there's a real chance. I'm the
writers Guilds G Gordon Ladies.

Speaker 1 (01:32:58):
That's okay, Andrew, that's the whole reason behind super Soaker
Full of Piss, right, That's that's our dream. You and
I can be the Howard Hunt and g Gordon Lyddy
of the w g Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
We're the crazies. Yeah, we're the craziest. Yeah, you know,
let's say what you will? We are loyal as fuck.

Speaker 1 (01:33:17):
That's right, we'll be, We will be. We will be
loyal to the end, even as we destroy the entire
guild with our incompetence.

Speaker 2 (01:33:24):
Does that make you and your team for now?

Speaker 1 (01:33:30):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (01:33:31):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (01:33:32):
You can tell we've been here for three hours because
that's not normally a Sophie joke.

Speaker 2 (01:33:37):
That's true. It was really necessary.

Speaker 1 (01:33:42):
Uh huh, what do we say?

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Go to hell?

Speaker 1 (01:33:48):
Go to Hell? I love you.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
Behind the Bastard's the production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
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