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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M oh, well, I was doing it as you were
doing it. I could have done it. I really would
have done it for you. If I will do that. Well,
this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I will
not do an impression of Sophie because I want to
keep our work relationship. No, please, please, please do it.

(00:25):
That's how you sound. We are Wow. This is a
podcast about the worst people in all of history. Speaking
of the worst people in all of history. Andrew T,
I am that king. Uh no, not not the worst
person in all of history. But you're fighting some of
the worst people in all of history on the lines

(00:46):
of the strike against those Hollywood motherfuckers. It really is.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I should but yes, those you are all Yeah, yeah,
the bad Hollywood motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, I'm on I'm on a strike.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
I'm a member of the Writer's Guild of America. And
also I realized the other day I did a project
for Writers Guild of Canada, which I don't really know
how that all worked, but I did have sign some paperwork.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
So exciting, exciting.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
It might be might have a union up up north
of the border. Also, but yeah, it is like the
clowns that run the studios. It's shocking, Like how if
they were doing their jobs remotely correctly, None, no one
reasonable would know their names now, like, not one of them.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
No, And there's only one wild outside of the current
crop of studio heads. There is only one studio executive
I can name, and it's my namesake, Robert Evans, not
because of anything he did as a studio head, but
because of his contributions to cocaine sciences, which I do respect.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Yeah, yeah, there's I mean, there's like reasons one might
know about them, but honestly, like I a person who's
worked in you know, television for years now prior to
the strike, Like I guess I knew who Bob Iiker was.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, Disney, but the Disney I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Think any of us had any Like I don't know
you'd hear these names, but it'd be one in one
of your the other, like they should be anonymous rich shadows.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
They could have one knows, cash checks for millions of
dollars a year and had nobody know who they are
or be angry at them. But they wanted tens of
millions of dollars a year, and so they've decided to
cause problems for themselves.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Like I think by the way, you're even that joke
is off by an order of magnitude. Yeah, you're like
to baseline hundreds and try to get millions or billions.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Yeah, yeah, that's probably more accurate. Speaking of corrupt motherfuckers. Yeah, Andrew, who,
what do you know about G Gordon Liddy A less
than I should? Yeah, everyone does, now we've I don't
think this violates any of the WGA stuff. There were

(03:14):
two big Watergate shows that launched recently. Like all TV
shows about historical moments, both of them are wrong in
specific interesting ways and accurate in other more minor ways.
Neither of them really get into Both of them feature g.
Gordon LIDDI neither of them really accurately describe him as

(03:36):
a person, Like one of them kind of picks the
he was this absolute unhinged, like maniac fucking cartoon character,
and one of them like portrays him as like this
violent psychopath, and the reality is he was, like there
were pieces of that in him, and he is. He
is a crazy He's one of the craziest bastards to

(03:58):
ever be involved in American politics. But neither of them,
neither of them quite get it. I think what's most
fascinating about this weirdo. He is such a fucking weirdo.
And so you know, there's plenty of Watergate podcasts like
you can. You can spend a whole week learning about Watergate,
listening to like five different fucking shows on the matter.

(04:19):
I really just wanted to focus on on g Gordon Liddy,
both because I grew up. He was definitely on the
radio a lot when I was a kid, so I
have a lot of experience with mister Liddy, but also
he is he's the proto type of all of these
fucking right wing media freaks that we are deluged with today,

(04:41):
think like and they're all They're all aping g Gordon Liddy,
Stephen Crowder, you know, whenever he wears his fucking shoulder
holster to go, you know, be a little fucking abusive
prick on his on his dumb ass fucking political YouTube
show or whatever. I guess he's on Rumble now, Alex Jones,
when he like lie about all these hardcore violence he's

(05:02):
done and how tough he is, how he could kill
a man without blinking, you know, Enrique Tario talking about
how like you know, oh, I don't regret anything ha
ha ha. Oh, please don't throw me in prison for
twenty two years, mister Jeff. Like, they are all aping
aspects of g. Gordon Liddy, but none of them. None
of them have what Liddy had in the center. None

(05:23):
of them are number one, none of them are actually
as committed. They're all grifters. And Lyddy had some grifter
in him. But Lyddy was a believer. He was a
believer in terrible things like but he was he was
not like, he was not like all of those the
guys I just named are completely hollow in their center.
Lily was not. Now the center of him was something

(05:44):
like dark and evil and like unsettling and greasy, but
there was there was mass there, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Like yeah, yeah, I mean you're still yeah, certain kinds
of dark chocolate, but the darkest of chocolate, I get you, right,
That's the innovation is or I guess right, that's what
makes you the og is like actually believing the shit
as yea being like a clear shill.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah he's he was not just a shill. I mean
that was a part of him. And in fact he's
like one of I think he might be the first
of these guys to like really get into shilling gold.
So that's interesting. He's fascinating again. There's there's there's both.
There's some weight to him, there's a degree he's he's
an original too. All of these guys are very much

(06:28):
consciously aping g Gordon Liddy, and Liddy was an original figure.
You know. The other thing that's interesting about Liddy is
that he wrote an autobiography and it is like number
one most of the time. When you get these guys
who are at the center of like a massive politic,
you think, think about the Trump administration, right, how within
like a month or two of him. Honestly, like while

(06:49):
he was still in office, there were fucking books coming
out left and right. As soon as one of these
guys would get fired, right, you know, somebody would get
like two million dollars and hooked up with a ghost
writer about it being Badaboo. You've got you know, fucking
the Mooch's memoir about his weekend the Trump White Ats
or whatever. Yeah, the room where it happens, starring some

(07:09):
guy whose name I've already fucking forgotten. Yeah, from Twitter,
from from from all these fucking weirdos. But it was like,
you know, these are cash grabs. Right, most of these
are cash grabs. You know. Again, you're you're sort of
stretching out someone who probably doesn't have that much that's
interesting to say. So you can get a couple of
anecdotes that will go viral in like a Business Insider article,

(07:32):
and you're just kind of hoping that, like, yeah, the
the the fame of the administration will make the book
worth whatever they're paying for it. Lyddy's there's a lot
of that for Watergate. Right, all of these guys write books,
you know. John Deane's got his fucking book, you know,
And Lyddy writes a book after he gets out of prison.
Lyddy writes his own book. And it is like I

(07:56):
read part of what I do is I like read anytime,
you know, I'm one of these bastards and they've written
a book about their life. I'll get in there. I
have never read a crazier autobiography than she Gordon Liddi's.
And it is it is pure Lyddy. Right, we're not
talking about this is not like, you know, adulterated by
some fucking publishing house trying to massage his image. He's

(08:18):
trying to massage his image sure at points, but like
it is, it is a it's like that. You know,
we did for about a year, you know, off and
on my friend's Katie Cody and I would talk about
Ben Shapiro's novel because like when once some somebody writes
a novel, you can't not learn things about them, right
from that process. You get so much more with Lyddie's

(08:38):
Saudo biography. So episode one is largely going to be
us reading through his depiction of his early life and childhood,
and I will be fact checking it wherever I can.
There's a lot I can't fact check, right because Liddy's
talking about like what he was thinking and feelings like
an eight year old, right, I can't. I don't have
outside I'm not gonna like refer to John Dene's hire,

(09:00):
you know, but we will bring it out. You know,
I read Dean's memoir for this too. I read a
book called King Richard. You know, We've got a bunch
of other sort of a number of other sources on
like the Watergate stuff and on his career before Watergate
was in the FBI. But for this early part, we're
just gonna be Lyddy. You know that that's gonna be

(09:23):
a significant amount of what we talk about. So without
further ado, I guess I should roll roll in with this.
Are you ready to learn about Let's get Lyddy? Sorry
about our best Republican Yeah, that's that's the thing is
g Gordon Lyddy would be such a great name for
like like a SoundCloud wrapper. That's the real tragedy. Yeah, yeah,

(09:45):
he was born too early. Tragedy.

Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, Daniel, can you can you add just like a
let's get Lyddy and then can you add just like
some really awesome sound effect here?

Speaker 1 (09:54):
Please? Sure, let's get Lyddy. I don't understand this, but
I'm gonna soldier Dane will understand the reference because he's
Lyddy would have wanted me to soldier forward. He never
thought about what was happening either. George Gordon battle Liddy

(10:16):
was born on November thirtieth, nineteen thirty in Brooklyn, New York.
His father, Sylvester, was a lawyer and stockbroker. He would
eventually be one of the men responsible for bringing Volvo
to the United States. So we have G. Gordon, but
he his dad to thank for American Volvos. If you're
a Volvo driver. His mother Maria. That's not nothing. His mother,

(10:39):
Maria was a homemaker. Now I just read his name
Gordon Battle lyddy, given the fact that he is a
violent madman as an or at least he puts on
the image of a violent madman as an adult, I'm
gonna guess everyone's wondering, like, what the fuck is the
story behind that name? But like, the fact is, as
far as I can tell, his parents weren't like nuts, right,

(11:02):
And the story here is actually like pretty tame. It's
kind of interesting, but it's not like wild. He's named
his namesake is a was a New York lawyer and
Democratic politician named George Gordon Battle, which is a pretty
cool guy, a pretty cool name, and he seemed to
have been a pretty cool guy. He was defense attorney

(11:24):
for Earl Browner, who was the head of the US
Communist Party. He helped raise money for a number of
really good causes. He was the chairman of the National
Committee on Prison Labor Reform, and he's one of the
men who fought hard to stop Central Park from being
developed right from like it being replaced with like buildings
and shit. Right. He was childless, but he spent his

(11:45):
entire working life fighting to add more public playgrounds to
New York City. If you grew up in New York
City and spent time on a playground, Gordon Battle George
Battle has a lot to do with that, and in
the late nineteen twenties, seeing what was going on in Europe,
came a tireless opponent of anti Semitism for the last
act of his life. So yeah, like a pretty cool guy,

(12:06):
smart psychond tell this might key you into the fact
that g Gordon Liddy's parents were not politically the kind
of people you might expect to likese raise a fascist,
political criminal right Like, they were not, Like, it's not
one of these cases where you've got like, you know,

(12:26):
super hard right family who's like really mentally abusive to
their kid, and you're just like, I see why this
dude grew up to be a piece of no. Like, again,
they're not perfect people, Like we'll cover some of that,
but they seem to have not been the folks you
might expect, right, and the story of how they wound
up raising this maniac anyway is fascinating. So he grows
up affluent, his family is kind of upper middle class

(12:49):
when he's a little kid, and like Rich by the
time he's in his teens, I think would be fair
to say Liddy's despite the affluence, Liddy's early childhood was
not pleasant. This was not due specifically primarily to his parents' actions,
but rather to a quirk of his psychology. He was
terrified of everything. Now, in his defense, his world was frightening.

(13:13):
The world of nineteen thirty is a scary place to
be a child, and this was kind of exacerbated by
the fact that the family home lay directly underneath the
path of the Hindenburg Zeppelin. So as a little kid,
his earliest memory is this monster in the sky, just
like barreling over his house making this terrifying noise. In

(13:37):
his autobiography, he recalls being just absolutely piss horrified by
the quote bloated shapes, swelling and roaring with incredible power
as it came on and on, trapping me in the
bottom of the box and blotting out the sky. The
box in this instance is his backyard and hoboken with
a family moved soon after his birth. But like, yeah,
that's his earliest memory is like the Hindenburg, terrifying. There's

(14:00):
like a dragon in the sky ampuk it he was
now he may be lying about he was not yet
two when this happened, and like, so I always kind
of a little grain assault when people talk about remembering
shit that happens with their two but it does. People
do remember shit from that time, so not impossible. And
I guess I don't know why he would lie about this. Yeah, yeah,

(14:20):
it's always like the world's most awful people are the
world's most scared people in a way that it's like, so,
you know, it would be cute if you didn't give
these people half the you know, any of the power
they have. This is this is why we need to
be so careful about like not giving people power, because yeah,

(14:41):
you can't. You never know what's going on you want.
You see, like a kid at the playground, that kid
could be brewing up some Hitler particles, right, Like, you
never know what's going on in their heads. So I'm
going to read a quote from his autobiography here. I
had been walking for six months, but due to the
concern of my mother, I hadn't yet spoken an intelligible

(15:02):
word I beget or to the concern of my mother,
I hadn't yet spoken an intelligible word. I began to
speak immediately to articulate my first memory, absolute overwhelming fear.
So he starts speaking to try to express to his
mom how scared he is of the Zeppelin now. His
second memory comes in the spring of nineteen thirty four,

(15:23):
when he and his mother and sister had moved to
d C temporarily. Their grandfather was dying of terminal cancer,
and Sylvester wanted to care for his father. I think
he didn't want the family to have to be there.
Maybe their grandpa didn't want his grandkids to see him
like that. But while he was there, he experienced like,
while you know, he's living with his mom in d C,

(15:44):
there's like a fire drill at the building they're living,
like a surprise fire drill, and he's too young to
really understand it. So he recalls experiencing absolute overwhelming fear. Quote.
The early memories that follow are still fragmented, but the
theme is common. Lying on the floor, or as my
paternal grandmother lashed me with a leather harness, shouting bad,
bad fear, my mother insisting I not use my left

(16:07):
hand as she forced me into right handedness, and my
inability to understand why more Fear rounding the corner and
coming upon a truck mounted vacuum, a giant air hose
sneaking across the sidewalk from a huge bag suction engine
rolling as it cleaned the flus of coal furnaces, running
from the sound, and the threat no certainty that I
would be sucked inside the monster bag. Fear soon My

(16:28):
every waking moment was ruled by that overriding emotion, fear.
So you've got this mix of like, yeah, understandable stuff, like, yeah,
his grandma was, you know, very aggressive with her punishment
of him. I don't think uncommonly so for the area,
but like that's a scary thing to deal with. His
mom didn't want him to be left handed, and like

(16:48):
that scared him. And then like just shit, he and
these like nightmare vacuums driving around cleaning out flues and shit,
you know, he's just scared of everything as a kid.
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
That also, though, I will say, having said the last thing,
I guess if he's taking all these pains to I
guess I'm just so conditioned to assume he's like a
lying lunatic that if he's trying to convince us how
scared he was.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Now I'm thinking he simply wasn't. I mean maybe right,
Like that's the thing, one way or the other. He
does say a lot about him, but like, right, I
don't know, I don't know why he would lie about
this in particular. I guess, you know, because it builds
to something later. But like, yeah, I don't find this unbelievable.
Like when I was elementary school, I had a teacher

(17:33):
who like would harass me about using my left hand right,
like that was not an uncommon thing back, especially for Catholics. Right,
if it's written to it, this is like post jail,
though I guess it's like it's nineteen eighty.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
He writes, this is like this is how I'm trying
to justify my the way I am. That that would
be my only thought as to, yeah, whether or not
it's a lie. But the emphasis this yeah, because the
other counterpoint is everything he described is very COVID. Yeah,
a lot of people are afraid of those things. I

(18:07):
don't see how you're more afraid of those things.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
A lot of kids grow I think what's interesting is
sort of his reaction to the fear. But he he
has as we'll talk about he develops a I don't
think the fear that he has is abnormal, because a
lot of kids get scared of weird shit. I think
his his obsession with like his fear as a failure,
a moral failing for him is the thing that is

(18:31):
interesting to look what I Yeah, that is kind of
where we're going here. So he's also a sickly kid.
He has probably I think it would be asthma, and
so his his treatment for this is that he would
spend hours every day in a tint in his bedroom
breathing medicated steam with a mustard plast, a mustard plast

(18:53):
on his chest. The gold there was to relieve mucus congestion,
to stop his persistent cough. And it's here I should
note some of the something, which is that g Gordon
Lyddy and I actually have a lot in common because
I had the I had the modern version of that.
When I was a kid, I had asthma and I
would have to spend hours almost every night hooked up
to this weird machine the size of a projector that

(19:14):
like pumped all butterol missed into my lungs. Like that
was like a thing that I had to do as
a little kid. I was like reading that was weird
because I was like, oh, yeah, I've been through that,
you know, and it's not I think Liddy's certainly that's
Liddy's experience. Seems like it was more physically unpleasant, but
even like mine was not painful, but it is this

(19:35):
weird thing that kind of separates you from like other kids,
from your your your brothers and sisters, from your your
family members, you're and stuff like the fact that you
have to spend all this time like attached to this machine,
like I'm sure it also to do something, you know,
a sick yeah, yeah, yeah, in order to keep breathing right. Yeah. Yeah.
My asthma was ever that bad.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
But I did have a trip where I came back
and yeah, I had the I I think they had
a manual version of this at the at the urgent Care,
which was just like, I don't know, a fucking fire
extinguishers volume, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
What we need. I don't understand why these don't exist.
Andrew is our butterol cigarettes. I would smoke those still,
you know, I want I just want to I just
want to chain smoke for health. You know, it's.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Probably not impossible to get a little vape cartridge of LB.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Just just vaping out bututerol. Like you know, I just
blow it. I'm still health about you fuckers.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
Blowing steroid clouds, steroid cotton.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
This is a fifty to fifty mix of al butterol
and tobacco. Oh my god, that would make my flavor.
That would burst my heart. Yeah, it seems healthy. So yeah,
he's got this experience, and I think, probably to a degree,
separates him from it. And you have to when you're
doing this. Lyddy is always a guy who lives inside

(21:02):
his head to a significant extent. He's and that's part
of why he's so unhinged, as he's always he's thinking
about like very strange things all the time. His mind
is like NonStop going in these kind of manic circles.
That is part of why he becomes like the plotter
that he becomes. And I think, you know, given that
I went through something similar, I kind of might tie

(21:24):
some of it back to that, Like it's hard not
to just sort of get stuck in your own head
a lot when you have that as an early life experience.
His grandpa dies in thirty five and the family moves
back to Hoboken together, you know, and he's he you know,
is a is a weird little kid, he recalls being

(21:45):
because he's kind of raised in the city and the suburbs,
absolutely terrified of the natural world. As a little kid,
nature was so alien to him that like one of
his earliest fears is the fact that moths would arrive
at nighttime. Quote. I had been frightened for the first
time a moth fluttered against my bedroom window on a
warm summer night, the light through a giant shadow on

(22:06):
the opposite wall, terrifying me, frantic screams, then my mother
explaining it was just a harmless moth or perhaps a miller.
From that moment on, the night was filled with giant
moth millers out to get me. I knew it. So
my fear grew each to experience breeding more so he's
by at least if you believe his sort of yah
recitation of events, he is just stacking up these like

(22:28):
very normal experiences that are deeply traumatizing to him.

Speaker 2 (22:32):
And like, yeah, I guess it's like, I mean, right now,
I see what you're saying about, Like why would he
make this up?

Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, in this detail and this like yeah, I think
some of this must be true. Is does he play
it up? Sure? I mean, that's the kind of guy
that he is, you know. And I also think I'm
certain the way you know, this happens to all of
us to some extent over time. You know, your memories,
you think on them, you change them, you tell stories.

(23:01):
You know, maybe you jazz something up for a story
you tell somebody, and like that makes it into your memory. Right,
So I think there's probably just something obviously as happens
to most people, because I do think he probably believes
a lot of this, whether or not it's all literally true.
Another one of his most searing in a literal sense

(23:22):
early moments is later that same summer, you know, where
he becomes terrified of moths. His parents take him camping
in the woods, maybe to try to get him over
that fear. And in the morning, he's like poking around
their campfire spot and he picks up a coal that
he doesn't realize is burning, and it like hurts him.
It burns his hand. Now, I think most kids have
a version of that. I burnt myself in a car

(23:43):
lighter by accident when I was a kid. We used
to have those and if you're a gen z kid.
We used to have cigarette lighters built into every car.
If you want to know how much your grandparents smoked.
That was just the world for a while. Yeah, yeah,
and electronic like lighter yeah, flame. No, he popped out

(24:04):
of the car and I'll light your cigarette.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
I tried to pick up a spent sparkler moments after
it had got out.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, it's not wise again, almost a I'm gonna guess
very close to one hundred percent of people listening, whether
or not they remember it. At a moment like this,
it's basically every kid you know touches something hot at
some point and hurts themselves. Lyddy describes this as investing
in him a pathological fear of both fire and pain,
and his suffering increased when his doctor prescribed him regular

(24:35):
hypodermic injections for his respiratory I think these are allergy shots,
which I also got as a kid. So again, this
becomes like this constant regular because he's doing this every month.
This is just like this endless fucking train of horror
for him, where like he's just constantly dreading the next
time he's gonna go get this shot and deal with

(24:55):
this pain. Right at the same time, he develops you
know what's to be his worst childhood terror, which is
a fear of God. Again very common. His family is
this poor kid is just miserable. His family is super Catholic,
and he goes to a Catholic school that Lyddy refers
to exclusively as SS. I believe the s's stand for

(25:19):
it's it's the Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church. I
think the two s's are Saint Peter and Saint Paul.
But he's also he talks about the Naziss constantly in
this in moments where it has nothing to do with
what he's like referencing, Like, he loves bringing up the SS.
So I don't think anyone else called the school this,
I think you is just he found it another way

(25:41):
he could write SS out and so he had to
do it.

Speaker 2 (25:45):
I mean that's another thing the modern loves to do
is just remind you that zis just a little bit.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Oh, Andrew Hitler didn't love the Nazis as much as
g Gordon Lyddy did. This guy, Ah, it's so funny.
Here's how he describes his religious upbringing. Quote, God we
were informed was omnipotent, unlimited power, demanded and deserved the
utmost reverence and deference, and left no room for a

(26:15):
sloppily performed sign of the cross. An imprecise sign of
the cross was an insult to God, punishable by a
sudden crack on the head from monitoring nuns. Such punishment
was to be received gratefully, otherwise retribution might come from
God himself. The retribution of Almighty God for a sloppily
made sign of the cross was terrible. Only last year
we were solemnly assured a lazy, a reverent, careless boy

(26:38):
had made a sloppy sign of the cross while saying
his nightly prayers. The good nuns alas were not present
to crack him on the head, and as God was
not one to let such a sin go unpunished. The
next morning, the little boy found his right arm withered, twisted,
and paralyzed for life. Ah yeah, I love the Catholic shit.

(27:01):
Such ah so funny, My God just ruining children, just
just going off like a bomb in millions of childhoods
around the world.

Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah for making the gang sign, Lazil.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, fucking up to get the Catholic gang sign.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
Like what the fuck are you talking about God? You
do this all the what God has so much time?

Speaker 1 (27:26):
Yeah, yeah, imagine like it's so hard for me to
get into the head of someone who is like, yes,
God is constantly watching small children to see if they
make like a minor mistake in the positioning of their hands,
and he will cripple them for life for doing so.
Like yeah, because like none of them ever frame it
as like, yeah, you know, I'm a Catholic because God's

(27:48):
fucking nuts, like this is the only way to avoid
his anger, like fuck, fuck the guy, but I just
don't want to death, Like yeah, I'd like I'm a
little bit more, you know, if people prefer to do
him a little bit more like a mob boss, like yeah,
if you don't pay your protection, he's gonna fuck you up.
What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?
What are you gonna do? It's got I guess there

(28:11):
are some people who talk about him that way, but
usually it's all dressed up and anyway whatever. Well, salvation
are the ones that are like, if there is a God,
what's preventing you from raping and murdering? And and that
those are the people you have to look at the
hardest because you're like, uh, I mean I could think
of things man a lot. I don't really want to
do those things. I guess it's. Yeah, So whether or

(28:35):
not he exaggerated his experience here, and I don't think
he did. I know some people, including my dad, who
grew up Catholic in this, well, my dad was, you know,
not this old, but like I've known people who were
kind of from you know, around that period of time
and raised in Catholic schools, and like you get stories
like this from the nuns. A lot of old Catholics

(28:55):
have horror stories from the nuns. And yeah, the fact
that Liddy's like like living in fucking constant fear of
God is not like when I was a kid, I
had a period of time I went through like that.
We're like I would just be terrified because I'd like
killed a bug or something while playing and like, oh
my god, if I like damned myself to hell for eternity.
You shouldn't tell kids about stuff like that, you know. Well,

(29:18):
it's the same as.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Like dare too because the and you're like, oh.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
None of this matters, I'm gonna murder all the bugs
fucking you know, I'm the reason there aren't any fucking
fireflies anymore. I wiped them all out, you know, just
just just to spite the Lord got them anyway. Speaking
of genocide, you know who else likes wiping out? You know,
the natural world in order.

Speaker 2 (29:46):
To extinctions doesn't have to be ansde every gedocide.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, yeah, not every genocide, but some you know, some genocides. Yes,
his ads, we're back so so far, most of Liddy's

(30:10):
experiences in the world have been terrifying and negative. But
he did have one shining really, he had two shining
things that one of them is reading. He becomes a
reader from an early age. He finds himself particularly in
love with like a lot of this kind of colonial fiction,
Ruyard Kipling and the like, you know, the stuff you
would expect. And then the other thing that he has

(30:31):
he viewed as kind of a wholly positive thing from
his childhood was patriotism. The nuns, he said, introduced him
to authority, first God and then the flag. After morning prayers,
they would pledge allegiance to the flag. And you know,
the nuns were as strict about this as anything else.
Here's how he writes about learning how to do the

(30:51):
pledge of allegiance. We stood at rigid attention, facing the flag,
in lines straight enough to rival those of the mast
SS and Lenny rievenstalls triumph of the will began at
the words to the flag. We shot out our right
arms and unison palms down straight as so many spears
aimed directly at the flag. It was the salute of

(31:12):
Caesar's legions, recently popular in Germany, Italy and Spain. Is
that not true? Oh yeah, no, there you can find
pictures of American schools. It was not like universal, but
it was not wildly uncommon for kids in some schools
and some you know, fucking especially some private schools to
do the fascist salute, you know, which was previously the

(31:35):
Roman salute, right, or at least a variant of it. Yeah,
so it's not like other kids have this experience, right,
there's no reason you think he's lying about this. It
is insane that he just like he has he's described
because he's describing it as like the SS. But he
doesn't mean that in like a negative sense like he has.
There's at no point does he like think about this

(31:57):
kind of fucked up to do that? Is it bad?
If we look at like where the Nazis win. Does
it may be bad to do this with kids? Absolutely
not for a second. Does g Gordon Lyddy consider that
he was organized? We were as organized as thes, my friends,
my buddies, the ssh what a maniac. So, oh my god,

(32:19):
this is where we should introduce his second mother, the
family housekeeper, a German immigrant named Toresa. Now, if you've
had like rich or very upper middle class friends, you know,
when you were a kid, you may have like known
someone who had like a nanny, a full time nanny,
sometimes even a live in nanny who like helped raise

(32:39):
them as a kid. I had a friend who grew
up in a similar circumstance and expressed to me at
one point that it was like really confusing to him
as a little kid because he kind of didn't know
entirely whether this was his mom or his mom was
his mom, because like the nanny did a lot more.
And I'm like, oh, that was like, yeah, that is
kind of a weird thing to put a kid through, right,

(33:02):
And there's this moment that kids like that tend to
have where they like realize this person who is kind
of a mom to them is an employee of their parents, right,
is there because they're being paid. It's taking care of
them because they're being paid, And like that can mess
you up a bit. In Gordon's case, this is going
to mess him up a lot because Teresa is also

(33:22):
a literal Nazi. She is a German immigrant to the
United States. She's absolutely obsessed with the Nazis. With Hitler,
she tells him all of these wonderful stories of her homeland, Germany,
all of these different myths and legends, and she talks
to him constantly about this terrible war that Germany went

(33:43):
through before he was born, and how afterwards the country
fell into chaos. But now a hero has arisen and
is in the process of saving the German nation. Quote.
Great roads were being built, and unlike in the United States,
everyone in German and he now had a job. My
mother had won an Emerson shortwave radio in a raffle

(34:04):
at Sspeter and Paul Parrish and Teresa and I would
listen to programs broadcast from her native land, the volume
swelling and receding in cycles. Now Lyddy had listened to
FDR on the radio like most Americans in the Great Depression,
and he had found some comfort in that saying, we
have nothing to fear but fear itself as a scared

(34:24):
little kid, but nothing in his life up to that
point had inspired or influenced him the way his first
Hitler speech did. This is the defining moment of his childhood.
Now in his autobiography, Lyddy claims to have had a
memory like a tape recorder. Given how bad he actually
is as a spy, I think he's lying about this,

(34:45):
but he claims. He claims that he can replay audio
perfectly in his head and like sometimes an involuntary switch
will throw and he'll hear music that will like launch
him into a certain emotional state. I don't know the
degree to which I think that he's telling the truth
about this, But also, I'm gonna read you this paragraph.
I don't know fully why you would lie about this.

(35:07):
Oh my god. The music that poured through the Emerson
from Germany was marshal and inspiring. I lost myself and
its strains. It made me feel a strength inside I
had never known before from playmates who were German, I
learned some of the language. One day, Teresa was excited
he was going to be on the radio just wait
till I hear him speak eagerly. I joined her at

(35:28):
the Emerson. First, the music, the now familiar strains of
a song that started defan Hoch raise the banner. It
was a rousing, powerful anthem, the horsted Vessel song. Now, Cambrew,
we got to take a second here, do you know
what the horse vessel lied is? No, it's the horse
vessel song. Horst. So back during the rise of the

(35:49):
Nazi Parties, before Hitler's in power, Joseph Goebbels, the future
Propaganda Minister, ran the party's Berlin operations, and a big
part of his plan was to Winstan get a series
of running fights and raids with communists and social Democrats
in order to spark media condemnation of chaos and disrupt
the organizing of the party's enemies. Right, he's both trying

(36:11):
to get like the media flipping out about like, ah,
there's so much chaos. We really need a law and
order guy in office, and also trying to like physically
murder and hurt, you know, two for one. So you
do the violence and then you step into self the violence. Now,
one of Joe's top thugs is a guy named Horst

(36:33):
vessel and Horst is a construction worker. He is a
low level gangster and a pimp. He is running a
prostitution racket out of his apartment, and his landlady, he
was a widow of a Communist party member, is scared
that she will lose the apartment if the police catched
Horset running an illegal business out of it. Now, there
is a debate about precisely what happened, but the generally

(36:55):
accepted story is that Horst refused to pay his rent
and threatened to beat his landlady. She goes to a
local Communist bar to get some of her husband's old
friends to help her evict him. Horst was also an
assault leader for Joseph Goebbels, so go you know. He
was known for running vicious raids on these very poor
Berlin neighborhoods where he would beat people nearly to death.

(37:16):
The Communists that his landlady goes to had been victimized
by Horse before and they knew about him. So when
she comes to them and is like, this guy is
causing me problems, They're like, let's just fucking off this
son of a bitch. So they shoot the bastard in
the head Joseph Goebbels never want to let a murder
go to waste turns Horst into a martyred saint, and
his death is used as evidence of communist evil. The

(37:39):
song that g Gordon Liddy like is listens to and
is like inspired by as a child, was written in
the honor of this, like Murderer and Pimp, and became
the official anthem of the Nazi Party. So that's what
he's listening to. Right, Oh, yeah, God, he's like eight, right,
he's eight or nine.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
You know what's so interesting about this is it really
puts like paid to the and like this is obvious
to anyone who's not a fucking idiot, but like, you know,
people growing up. It's like, you know, I grew up
in like Reagan times and it's like, oh, the sanitization
of Reagan and like, oh, Republicans aren't Like Republicans today

(38:20):
are really bad, but they weren't always like this. We
used to be able to get along. And like not
if you're alive today, not one person alive today has
been a party to a right wing that was quote reasonable.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
No, no, this is like goes back a very far time.
Like this is not well, I mean, honestly, if you
lived in fucking Portland through twenty twenty, we had a
fucking right wing gangster get killed. Here. That like not
an uncommon story to what happened with Horst. But g
Gordon Liddy as a small child, loves this song about
a dead Nazi pimp. But he loves Hitler's voice even more.

(38:56):
He was again, is this kid whose entire life is
feel who was absolutely overwhelmed by terror all day? According
to him, Uh, he is drawn by the pure confidence
in Hitler's voice. Here was the very antithesis of fear, sheer,
animal confidence and power of will. He sent an electric
current through my body, and as the massive audience thundered

(39:18):
its absolute support and determination, the hair on the back
of my neck rose, and I realized that I had
stopped breathing. And this is like the moment that teaches him.
He has this like powerful realization of like you can
conquer fear, and like sets him on this course to like,
you know, conquer it, like to become the master of
his fear in his pain, just like Hitler.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
That's so wild. It's so wild that you would admit
this shit like this.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
And it is it's weird, like again that you would
put this in a book after fucking yeah, to launch
your career as a talk show hosts.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
This is basically same the same people that like respond
to like Jordan Peterson.

Speaker 1 (40:00):
Yes, oh my god, he would have loved Jordan Peterson.

Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
But it's it's like in the way that like, I
feel like most Jordan Peterson fans you see now like
don't admit that this is what they're driven by. That's
so weird to hear it so baldly said like this,
That's the thing. All of these modern guys, a lot
of these like modern right wing media people are basically Nazis,
have friends who are literal Nazis, like the Signpost shit,

(40:26):
you know, they'll do the Fuintest stuff. But even Flintes,
even Nick Fuintes, doesn't write shit like this. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it is like remarkable that you would just put
this down. It's fascinating. Liddy never is going to shed
this deep fascination with Hitler in the Nazis. It's almost
like a fucking what's the word here, It's almost like

(40:47):
a fucking syndrome for him, right, Like it's a reflex
like bringing up the Nazis, like, he can't help it,
you know. And again he would always claim he never
claims to be a Nazi, right, he would say, obviously
Hitler was a monster. I learned later they had gone far,
you know, much too far, and like you know, had
to be stopped. And on most fascists who said this,
I would be like, oh, this is just a shallow

(41:08):
attempt to allay suspicion. Lyddy's case is weirder because, for
one thing, he's admitting all of this when he doesn't
need to. He is absolutely no doubt, in my mind,
a bone deep fascist rights has died in the wole
it committed, a fucking fascists has ever existed, you know,
this alt he is an ultimate follower. He's like a

(41:28):
born henchman in constant search for a fearer. But I
actually think he's not lying when he says he doesn't
consider himself fully a Nazi. And I the reason why
is very simple. It's his dad, right. He worshiped his father,
so Sylvester Liddy was his son's hero. And in his
autobiography over and over again he repeats this belief that,

(41:49):
like his dad, is almost incapable of error, and his
dad hates Nazis, and it's one of those things. Liddy's
definitely a fascist. His dad hatred of Nazi. If you've
you've seen that meme of like the cheeto stuck in
the place of like the the lock. Oh yeah, yeah,
Like that's the one thing keeping him from like just
becoming a full on neo Nazi. I guess, I.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Guess that is the thing that is translated to the
modern right wing too, is like like they espouse everything
the Nazis.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Believe they are friendly neo.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Nazis, but will also say shit like well like socialism
is the real you know, they love a national socialist
part or like the Democrats are the real Nazis, and
you're like, I mean, they really just have it both ways.
They like recognize Nazi is a bad thing to be
but they don't recognize or they recognize that the word

(42:48):
nazis a bad thing to be called.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
It's I think with Lyddy, I think what interests me
about him is that the conflict is a little different because,
like number one, most of the guys that you're talking
talking about would never admit to like having this much
admiration of Hitler in the Nazis right, because it would
be giving away too much, right right. I don't know
how to characterize the exact nature of his belief, but

(43:13):
I do kind of think it's one of those like
he was his entire life ready to fully embrace Hitler
in the Nazis. It was just his respect for his
dad holding back like this tiny this like creaking broken down,
damn holding back the flood of Nazi water. And in fact,
so when his you know, Gordon hears his first Hitler

(43:36):
speech and he like goes to his dad to be like,
I've just heard the most incredible guy. And when Sylvester
is like, wait are you talking about Hitler? No, no, no, no,
fuck that dude. He is a monster. He's going to
lead the world and do a horrible, horrible war. You
are not allowed to listen to him anymore. And I
kind of wonder if his dad hadn't been this guy,
does Liddy just become like a full on Nazi like

(43:59):
his he marching with like fucking George Lincoln Rockwell, like
completely you know, swastika mask off, you know, fucking doing
shots with David Duke. Yeah right, yeah, probably, yes, maybe
there's a good shit. Similarly, that that's.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Like the type of thing that was like again quote
unquote acceptable at the time, or it was like a
you know in the time, it was a type of
political expression that was like.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah, you know, I don't know, this is like the weirdest,
like characterizing this exactly is the weirdest part to me here.
So you know, so again, very young Liddy spends the
end of the nineteen thirties, when he is like eight
or nine, treating Hitler like a forbidden dessert, right, or
like a hidden playboy magazine. Right. He can't be caught

(44:49):
listening to him, right, And he will claim later this
isn't because I'm I loved Hitler's you know politics, It's
because I just found him magnetic. It's like we you
absolutely were in look at this politics. You are a
bone deep fact. No one has ever been more of
a fascist than ug Gordon Lyddy. It's really like like, yeah,
I like the I like the fucking what the confidence

(45:10):
and the auditory style. Yeah, I don't know, man, Broye,
there's other confident ass motherfuckers out there. So Teresa is
like a big influence on him in this because you know,
while he can't be caught in the open listening to
his Hitler speeches. It becomes this like thing that they share,
right that like when his dad's out and like no

(45:32):
one else is around, they'll listen to some Hitler speeches, right,
They'll turn on the radio and like sneak it together.
And again, she is the primary female influence in his
early childhood. And like, I don't know, I think actually
honestly reading this, I thought back to how when I
was a little kid and my mom was out of town,
my dad and I would watch like South Park, right,
which I wasn't allowed to watch, but like my dad

(45:52):
would kind of you know, And that's a powerful thing
as a kid, you know, whatever it is for you,
Like if you've got like an adult in your life,
who will be like, hey, you know, normally, you know,
I had to watch you know, horror movies. But let's
put on Friday the thirteenth or whatever. Just been the
rest of your life you love fucking you know, horror
movies or whatever. Like for him, that's Hitler, then that's
the experience he has. That's like woman who raises him.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
You know, let's get on, let's get what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
Adoll Hitler. Now, obviously fascists are bad at estimating risk,
and Teresa was not careful enough with her attempts to
propagandaize this kid. Eventually h Sylvester catches them. Quote it
was bad enough that he would come home on warm
days to the voice of Joseph Goebbel's booming sonorously from

(46:39):
the Emerson worst when he found our address was on
the German embassy mailing list for Nazi propaganda. The Hindenburg, however,
was the last straw. The problem was that Teresa did
not accept the official crash explanation, but static electricity ignited
hydrogen being vinted as part of the landing procedure. She
was certain the Hindenburg had been sabotaged by the United States.

(47:00):
This is it, Hindenburgh truth there, that's okay, this is
so true. That's so wild about this is like this
is his autobiography. Yes, yes, he's writing all of this out.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
You could, if you wanted to, for instance, attempt to
rehabilitate your image in the nineteen eighties, simply just say,
you know, I was a sickly child, and I loved
fucking the rate, I love the radio. But then in
you know, that could all of everything that you've said
so far could be two and a half sentences and
starts wherever the shit that's relevant.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Yes, well that's kind of why I believe a lot
of this, right because like there's definitely he lies for
a number of especially when we get to Watergate. There's
like a lot of shit that he just like is
bullshit that he brings up about like John Dene and stuff,
like a lot of stuff that is not true in
this that is like legacy making, myth making. But like,
I don't know what why of lying the first How

(48:02):
does this help you?

Speaker 3 (48:03):
G Gordon Lyndy, Like the fascists are already on your side. Yeah,
Like so like this may just be yeah, we thought
this would be your This is to try to like
broad in the audience a little bit, get a little
like you know, some ragged Democrats whatever, No fuck is this.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
This is something unique, something totally unique, and you know
what else is unique? And sponsors of our podcast, none
of whom were raised by a Nazi. Well probably probably
most of whom were not raised by Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
There's some real a list sponsors you could get, though,
were definitely raised by.

Speaker 1 (48:44):
The Reagan coin. People might have been raised by a Nazi?
Is that ed Eddie Volkswagon, you know, buyer sponsored this fucker. Sure,
hopefully Volvo pops in or something. You know, we're back.

(49:09):
So Sylvester not a perfect dad, right, But his reaction
to all of this, everything that happens, does kind of
make me think that he was trying to do the
best he knew, how because when he when he like
comes in eventually, he like comes in on like Teresa
Rantick about how the Hindenburg was an inside job or whatever,
and he fires, he fires her, and he he eventually

(49:32):
he brings in a new maid, and he I think,
because he's so concerned that his son is becoming a Nazi.
The new maid he picks is a Jewish refugee named
Sophie who had just escaped Nazi Germany. And I think
his goal here is both like, give this refugee a
decent job, and also like, well maybe if my son
meets this woman who has been victimized by Hitler's reshime,

(49:52):
it will deradicalize him. I don't know. Again, we can
argue was that the right call, but I think he's
trying Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so tough. That's that's a
wild situation to be a day.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
I see what you're trying to do here, but that
could go so yeah, amazingly wrong.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
And Lyddy does not like her. He claims later he
came to like respect and you know, have empathy for her,
but he does not write about her very much, so
I don't know if that's true. In Hitler, Liddy continued
to see a totem of strength and icon to emulate
in purging his body and mind to fear and weakness
that he felt characterized his childhood. Now. While Liddy was

(50:34):
falling in love with Hitler, he had a few other
childhood heroes growing up. Quote frequently ill I was nursed
patiently by my mother, who used the occasions to teach
me the family history and various tales of personal courage
and accomplishment against odds. To keep from boring me by repetition,
she would make up stories of high valor, usually about
American Indians and their warriors ability to resist the most

(50:55):
horrible tortures without the slightest indication of discomfort. Among her
true story was that of Glenn Cunningham, a farm boy.
His legs were burned so badly he would never walk again,
and who became our national champion. In the mile of
family members, my mother's favorite was her older brother Raymond.
He too was slightly built, but that hadn't stopped him
from being the leader of all the boys in the neighborhood,

(51:15):
from fighting off much larger boys who tried to force
him from the Prime Street corner for selling magazines in Washington,
d c. From becoming an eagle scout, from putting himself
through Georgetown University and it's law school. I learned how
Uncle Ray had been there when John Dillinger was slain
in Chicago, how he was wounded at the gun battle
in which mab Barker and her gang were shot or captured,
and that he hadn't even noticed his wound until aft

(51:36):
of the battle and had not bothered to report it.
His Uncle Ray becomes an FBI agent, right, And to
be clear, there's not actually any evidence that Ray was
nearby when John Dillinger was killed, but this is probably
family law rather than Gordon lying. I think he does
grow up and taught this right. And I think Uncle
Ray is a giant piece shit and the fabulous too,

(51:57):
also a terrible influence. But this is so these two
things are critical to understand. Letty, he grows up like
afraid constantly, and like you know, just this like kid,
he's like short, he's small, he feels like he's weak,
and he's always scared. And his mom is constantly trying
to build him up by telling him stories about his
like great grandfather and his grandfather and like how good

(52:19):
his dad wasn't boxing and his uncle Raymond is killing
all these people. And this like drives him crazy a
little bit, right, Like the fact that the fact that
he feels like he has to become worthy of these
men who are in his genetic line, and he feels
like he's so weak and scared all the time. Like this,
this like fucks him up as a kid, right yeah, Yeah,

(52:41):
So he grows more and more ashamed of his perfectly
natural reactions to the world. Now, part of what incites
this is that he had, by this point read a
book by America First Leader Charles Lindberg, in which Lindbergh
discussed that he had picked his wife based on her
racial characteristics because he wanted them to breed genetic powerful
children together. So he has this sort of idea in

(53:03):
his head that like I come from a line of powerful,
like genetically powerful men, and it's my responsibility to become
worthy of the genes of my ancestors. Right and right
now I'm too weak. I'll never be worthy of breeding
with an Aryan princess if I don't conquer my fear

(53:25):
of the heroes.

Speaker 2 (53:26):
And you know what, to be fair, except for the
Aryan part.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Listen, why that's why you do half the shit you do,
you know, to just impress the person you want to fuck. Yeah, yeah,
well that's fair. In his case, it's like a theoretical person, right, yeah,
And he has to become worthy of the semen that
he's inherited from his dad and his uncle. So of

(53:50):
all the heroes in his childhood, his dad and his
uncle Ray are the living ones he actually knew. Ray
again is a short guy, but he's dating a model
and this model is much taller than him, which g
Gordon Liddy finds very attractive. He's always got kind of
a king for that. And he carried Ray would always,
you know, when he'd come over to see the family,
he would like always be wearing a gun and he

(54:11):
would brag about who he was carrying a thirty eight
super automatic there was powerful handgun in the world. Lyddy
repeats it a bunch. This is the most powerful handgun
in the world. My uncle has got the best gun
in the whole planet. That is a debatable claim handgun wise,
but I think he probably heard it from Ray and
repeated it all his life. Gordon grew obsessed with his
uncle's sight arm, and since this was the nineteen thirties,

(54:33):
gun safety was not a priority. Quote. One day, when
I was five, I slipped into Ray's room and found
it lodged in the lid of his suitcase. This was
a rarity. Not only was it something I feared, so
did everyone else. My curiosity got the better of my fear,
an uncommon occurrence. Quietly, I withdrew the pistol and examined it,
then managed to get the hammer back at the safety off.

(54:56):
Proud of this accomplishment, I walked into the room where
the adult sat Chadow to show them what I had found.
Uncle Ray spotted me immediately he knew the pistol was loaded.
Ray's rising He placed himself directly in front of the muzzle,
smiled warmly, then reached down and placed his finger between
the hammer and the firing bin. He grasped the piece
and gently disarmed me. This gun, he informed me quietly,

(55:17):
was his. He would get one for me soon. Thereafter
he did a pistol replica of the colt. So a
couple of livings there, Uncle Ray, I think maybe the
wrong thing to do is to give the kid who
has just stolen your gun and pointed it at some
adults an exact replica of that pistol. There might be
other lessons to teach first, is what I'm saying, right like,
don't point guns at the people.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
I mean, look, I guess I don't know the layout
of this living room either. By I don't feel like
Ray had to step right in front of the pistol
to do this stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Feel like he had other options. Yeah, come from the side.
Maybe don't leave a loaded and chambered thirty eight Super
in your fucking suitcase in your room with kids around. Ray.
You never know, Yeah, everyone was so drunk back then,
right Like, Yeah, you never know when you're gonna really

(56:08):
want to win the argument. No, exactly, you might, you could.
You might need that thirty eight Super at any moment. Yeah, So,
from what I can it's also very funny to be
because like today. Back then, you know, thirty eight Super
was one of the more power certainly one of the
most powerful handgun rounds that was available to people today.
The thing that's most famous for is like Cartel guys
love getting nineteen elevens plated in gold and thirty eight Super.

(56:31):
That's like the Cartel pistol, right, like if you want
to be yeah, Like it's like yeah, So that is
kind of amusing to me. All of this nonsense, this
like worship of men in his family, his like Hitler shit,
his constant fear, he he it leads him to have
this kind of like obsession with making a reality of

(56:55):
my genetic potential. That's the way he describes it, you know, right,
He's got to like he's got to fix himself so
that he can earn his genes. So this starts with
his first fear, the Hindenburg and its last runs before
the disaster, Lyddy had made his parents take him to
watch it so he could stand out underneath it and
force himself not to run away. His success in this

(57:16):
thrilled him, and it made him commit to conquering other fears.
Since he was scared of heights, he started hanging out
with a boy he knew who ran around on the
rooftops of nearby buildings do what you might call kind
of early parkourship. That boy also took Lyddy to the docks,
which is this like forbidden place with all these scary
foreigners in it. And on one occasion they're snooping around

(57:37):
a boat and they get yelled at and they both
run away, and Lyddy spends days beating himself up, like
he's almost like mortifying his skin because he's so ashamed
that he didn't like confront the guy or something instead
of running away from this sailor when he's breaking onto
a boat. Now, in order to deal with this, he
keeps going back to the boat, and his goal is
he just wants to hide on it near the saale

(58:00):
to prove that he's not scared of them. He conquers
this fear, but he earns a new one, which is
that there's these giant wharf rats around and one of
them like chases him off the boat, and he kind
of loses his mind in a panic. And for a
year or more, this tears at him, the fact that
he's like reacted with fear to these rats. But then
About a year later, when he's nine, the family cat

(58:21):
brings a dead rat into the house, and I don't
really know what to do here other than read you
what followed. The carcass was still warm and remarkably undamaged.
To demonstrate to myself my lack of fear, instead of
using a stick, I picked it up with my hands,
then looked for a place to bury it. As I
walked towards the trees in the back, I saw some
old bricks and got the idea for a test to

(58:41):
destroy forever any dread I still might harbor for rats.
I put the rat down and with the loose bricks
built a small enclosure in the gravel next to the garage.
I filled it with broken twigs, bark in small branches,
and went into the kitchen for matches. For the next hour,
I roasted the dead rat. Then I removed the burned
carcass with a stick and let it cool. With a
scout knife, I skinned it, then cut off and ate

(59:02):
the roasted haunches of the rat meat, this tasteless and stringy. Finally,
I dismantled the little fireplace and burned the rest of
the carcass. As I stamped down the earth over the
remnants of my meal. I spotted the cat Tommy. I
smiled as the thought occurred to me. From now on,
rats could fear me as they feared cats. After all,
I hate them too. Oh my god. If your child

(59:24):
has that experience, that's so far beyond serial killer shit.
Like serial killer shit is like torturing and animals. It's
not doing that. Sania's already dead, but in some ways
it's more alien and weird, like I must conquer the
rats will fear me if I've eaten them. Yeah, that's
what works.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
That's just so like also like totally cool to never
tell anyone that story.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
Yeah, that's a story you keep to yourself. Andrew's so
wild to say this out loud. This is this is
the thirties. Your parents are putting you in an institution
if you tell them that story. Yeah, I just right.
But that's what happens in the thirty that's just early
enough in the twentieth century or close enough to the
depression that like you might find one or two people

(01:00:13):
that it's like been their brother. Yeah, but not for
that reason, right, yes, yes, right, So if you hear
the whole thing, he will always be, you know, for
the rest of his childhood, obsessive with this need to
conquer various fears and prove himself a man. Now, the
thing that he wants to ultimately do, the number one way, really,

(01:00:34):
the only thing in his mind that's going to cure
him forever of this sort of like inadequacy syndrome he has,
is to go to war. Right That's the ultimate way
to prove that you're a man and worthy of your
genes is killing some people. And luckily for him, World
War two, you know, kicks off right around the time
he's starting to become, you know, an adolescent. Unfortunately for him,

(01:00:55):
he's like eleven or twelve when the US gets into it,
and there's at least like six years he's got a
weight before he's going to be able to enlist. His
only meaningful feeling about the war then, is not like
horror at all the people dying, you know, fear that
maybe his country will lose any of that. He's he's terrified.
His greatest fear is that he won't have time to

(01:01:15):
fight in it. He won't get to go to war, right, Like,
That's that's really what fucks him up. So while he
suffers through this torturous weight. He decides the rational thing
to do is to prepare himself to be a soldier,
and Gordon that meant one thing killing Now later in
life he is going to be famous for just absolutely

(01:01:36):
this guy. There's never been a dude who fetishized guns
more than G. Gordon Liddy or violence more than G.
Gordon LIDDI. But Lyddy is not. He's not naturally a
violent person. He's not someone to whom actually carrying out
violence is like a thing he's immediately comfortable with, right,
and so he's going to have He's going to dedicate,

(01:01:56):
like his adolescent years, to becoming comfortable with carrying out
violence for no good reason, right, not like violence he
needs to carry out because he's ashamed of the fact
that he's like not comfortable killing things. Now. The easiest
way in his mind to become comfortable with violence is
to get a gun and start shooting animals. But again, Sylvester,

(01:02:18):
his dad understands who his boy is and is like, no,
we're not getting you a gun. We are we are
absolutely not buying you a gun. You have to think
he knew his boy and was like, the last thing
this the last thing my Hitler loving child needs is
a firearm.

Speaker 2 (01:02:37):
I mean, there has to be some real concern when
this kid really wants to go fight a World War two.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
Which, yeah, the closest Sylvester will get is buying his
kid a Daisy bb gun. And this is also going
to prove an error because Liddy's a little too smart
for his own good. So he looks up at the
library the recipe for black powder and he starts making
his own gunpowder. He buys charcoal and sulfur and saltpeter

(01:03:08):
from the pharmacy, claiming his mother needs it for canning.
You can use sulfur and saltpeter, you can use for canning.
I think the charcoal was probably for the fire. And
then from a neighborhood kid, he says he buys a
six inch long section of gun barrel and twenty two
caliber that included a chamber, right, because you need the
chamber in order to make a gun the work. So
he saws off the barrel of his Daisy and he

(01:03:31):
attaches the twenty two barrel by friction fit, and then
he like basically he builds this into a functioning twenty
two caliber rifle using like it's very janky, Like it's
got like a plunger fire type situation here, Like it
sounds like a very dangerous and inaccurate firearm. But it

(01:03:52):
does function. It has no sight, like you cannot really
aim at very well. But he claims he shoots and
hits a squirrel with it. Right now, this is pretty
fucked up because you shouldn't shoot an animal with a
weapon that you can't be precise with right because you may,
for example, hid it in the guts and it will

(01:04:13):
die in agonizing death as opposed to dying quick, which
is what happens. He shoots the squirrel in the belly,
and he has to like kill it, right, He has
to like execute it at close range, and he, you know,
he doesn't eat the squirrel. He doesn't what you can do.
He has like no use for the body. He's just
killing it to kill it. So he he executes it
and then he cuts off its tail to tie around

(01:04:34):
his handlebars. Now this is definitely like serial killer adjacent shit.
Lyddy claims that he doesn't feel excited or happy after
doing it. In fact, he's horrified by it, like like
it haunts him and like his mom catches him doing
it too, so like that's probably part of you know,
why he feels bad and this this is what really

(01:04:56):
fucks him up, because the thing that fucks him up
is not that he he hurts this squirrel or that
he kills it, but that he feels bad about hurting
the squirrel, and that fucks him up because he feels like, now,
I'll never be able to be a soldier if, like,
I can't kill a squirrel without feeling anything, how can
I kill men? Right? That has its own internal logic.

(01:05:19):
There's a lot going on there, and none of it's
any good. How could I expect to be a soldier
in the war. I had to do something to free
myself from this disabling emotionalism. The widowest fascist here, he
is such a fucking like the deepest fascist. There's more
like fucking young Hitler has more like redeeming quality, says

(01:05:42):
a kid, than fucking g Gordon Lyddy. Oh god, it's
fucked up, so man. The thing he eventually lands on
was volunteering to help with his neighbor's small chicken farm.
He offers to basically, yeah, he's got this neighbor with
a chicken farm, and he's like, look, I need to
learn how to kill all, like gut and kill all

(01:06:03):
of the chickens that you need killed. And you know,
if you've never done this, killing butchering chickens and specifically
like gutting and preparing them to be eaten is a
very it's a particularly unpleasant process. Like chickens in my
in and a lot of people's opinions are like a
less pleasant animal to like butcher than a lot of
other animals. So the guy who owns this farm is like, yeah, sure, Gordon,

(01:06:27):
you could fucking kill all of my chickens. And so
that's like again bad adulting. Also this if this kid
comes to you being like I need to kill something,
Can I kill you? I have to learn how to
kill efficiently and without emotion or thought. Right, that's how
he phrases it. So apparently he claims he learns how
to kill without feeling that by murdering all of these chickens,

(01:06:52):
you know, I was satisfied. When it came my turn
to go to war, I would be ready. And like
I should note here, giguldn't Liddy never killed anybody, right,
not for lack of trying, but like I honestly don't
know if he ever, like was the kind of guy
who would have been good at this. So much of
this is like he's got this is like an image
he wants to present. He wants people to think of

(01:07:13):
him as a badass, as a killer, as a dangerous man, right,
you know, as this guy who could do without thinking, Like,
I don't think killing chickens actually prepared him for murdering people.
Part of which is that, like I don't, he never
kills anybody, right, He's never in combat, He never experiences
anything like this, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
I mean part of the part of the wa to
be dispassionate killer issue is thinking that working in this
slaughterhouse might help you become a dispassionate killer.

Speaker 1 (01:07:41):
Nope, absolutely not, is it. Like, Yeah, there's there's a
lot here, including the fact that like Adolf Hitler, a
fucking man with a lot of blood on his hands,
never could have worked at a chicken slaughtering like he was.
He was too Like again, the dude was a vegetarian.
He was like horrified by the suffering of animals, didn't

(01:08:02):
care about people suffering, you know. But yeah, just a
dangerous maniac. G Gordon Liddie, one of the one of
the least one of the least mentally uh uh healthy individuals,
one of the most dangerous brains ever to be born.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
Yeah, to be given power, Yeah, of any kind, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
This is a man who needed like dedicated care right
of some sort. He needed a lot of people focused
on stopping him from being a danger to him, mitigating
mitigating his risk to others. Yeah if and yeah that
that that never happened. So Jesus, we are building to

(01:08:50):
how he masterminds the Watergate break in badly. Again. This
is a man who is bad at everything but being
a media guy. Right, He's pretty effect of it, being
like a right wing media figure. He's a terrible failure
at every other aspect of his life pretty much. Some
people say he was a pretty good lawyer, you know,
so maybe I'll give him that. We'll talk about that too,

(01:09:11):
So we'll find out. Right now, Andrew, let's talk about
how are you doing. I'm you know, I'm alive. We're
just uh, you know, still just striking and hanging out
and podcast. It's great. Love it. I don't love it,
but it's just you know, what are you gonna do? Excellent. Well,

(01:09:32):
support the strike, you know, help out. Oh yes, I
pulled up.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
A link if you are listening to this and you
are some the entertainment community fund to search for that,
I don't know whatever, ask chat GPT to find it
for you don't do that. And yeah, and I do
a podcast called you know as this racist we are.

Speaker 1 (01:09:53):
We're doing some picket line diaries just to do uh
you know what the actual uh sandals on the ground
of being on strike is like. So, yeah, that's it.
Uh yeah, check out those picket diaries. And until next time, folks,
remember David Zaslov's home addresses. Oh you probably we'll probably

(01:10:16):
bleep that. Not the first time we've had to bleep
that uns Yeah, good stuff. Behind the Bastards is a
production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us

(01:10:38):
out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: G. Gordon Liddy: The Fascist Behind Watergate