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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Ah, that's probably a bad way to open the nineteenth
most popular podcast on the Internet.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
I wanted to say that.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today I did, I did. I did ever since you
sent me that thing, So if you have been trying,
I wanted to work it in organically though, right. Otherwise
people would think that we're you know, we're losing our
minds from the fat Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Hell yeah, but we are number nine to Andrew.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Oh my god, congratulngratulations to us. Yeah from us.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
We're not lying.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
This is like when I buy myself a Christmas present.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Yeah, just like a little treat. It's like it's like
getting an extra extra donut. Yeah, yeah, an extra donut something.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Andrew t what how goes? How goes the strike? Andrew? Uh,
still striking?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
I brought a a second dog to the picket line
on Friday.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
A second dog has hit the picket line. She was
a huge hit. That's good. That's good. That's good. That's
all I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
As of this episode coming out, we're closer to Its
potentially possible that the strike is.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Over by the time you hear this. I would give
it fifteen percent chance the strike is over. And this
is all silly. This intro but again, if the strike
is over, we will cut in an ad for a
random television show you know exactly. Y. Yeah, it'll be good. Andrew.

(01:46):
As we speak this to great Hollywood celebrities, real like
titans of the industry, just announced that they were bringing
their shows back and then got curb stopped the verbal
equivalent of curb stopped. Yes, yeah, Is that funny or not?
How are you Where are you landing on that? I

(02:07):
because where I'm sitting, I think it was pretty funny.
I the the about face came so quickly that it
was really like two days yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Yeah, so so that that kind of like the whiplash
of it. I think the the equally funny part is
everyone having to kind of walk back congratulations or walk
back the things they said to Drew Barrymore, who I
think people largely still kind of like, and then also
not really doing the equivalent for Bill Maher.

Speaker 4 (02:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
I don't know. The not funny side of it is
the telling people that they can start working again when
they actually can't and yes, and like that's that's the
people that are not you know, sagger wga that work
on sets, and being like, oh, you're gonna get to
come back to work and the answer is no, you're not,
and I'm just a selfless narcissist.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, there there was no good reason for any of this.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
I mean, the the Drew Barrymore of it. It's I'm
just going to give I guess her the benefit of
the doubt and say she was probably deceived over what
the rules are. And I will equally assume that Bill Maher,
given his personal politics, he would have scabbed sooner. He

(03:18):
just didn't have the opportunity his seeson.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Is there anybody else that would have loved to have
scabbed more than Bill Maher, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, yeah, So whatever they have on him, it's very legit.
But yeah, no, I mean because he would have been
just straight up openly scabbing, whereas Drew Barrymore would have
been like functionally almost certainly scabbing on some level, but

(03:48):
in a much more difficult to prove way. But you know,
Bill Maher is a member of the Writers Guild.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck. Bill Maher is more or less
where we're heading here. You know, like Bill Maher, you know,
you know who has been consistent in their principles all
of their lives is g Gordon Lyddy, the g Man Liddy. Yeah,
he never uh, he's always been been honest about who

(04:13):
he is. Yeah, that's not a great thing, you know,
it's like, but it is a thing. Yeah, you gotta
you gotta acknowledge that. So when we when we last
left off the g Man, uh, he had joined the
FBI compared it directly to the s S in a
positive sense, favorably, Yeah, favorably. Yeah, as America's protective echelon.

(04:40):
So he's in Indiana a while, he learns how to
cowboy gun fight from these great cowboy gunfighters and then
the uh and then he totally gets super close to
needing to use his handgun, but he never quite has to.
But what he does have like multiple stories where he like,
it's everything up to and then like but then before
I I could pull my gun, you know, the situation ended,

(05:02):
so everything was fine. Well, maybe we don't need to
hear about that. Then that's not very interesting. G Gordon Liddy.
So he gets transferred to Denver. After that, he's involved
in he is involved in the arrest of at least
one major criminal. One of these guys that's on the
FBI's most wanted list, and then based according to his

(05:23):
recitation of events, he gets transferred to FBI headquarters in DC,
and he becomes incredibly close with j Edgar Hoover, so
close that all of the older agents are jealous because
Hoover wants to spend a lot of time with Lyddy
and not them. So that's not what happened. And again
this is thankfully, this is what I'm not going into

(05:44):
as much detail about what Liddy claims because we have
other sources on his time in the FBI and they
are very different than what he claims. So he is
involved in one high profile arrest, but there's evidence that
his superiors like they had issues with his errat and
irrational behavior. One of his supervisors described him as a

(06:04):
wild man and a super klutz basically just like, yeah,
this guy is kind of out of his mind. And
he's also like he fucks up constantly, Like whenever he's
given a chance to do something, he's going to make
some stupid mistake. He's like a Nazi Elmer. That is
like really, it's a great comparison. And so the kind

(06:28):
of attitude that like some of these people who like
supervise him is is like, yeah, he just he couldn't
be relied on. And because it's you know, this is
the FBI. Right, one thing the FBI, especially under Hoover,
was good at was not leaking shit. So we don't
have as much detail as I'd like on what specifically
he fucked up, But given that this is consistent with
his performance later in life, I'm going to choose to

(06:51):
side with his superiors here rather than claim that he
was just super good at the FBI. Yeah. Yeah, And
this makes if he's if he really is just like
kind of incompetent, it makes his transfer to DC makes
sense because like that is kind of what they did
a lot to guys who were bad at being in
the field, Like you move from a place where you

(07:12):
can kind of you can keep track of them. Like
he gets he gets transferred to the record division, which
is like that's where you put a dude you can't
fire for some reason, but who like can't be trusted
out with a gun.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
That's like the punishment in like the second act of
a loose cannon cop movie.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Right, Like that is, yes, go file some papers, g
Gordon Lyddy, get them, stay the fuck away from from
the world. Lyddy would go on to claim that he
was the youngest bureau supervisor in agency history. You'll see
this sighted in like write ups of his career periodically,
but they only ever cite him. So I'm gonna go

(07:50):
ahead and say that's probably either not true or not impressive. Right,
he did get a couple of like commendations from Hoover,
but like, that's not it doesn't appear to be that
big a deal. Wikipedia also lists those claims as citations needed,
So again, not gonna go out on a limb and
say he was definitely awarded by Hoover. Former FBI officials

(08:15):
interviewed by journalist Anthony Lucas later would claim that Liddy
got pushed out of the FBI because he was seen
as dangerous and unreliable. You know, we don't get tons
of detail on what exactly caused him to get pushed out,
but there are some pieces from Lyddy's autobiography that may
suggest why. For example, this line, my son Jim was
born in April of nineteen sixty one, and I was

(08:37):
so elated at finally having a boy that when I
thought about it the next day, driving through an unpopulated area,
I stopped the car and fired three rounds into the
air and a private ceremony of celebration, just firing his
service weapon randomly into the sky to celebrate. Yeah, unpopulated area.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Okay, lyddy man, it is it is wild. Having done
the show a few times now, how much of history's
damage has been done by huge nerds?

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, just a big old dork.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
It's really like they Yeah, I mean I guess that's why.
But it's you know, we're not We're not cruel enough
to nerds.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
I'm realizing. No, that's yeah. I think we need like
a national conversation about how to be crueler to them. Though, yes, yes, yes, yes,
what's the what's the actual appropriate way to handle this? Right?
That's the problem is the wrong people are bullies? Yeah,
the wrong because you, like, somebody needed to g Gordon

(09:40):
Liddy needed more shame of the things that were going
on in his head. He needed to feel worse in
a specific way about himself. But like if you just
had again, like a kid, just like shoving him into
a locker at school, that's not going to work on
this guy. You need there needs to be some more
like art to it, you know. But really his dad,
I don't know, I don't know how you like get
Like I think if his dad had been more aware

(10:02):
of the kind of shit going on in his brain,
he could have like shamed it out of him, Like, right,
what are you doing shooting your handgun in the air
to celebrate having a kid? Give me that gun? Give
me that gun? Gordon like, I'm keeping.

Speaker 4 (10:16):
This no gun privileges until you're not allowed to have this,
it's pretty cool, and he like he goes on this
rant in his book about how like at the FBI,
you know, you're allowed to carry a gun off duty
and you don't have to, but if you're in a
bad situation, if something happens around you and you're not

(10:38):
able to stop it because you don't have a gun,
you get in trouble.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
So I always had my gun. He just he needs you.
And again, there's never any like it's one of those
like it feels almost like he's setting up something that's
gonna happen later. But g Gordon Liddy never had any
cause to use a firearm in his entire life, Like,
at no point was this even remotely necessary for him.
So he's this is all just pointless. He just needs

(11:01):
you to know that he carried a gun around for
several years.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
God, I know the the like they like, oh no, no,
I need this because if I don't fucking save the day,
I'm going to get in trouble. It's like, yeah, still
somehow Weasley, which is amazing.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
It's just like, yeah, it's so funny. So Lyddy claims
that everyone at the FBI loved him, but he just
wasn't making enough money to support his growing family because
his wife. His wife is popping out kids at an
alarming rate, right, she is like putting out new liddies
at the same speed with which he is firing bullets wildly,
and this becomes a problem, he says, for their for

(11:41):
their bottom line, and so you know, he decides to quit,
and the FBI is like, we love you. Letty, you know,
come back anytime. We'd love to have you again. We've
we've stamped your paperwork with a special thing that means
you can come back anytime you want. People within the
FBI are like, yeah, we were doing everything we could
to force him to leave. So you know that said,

(12:04):
I do think there's probably a good chance his family
financial situation is not great one of these reasons might
be and again this is a reading between the lines,
but every time he talks about his gun collection, it's
like very large. So part of this may just be
that he's spending all of his child money on new handguns. Now,
the central issue is that Lyddy and his wife are

(12:27):
devout Catholics. Now, I don't know if you know much
about Catholics, but Catholics, like all humans, like to fuck,
and Catholics, unlike most humans, are not allowed to use
birth control. Right, So this is part of why there's
a round a billion of Catholics, you know. So Lyddy
and his wife they try to use the rhythm method

(12:47):
to avoid having more kids, and he can't write that like, well,
the rhythm method's clearly bullshit, So he just writes that, like, well,
it didn't work for us, you know, we had after
four children, it had become clear that the rhythm method
does not work for my Maybe it just doesn't work,
g Gordon Liddy. Maybe it's a bad method of birth. God,
hey everyone, my phrasing hair was not great. I didn't

(13:08):
mean to say that the rhythm method like can't work.
You know, obviously biologically it does it's just that realistically,
I don't think it is an effective method of birth control,
particularly for people in long term relationships. I think G
Gordon Liddie's case is a pretty good example of this.
There are a lot of others, but obviously, like biologically,

(13:28):
if you were to do it perfectly, it would work.
It's just not a very good idea compared to modern
forms of contraception.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
And what are most opportunity to talk about what amazing
sperm he has. You know, he could have just claimed
he was unbelievably fertile.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
He's just too potent. Yeah. No, the fact that the
rhythm method doesn't work is not really This is not
really a problem for g Gordon Liddy because he wanted
six children and he claims that fran did two, and
in true g Gordon Liddy fashion, his reasoning for wanting
six kids is some of the craziest shit I've ever read. Quote.
She had grown up as a lonely only child. I

(14:07):
had a sister and a cousin who was a de
facto brother, and I missed a large number of people
always present at home. I was also aware that children
can be lost to sickness, accident, or war. And six
would raise substantially the probability that at least some offspring
would survive. Just as important, I recognize that a child
can lose itself through failure of the will to achieve,
and that having six would make it easier to accept

(14:29):
and write off such a living death as well. Yeah,
you need more kids so you can write them off
if one of them is a dead person while alive still, well,
I think he just caught on some level.

Speaker 3 (14:40):
Those he's bringing real loser jenes to the table, So
he's really hatging his bets.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yeah, you gotta be careful if you're like bringing liddly
grad genetics to the table, because it's that kid's just
got to be a fuck up.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, it's just tough's he brings fuck up to the table.
So you like, you know, you break out the Punnett
square a little bit of the recessive traits. Yeah, the
math that got him personally to six.

Speaker 2 (15:09):
I would love to see.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
I'd love to see his little scroll notebook, like one
loser one he dead.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, there are one. At least one of them is
gonna you know, lose them, lose their mind, So we
gotta we write one off and being liddy's a good
at three of them are going to die in a war,
so that gives us two that make it to yeah two,
and then one of them is a natural loser. So yeah, yeah, exactly,
this is just the minimum we need, you know, just
given given my worthless genes, this is the only way

(15:36):
to share enough liddies survive. Oh yes, it's it's it's
a logic like this that has ensured that we still
have g Gordon liddies today everybody. So yeah, Now, unfortunately,
Fran's body does not handle multiple pregnancies in quick succession

(15:56):
very well, right, And yeah, I don't say that to
like make what four kids. I think eventually five in
you know the space of like five years is too
many kids, maybe, like maybe you shouldn't have that many
kids that quickly. That's a lot to deal with. She
dealt with increasing pain each time, and eventually their doctor
sits them down and is like she could die, right,

(16:20):
like this is like she can't have any more kids,
you know, like this is we need to stop here.
So you know, eventually they shop around for a Catholic
priest because they want a priest who will advise them
that it's okay for her to take birth control, because
you know, these things go. They have one more kid
during this process, but Lyddy decides to give up after that.

(16:43):
And this may be the most like Moonman ass piece
of reasoning that I have encountered in his book. Although
one of the reasons I had chosen Francis to be
the mother of my children was her size and strength,
which should have enabled her to bear half a dozen
hyperform Orman's children, I certainly had not intended to risk

(17:03):
damage by pushing her to her design limit. Oh no,
you're not to talk that way about their wives, g
Gordon Lyddy. He's like actual Marvin the Martian m He's
talking like about his his his ill wife and his
children as if he's like a fucking GM factory.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah, designs limitation, their design limit.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
She should have been putting out six high performance children
by this period.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
So high performance asterisk Lyddy failure rate exactly all.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Of these kids should already be shooting handguns into the
air at random. They haven't hurted any squirrels. So he
quits the FBI and takes a gig with his dad's firm,
where he immediately gets a huge raise. So this is
again the only job that would take him, I think,
is how I interpret this. He says his day was
desperate for him to come work for them, and like

(18:02):
had been just trying for years and was so happy.
But he also writes that, like as soon as he
gets to work there, they start fighting every It destroys
their relationship because his dad like cannot stand him as
like a business partner. And my guess is going to
be because he keeps suggesting crazy shit that would get
them both thrown in prison, and like his dad has
constantly no, you have to not do that. Seems likely, Yeah,

(18:26):
seems like good direction. She was like the g man. Yeah.
So his description is that despite the fact that he's
very good at this job, he has to quit this
as well to save his relationship with his father and
go into public practice as a for a DA's office
in New York State in order to preserve their relationship. Now,

(18:46):
by the point that he does this, this is like
sixty two or sixty three something like that, the swing
in sixties are well underway, and our boy is starting
to pay attention to the resistance that has built in
the country to the involvement of US troops in a
little country I might have heard of called Vietnam. You know,
if you're unaware, Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia

(19:06):
that we had a disagreement with and they want Yeah,
so this had started. The whole kerfuffle in Vietnam had
started due to the failure of French forces to maintain
control of Indo China and a bunch of unhinged fears
among US policymakers that the spread of communism in Vietnam

(19:28):
would lead to a series of falling dominoes that ended
with a unified communist Asia under China. Now, if you
read Po Chi Minh, if you're aware at all of
like Vietnamese history, that was never in the carts, right,
The last thing anyone in Vietnam ever wanted was to
be part of like a Chinese dominated block. And they

(19:48):
immediately go to war with China as soon as they
kick us out, right, Like, that's the first thing that
Vietnam does after finishing us off is fight with China
and Cambodia.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
You know, the this is this is a thing that
happens on Jos's racist all the time. Is that you know,
if these motherfuckers were less racist, they would be able
to achieve their imperialism gains better. They would have realized
not all these chinks love each other.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, there's a there's a there's a joke that I
saw going around Twitter recently, which is like, if somebody
could have explained, had explained to like the leaders of
Northern Vietnam right at the start of the war with
the US, that like in fifty years they'd be allied
with the US against China, they would have said, yeah,
sounds about right, Yeah, totally possible, absolutely could happen. Yeah, yeah,

(20:40):
this is their assholes. Yeah, this goes into we just
talked about this a little on our episodes about Scott
Adams's terrible books and his beliefs about the Muslim world.
But like, one of the things you need to keep
in mind, no matter what fucked up shit like a
foreign country far away is doing to a group of people,

(21:00):
those people are always in their hearts going to be
angrier at somebody who lives next door to them. That's
just the way human being. It's like the United States,
like we get we have our Panics over like Islam,
or our Panics over China, but like fucking people in
Texas always hate people in Oklahoma more than anyone else
on this planet. Like that's just the way it is.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
Yeah yeah, no, or their neighbors or their neighbors city.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Yeah yeah yeah, those people are actually murdering or whatever. Yes,
this is just how humans work. So this is patent nonsense,
this whole domino theory. But arch warriors, like cold warriors
like G. Gordon Liddy, absolutely believed it. Here are some
other things that G. Gordon Liddy believed about Vietnam. This
is this is him summarizing the situation with France following

(21:52):
the close of World War Two, when the French were
fighting the viet Men and Indo China. They were at
first highly successful. That was because they were using the
foreign legion then manned almost completely by veterans from the
most disciplined, ruthlessly efficient practitioners of all that warfare and history,
the Waffen SS. It was only was made public and
political pressure forced their removal that the French began to lose.

(22:15):
He cannot, he cannot stop bringing up the SS. Like
almost every chapter, the SS comes up, and there's never
a good reason for it. And it's like, this is
the eighties, this is the eighties.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
It's pretty I mean, this is kind of the last
time Nazis were basically universally froud upod. I would have thought,
amongst like Gordon Lyddy, Yeah, what do I.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Know this is? I should start by saying nonsense. It
is true. There were some members of the Waffen SS.
So the SS is like a state within a state
in Nazi Germany, right, They are this racial elite. They
have a huge amount of power in the political system.
They do a lot of like a lot of the
guys individual like people who are managing all of the
different police departments and stuff in Nazi Germany are members

(23:06):
of the SS. They also have, you know, they exercise
a lot of control over the industrial apparatus that was
kind of the goal that Himmler was building towards. And
in addition to using them to like breed more Arians,
there are divisions of the SS that also fight as
regular military units or kind of in a fashion similar
to and these guys are called the waffen SS. Waffen

(23:28):
just means weapons, right, So the Waffen SS is the
weapons SS. Right now, there are a lot of like
lies and myths. As we're about to talk about about
how well, the Waffen SS functions. The fact that the
foreign legions, some of these guys after the war wind
up in the foreign legion is not really weird, nor
is it out. It's not specifically even because of World
War Two, right, it's not because historically, if you look

(23:51):
at the foreign legion, it's usually like half or more
German guys. This is just like a thing about the
way it has always been constructed. The French foreign legion
has always been heavily Germanic. About sixty percent of it
in the post war period were Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian
or most commonly German. And there's a good chance that

(24:11):
about fifty thousand Germans cycled through French Indo China during
the post war stages of the conflict there, but that
doesn't tell the whole story. The Vietmen did like to
claim that all of their captive French soldiers were SS veterans,
but like that was a propaganda claim because no evidence
was ever provided of this. We do know that the
French military scanned for SS veterans, particularly after nineteen forty seven,

(24:34):
and since SS members had all had a tattoo, their
blood group was tattooed on them, it was easy to
find and deny them. Thus, the first wave of Legion
volunteers in Indo China would have included a lot of
Germans who had served who had been Nazi soldiers, right,
But very few of these guys would have been SS.
Much more of them are Wehrmacht Nazis. Right, As this

(24:55):
historian from the asked Historian subreddit noted, the Legion was
recruiting about ten thousand many a year, many of them
certainly Germans, but by the nineteen fifties, with the average
age of a legionnaire in the very early twenties, most
German recruits were young men simply trying to escape the
bleak situation in their home country, and the extent of
their involvement with the Nazi Party was their membership in
the Hitler Youth as children. Now, I'm not doing this

(25:17):
to defend the reputation of the Foreign Legion, right, because
there's a lot that's messed up about that unit. This
is more important because of the specific way in which
Liddy is wrong about like both the presence that like
all of the guys fighting in French Indo China in
the late forties were SS veterans and they were really good.
You know, if they just stayed in there, they would

(25:38):
have won that war. The fact that he believes that
in states that says a lot, right because this recitation
that like the first Foreign Legion Units and Indo China
URLSS veterans and they were masters of counterinsurgency is based
upon one specific novel. I have actually traced back where
Liddy gets this belief, and it's from a fiction book

(25:59):
called The Devil's Guard. Now, I actually have not seen
this written anywhere else. I think I may be like
the first person to note this publicly, but it's extremely
obvious if you are familiar with the book The Devil's Guard.
And I'll go into why I am in a little bit.
But The Devil's Guard was a novel published by a
guy named George Elford in nineteen seventy one. This is

(26:20):
about nine years before Liddy writes his autobiography. The Devil's
Guard is based on the experience of a former wafeness
officer who it starts with him like he's fighting in
Eastern Europe, He's fighting in Russia, and then as the
war ends, he kind of like fights and sneaks his
way across Europe, eventually escaping the Allies and traveling to Indo, China,

(26:41):
where he fights in a nine hundred man unit of
all former SS men. And they're just the best encounter
and they're running circles around the Viet Minh using all
these different they're combat skills, and they're so sneaky, and
they have all these different plans and stuff. And because
of how ruthless they are, the VIETMN just you know,
can't do anything about them. Right now, Elford presents this

(27:02):
this is a non fiction novel. It's supposed to be,
but he claims that it's the result of an interview
with an anonymous, totally real Nazi. Historians now universally agree
that this is a lie. There were no there were
definitely SS men who served in the Foreign Legion. There
was at no point a nine hundred man unit of
former SS veterans. Right, that just did not happen. Right,

(27:23):
that's from an Indiana Jones's sequel. That's from an Indiana
Jones book. Like, right, yeah, it's also like another one
of the reasons we know this book is full of
shit is that he has these loving descriptions this is
like a Soldier of Fortune. As books, there's loving descriptions
of all the different guns they use and how, and
a bunch of the weapons he describes them using in

(27:44):
detail did not exist at the time or were not
in use by Legion troops at the time, right, They
simply were not present in that conflict. He just thought
they were cool guns, so he wanted to put them
in his novel. Meanwhile, and there's also you know, a
bunch of different genius count insurgency tactics shown in the book.
Like at one point, these SS guys kidnapped the family

(28:04):
members of a bunch of Vietmen fighters and like stick
them in vehicles that they're driving through a part of
the jungle, so that if the Vietmen attack a convoy,
they'll kill their family members, right, which is would be
a war crime if they'd done it, But it's supposed
to be like, you know, this is the kind of
heart you can't you can't follow the law if you're
going to win an insurgency. That and a bunch of

(28:25):
other tactics that are like that in the book are
all taken directly from a different book about British commandos
fighting the Japanese in World War Two, like they're lifted
directly from this other book. Now, The Devil's Guard is
also it's one of the fact that it shows, the
whole premise of it is that the SS could have
won the war in Vietnam if we'd let them. It's

(28:45):
one of the most fascist books of military fiction and existence.
And again I have to I have to, I have
to really emphasize fiction. It's claims too that it was
real have spread myths about the incredible brilliance of the
SS as a counter insurgence for generations in two thousand
and six, and this is why I know about it.
In two thousand and six, online bookstore A Books noted

(29:07):
that it was one of the top ten novels sold
to US soldiers heading over to Iraq, and the only
piece of war fiction on that list. Because again, you've
got all these kids, they haven't actually been to combat yet,
they're trying to know what it's like. They want, like,
you know, advice, so they read this book about supposedly
the best counterinsurgency experts who ever existed, the fucking SS. Right,

(29:28):
it's just this very popular book of lies, and Lyddy
is kind of the first pop prominent guy who gets
taken in by it, right, which is why everything he
writes about Vietnam is very clearly just taken from this,
this book of fiction. Now, I think it's worth spending
a little bit more time discussing exactly why Liddy's conception
of the Wathen SS is a historical First off, the

(29:52):
SS were dogshit at counterinsurgency. There is no evidence that
has ever existed in history that these guys had any
competence at defeating insurgencies. They are involved in one insurgent
campaign in the history of the organization and they lose it, right, Like,
they don't win at all. It's like saying the US

(30:12):
is the best counterinsurgency army in the world. It's like, well,
what the fuck are you basing that on?

Speaker 3 (30:17):
Right?

Speaker 2 (30:17):
How cool the Navy Seals are in a movie you watched.
They've lost every war they've been involved in. I don't
understand why you think they're good at this. That's the
power of culture, baby. Now, the SS are repeatedly noted
by their colleagues and Wehrmacht officers for inciting violence from
captive populations due to their brutality. Right, the SS comes

(30:39):
into all these areas like Ukraine right in eastern Europe,
where because of sort of the relationship that area had
had to the Soviet Union before the Nazis come in,
there was a good possibility of like them taking over
and being relatively popular, and they just massacre so many
people pointlessly that they inspire like account like an insurgent

(31:01):
campaign against themselves because they're Nazis. They're terrible. That said,
even outside of like if you're kind of taking it
outside of their performance as a counterinsurgency force, there's this
idea that's still pretty common even among people who don't
like Nazis, that the SS were an elite combat unit
that performed well above like the levels shown by their

(31:22):
Verhrmacht counterparts. This is a lie as well. There were
certainly specific SS combat units that performed well, right, you
know that exists. You can find some some SS military
units that had very good battle records, right, But even
that does not mean what you might think it means.
Because SS divisions consistently received better gear and more of it.

(31:43):
They were much more mechanized than their regular army counterparts.
Because of the clout that they had with the Nazi system.
And SS divisions were also larger than normal Wehrmacht Army divisions.
A Waffen SS division has ad had a standard size
of about twenty thousand men, compared to sixteen thousand, five
hundred in the regular army. So if you're saying, well,
these WAFT and SS divisions performed better than these Fairmaut divisions,

(32:05):
it's like, well, they were an extra like thirty hundred guys,
and yeah, I mean it makes sense. Yeah, better take Well,
you know.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
That's that's just the power of airy inness. You know,
that's it's like if you weren't, you wouldn't have all
those extra dudes.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, how did they fight so much better? Well, there
were like three thousand extra dudes. Yeah, that'll that that
can matter sometimes that's so much extra area and blood.
Of course, it's also worth noting that even if you
take this into account, they don't actually have across the
board a good like a better combat record than regular units.

(32:41):
It is worth noting SS men were picked both for
racial and ideological purity.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
Part of what this meant is that regular enlisted soldiers
in the WAFT and SS were often healthier and in
better physical shape than regular army soldiers. But it also
means that their officers were pipped not on based on
their performance right, their competence, but based on their adherence
to propaganda right, which meant that the most important thing
for an SS officer was not what do they know,

(33:07):
how well are they trained? How well have they performed?
But like, do they fit this sort of vision we
have for how they should look? And I found another
really good asque historians post on this matter, which quotes
a February nineteen forty three inspection of an SS division
by a Wehrmacht Army major quote. The commanders of this
wap of an SS division did not seem to realize

(33:28):
that brave and ideologically misguided young men were being selflessly
sacrificed through insane arrogance and a lofty disdain for sound training.
Belief in the Fuerer was more important to them than
professional ability. Shocked and sobered by the experience, I returned
to headquarters, where I was given an opportunity to report
my impressions to the chief of the general staff. In
other words, officers in the Waffenss were often young men, likelyddy,

(33:51):
filled with very irrational beliefs about combat and their own
racial purity. The fact that they were brainwashed meant that
they were incapable of judging threats adequately.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
They could not accurately judge the situations that they were
in and what was a necessary response, and as a result,
they got a lot of their men killed unnecessarily. Right.
In other words, these were all the guys who became
SS officers were the kind of men who might say,
disobey orders to crawl through mud with an open surgical wound,
and you don't want that guy making calls and combats.

(34:22):
It's really a two way street.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
The love for that, like the SS would have loved
and yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
He would have immediately made it into the SS. Like
the Wehrmacht would have been like, no, get this guy
the fuck out of here. He's like, he's not rational,
But the SSS would have been like, he's a rational
make him an officer, right.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
He just yeah, right, you know, at least he knows
where he would have fit in. Yeah's a lot of people, don't,
you know, a lot of people don't. Yeah, this was
his ideal life situation and he just missed it.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Anyway. That was a long digression, but like I felt
it was necessary anyway. You know what else is a
fascist paramilitary organization? Mmmm, we'll find out the sponsors of
our podcast. Oh ah, we are back. And boy, I

(35:27):
really loved those ads for the Waffen SS. You know.
I hope, I hope a lot of a lot of
our listeners join so that they can win the war
in French, Indo, China. You got it. It's like just
as if only there were a few more Nazis there,
you know. Yeah, a couple more Nazis gonna put that
whole house in order, like like we always say, that's

(35:50):
all we need. Yeah. I do love the idea that,
like the ss IS experience getting their asses handed to
them and the steps of Eastern Europe would have prepared
them for a jungle war Inva. Yeah, they were really
ready for that. So by the nineteen sixties the mid sixties,

(36:11):
the anti war movement has started to pick up serious
steam and Lyddy is horrified by this. Young people, as
he writes, were quote eroding the national will and respect
for authority. They were sinking into a nether world of
drug culture. Also, you want to hear G. Gordon Liddy's
take on the civil rights movement Andrew, Oh, I'm sure
it's very measured. Yes, solid, it's gonna be good. Valid

(36:35):
demands by blacks for civil rights were often resisted violently
by whites, and in response, many blacks were adopting violence
as an offensive rather than defensive tactic. This is his
you know, that's not all wrong, and that like, well,
the fact that they were getting murdered led to like
embrace of more radical use. I still would call that
defensive violence, right.

Speaker 3 (36:56):
I will admit that was much more measured that I
thought it was going to be.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
He is his racism is never like straight up like
he's never going to be the guy who says, I think,
you know, we should go back to slavery, or I
don't think these people Like he's always going to be
the guy who his racism is more obvious and like
the only ways he ever talks about black people right right,
where like any time he deals with a violent criminal,

(37:20):
he's going to let you know that it's a black man,
right like, like that's that's how that's that's where you
kind of catch it here right now. Given his anger
at the way things are going in the United States,
Lyddy has come to feel that his only option is
to get a job at the District Attorney's office in Poughkeepsie,
New York in nineteen sixty six. And I hate typing

(37:41):
the word Poughkeepsie, so I'm very unhappy that this is
such a part of the story. But he points out
that like part of what he moves there is it's
his wife's hometown, right, So he goes there and he
becomes He describes himself as like an unorthodox but dedicated
law man, respected by the local police and liked by
the judges. And that is, to at least some extint true.

(38:04):
A New York Times reporter who visited in nineteen seventy
three and asked a round about Liddy got this description
of him. Lyddy led an unusual, even bizarre life. He
liked to drive around town in a jeep, He cared
a revolver at all times, even when prosecuting a case,
and seemed to enjoy the kidding by the sheriff's deputies
who would outdraw him. He would spend his off hours

(38:24):
cruising the city with policemen. He's like always hanging out
with them, and shit, not for because it's his job,
just because he thinks it's fun. Oh my god, what
a freak.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
I love the mental image of a fucking Poughkeepsie PD
and G.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
Gordon Liddy drawing their guns at each other. Yeah, yeah, wonderrect.
I also loved that little mention that like, oh yeah,
he wasn't very good at it, right, like he always lost,
you know.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
Yeah, yeah, I'm genuinely surprised he didn't accidentally shoot someone
in that moment.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, we don't. One hundred percent. No he didn't. You know,
that's true. That's the Yeah. So that article also provides
us with an amusing summary of some of Liddy's greatest
hits in the courtroom. Lyddy's courtroom activities as prosecutor were
occasionally a bit unsettling. On one occasion, he waved a
knife under the noses of startled jurors, later overturned on

(39:20):
the basis of that stunt and opposing lawyer procalled. And
another time he smashed a piece of wood over the
jury rail while prosecuting an assault case involving the use
of the plank. Lyddy paid for the repair to the
jury rail. God, I love that. Yeah, he loses a
case because he pulls a knife on the jury. What
a clown. So funny, It's so funny.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, here's here's the thing I was gonna say about him,
that is, I realized I'm just trying to parse the difference,
which is he has humongous like middle school knife catalog
guy energy.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
This guy, this guy like g Gordon Liddy, never was
seen without a Budka catalog.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Right, absolutely, But I will just throw this out there,
at least of the people I am friendly with, you
might be the person who's closest in my sphere to
knife catalog and middle school guy. So that's why I
was trying to parse the difference between you and recordedly.
And I think it might just be not being a
huge dork.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
But you know what I'm saying, I'm a huge dork
and I own way way more knives than are strictly
necessary for any of my purposes. I think one of
the big differences is that I've never lost a court
case because I pulled a knife on the Jerry. Yeah, Like,
my knives are more like, you know, used for processing

(40:38):
animals and stuff, like, I mean roadkill with my knives. Yeah.
Well yeah, it's like, I guess it's competence or something.
I can't mild competence, right, That's all it takes. Yeah,
that's the difference, I guess and not being a Nazi.
Not being a Nazi, yeah, not using them to threaten
people for no good reason. There's a lot of a

(40:59):
lot of things, right, that you can do to not
be like G. Gordon Liddy. You know, I also have
read books about the SS that are not like strictly
historically accurate, largely because I needed to understand aspects of
like the growth of the fascist movement among you as
soldiers in the early parts of the global War on terror. Right. So,

(41:21):
one of the most influent infamous stories about G. Gordon
Liddy is that during one of his court cases, he
drew and fired his revolver in court in order to
like make a point. This you'll hear this summarized, like, Yeah,
he fired a loaded handgun in a courtroom in order
to like make an art, like emphasize an argument the

(41:43):
court case. And it didn't quite go down that way, right.
So the court case that he's involved in, he's prosecuting
a dude whose defense claimed that the revolver he'd been
accused of using by the police was inoperable. So he
couldn't have fired it because it didn't work. So Lyddy
wanted to prove that it did work, and in order
to do that, he loaded it with blanks, and he
fired it during the climax of his argument.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
This.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
You know, the judge was startled by this, But like,
it doesn't seem to have been an ineffective tactic, right,
Like it's a little showmanship, but he's not actually just
like firing a normal right right, Like he's shooting a blank.
It is kind of it is technically relevant to the case,
So there you go. I think if he was a
different guy who had not gotten in trouble for committing
a series of crimes, this would be like, oh yeah,

(42:27):
look at it, he's like this, you know, this would
be kind of celebrated, right, I do think this is
the kind of thing that would be celebrated if he
was a normal dude, right.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
Right, Yeah, just don't be a freak and you can
get to do your idiosyncratic things.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah we all like a weirdo, right, Yeah, you just
went too far to Gordon Lyddy. In general, he was
seen as an eccentric but decent lawyer, one of the
defense lawyers who worked opposite of Litty told The Times
later he was fun in court. You could ridicule him
in front of the jury, and he never carried a
grin outside the courtroom. He also worked hard, prepared his

(43:03):
case as well, and presented them with a lot of ego.
He just didn't seem to have the anxieties, fear, insecurities
and uncertainties that the rest of us have. It was
hard to visualize him sweating.

Speaker 3 (43:16):
That's such an interesting thing I up to this point,
it's actually really hard to not visualize him in anything
but flop sweat constantly.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
Yeah, he seems to I think you know. There's again,
there's two TV shows that recently came out, both of
which have g Gordon Lyddie as a character. There's the
one that has one of the one show that starred
Justin Throw playing him, and then I get the actor
for the other show that features him. But like one
of them shows him as flipping out and screaming and

(43:46):
like physically threatening people in a kind of unhinged way
on a number of occasions. And one of them shows
him as like this this very like emotionally cool, calm,
like idiot maniac, right, who is like like constantly is
always in this sort of and I think that that's
the justin throw version. I think that's closer to how
Liddy actually behaved. Right. I do think he he is

(44:09):
very good at maintaining this like pool outside look right
to other people generally speaking, even though he is it
is very obvious a lot of the time that he's
in over his head and incompetent, like he's always he
always has this sense of confidence about him. Right. The
most noteworthy moment of Lyddy's time and how Kipsie was
his run in with doctor Timothy Leary during a raid.

(44:31):
And these two guys are really tied together. There's they
will they will wind up touring the country doing a
floor show together. Yeah, cam Lee here, And like Timothy
Leary is kind of a left wing version of g
Gordon Liddy. A lot of what Leary says and gets
famous for is bullshit. He is a significant like Fabuloust, right,

(44:52):
he is a little bit of a con man, you know,
but he's also at the core of him he believes
some things very genuine as an and is extremely committed
to those things. And obviously those are better because he's
not a Nazi, right, so, but he is you do
kind of get an element of like Leary's fundamental, like
the fact that he's willing to tour around with Leary,

(45:13):
this unrepentant fascist after both of them have gotten out
of prison, says a lot about tim Leary. But their
first run in is so there's this raid in nineteen
sixty six on tim Leary's the place that he's living
at the time that a lot of people consider like
the inciting incident of the acid era. Right, Like this
is the if you're making a movie, right, if you

(45:35):
decided to do a mini series about like the birth
of the psychedelic drug movement of acid of like a
lot of the things we consider core to like the
hippie movement, you started at this raid in nineteen sixty six,
right tim Leary. And the background of this is that
like Tim Leary and a bunch of he was, you know,
a professor at I think it was Harvard. Yeah, maybe

(45:57):
I'm wrong about I think it was Harvard, and he
like becomes a way of LSD. He starts taking it,
he starts doing studies with it. This is during a
period where it's legal, right, it gets illegal eventually, which
is why some other stuff happens. But after he gets
kind of like pushed out at his college and is
no longer working there, he and a bunch of his
associates move into a mansion in Millbrook, New York. And

(46:18):
this mansion has bought. There's this like rich kid stockbroker
who like continues to make a lot of money doing stockshit,
Like he's never interested in anything but getting better at
being a stockbroker. But he loves acid, right, so he's like, yeah,
you can. I bought this mansion. You can all move
in here and do your drug experiments in my mansion.
Remember when the rich used to be cool? This guy

(46:40):
does sound as cool as a stockbroker could be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's interesting. Leary's always kind of like baffled at the
fact that, like this guy is so on board with
the movement but also very comfortable and happy being like
absolutely a part of the establishment. Like yeah, being this
like soulless business guy. So this the leer in between

(47:04):
thirty and sixty at any given point. Hippie dropout types
live in this mansion and do hella drugs, right, mostly
acid and wheat. From what we can tell, I assume
there's other stuff that gets thrown into the mix. So
this is all well and good, except for Millbrook is
kind of a small town. I think it's a little
more affluent than your average small town. You know. It's
in upstate New York. And the citizens of Millbrook are like,

(47:27):
once they realize this famous drug wizard is living in
their town, they're like, well, we're not really thrilled about this.
We don't want Tim Leary living here with a bunch
of hippies, you know. And he's he is kind of
he is by this point already gotten this reputation is
like the devil to a lot of conservatives, right, he
is the absolute worst person on earth. He's corrupting the youth.

(47:48):
And so because he's got this, you know, reputation of
spreading the gospel of acid, action is demanded by the
citizens of Millbrook, And since g. Gordon Lyddiy is at
this point a well known anti drug crusader, he winds
up helping to organize the raid on Millbrook.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
He's there during it, theoretically in order to ensure that
proper legal procedure is followed, right, because he works in
the DA's office. So the most notable part of this
story is that when the police bust into the mansion
late at night after Leary and his like cohorts have
gone to bed, Leary is like wearing a shirt and nothing.
He's shirt cocking it right, like his disk just swinging

(48:25):
in the breeze. And well, all there's this whole argument
over like is this raid legal? What are they doing?
Like where you know? Well, while this is all going on,
and it seems to go on for quite some time,
Leary repeated that, like the cops are constantly like, hey man,
would you put on some pants? Hey man? Like and Leary,
this is one thing I will give him. I love
this about him. He's like absolutely not, Like you are

(48:46):
in my home. I will have my dick out if
I want to, just repeatedly refuses to not have his
wig hanging out, which is honorable, I think. Yeah. It's
also worth noting that Lyddy, who volunteers, he's not asked,
like the only thing he's needed therefore is to make

(49:06):
sure that like legal procedure, But he volunteers to help
the cops survey the hippies beforehand for no reason and
nearly blows the whole op as a result of this,
because he's bad at everything. Quote, and this is from
the New York Times. It seems that Lyddy and some
policemen complete with binoculars and walkie talkie, were staked out

(49:26):
in the bushes of the estate when a young woman
stepped completely nude from one of the tints on the grounds.
A lot of funny things were going on at that place,
a deputy explained. Anyway, they became so preoccupied with this
girl that they gave their height out away and blew
the whole bit. They nearly exposed the whole operation because
like he and these cops can't stop oggling this naked woman.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
It was like Porkys for Nazis. It's all Nazis, I know,
but come on.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah, you know what else is like Porky's the sponsors
of this podcast. We are in fact sponsored by the
movie Porky's. Yeah, the bar, the establishment, the establishment, all
of those things. If it's called Porky's, we are legally
responsible for it. Uh, we are b a Q. That's

(50:26):
how you spill back, that's anyway. So Lyddy spends three years,
i think, working for the DA's office in Poughkeepsie before
he decides that it's time to take a more active
role trying to wrench the ship of state away from
degeneracy and leftism. And the way he's going to do
this is by running for Congress. That's how he describes it, right,
that after a couple of years, he's like, I'm just

(50:46):
not doing enough to fight against this, So I've got
to get into politics in order to like, really really,
you know, make a difference here. That's how he describes it.
The Times has a different story. They note that late
in his run for the DA's office, a local resident
had complained about Liddy's actions in a narcotics case, and

(51:07):
that like that wound up becoming an official complaint to
the State Commission of Investigation. The case gets dropped for
lack of evidence, but this quote from that lawyer, mister Tepper,
who he had worked against Liddy, gives us an idea
of how he kind of might have gotten forced out,
Like he may have run for office because it was
he was almost known to him, there's not going to
be a space for you here forever. Quite right, he

(51:30):
was always expecting the big narcotics bust, mister Tepper said.
Gordon kept pushing pushing all the time. He probably bent
the rules a bit now and then to collect evidence,
but I can't recall anything specific now. His autobiography makes
no mention of this, but we do know there were
complaints against him, and we do you get the feeling that, like, yeah,
maybe he was kind of pushed out to an extent
here at least there was some like he had the feeling,

(51:53):
I'm not going to always have a role here, right
right right. So Lyddy now thirty eight, decides he's going
to challenge the leading Republican candidate in New York's twenty
eighth congressional district, the relative of one of our former guests,
Maggie Mayfish, Hamilton Fish Junior. So these guys are related
to that serial killer and the political dynasty, the Fishes. Yeah,

(52:15):
so that's cool anyway. Hamilton Fish Junior is kind of
like an establishment Republican, right He's He's probably someone who
would like was closer to the Dims than like a
dude like g. Gordon Liddy. And so Lyddy is kind
of running against him on a very extreme right wing platform.
His campaign had three planks, taxes which were too high, crime,

(52:37):
and Vietnam right on crime, Lyddy presaged much modern right
wing discourse when he said, God help us if the
thin blue line of protection crumbles. He's a thin blue
line guyon it is funny, like all of the thin
blue lionist guys wind up in prison for committed crimes. Yeah,

(53:03):
do love how consistent that is. Meanwhile, on Vietnam, he
was clear that he supported US commitment to the war
effort quote, but not our conduct of the war. And
whenever you hear that, what that means is he thought
that we hadn't committed quite enough war crimes. Right, if
we'd massacred another couple of million people, we would have
won it. Yeah, Like that's how I was taking. We

(53:24):
needed more SS guys out in the jungle. Uh, so
give it. Yeah, Yeah, it's very funny. He would have liked.
If he had gotten any chance to weigh in, he
would have pulled out that fiction book about the SS
and slammed it on the table. So Lyddy lost badly
and eventually was forced to drop out and Backfish in

(53:47):
order to have a future in the Republican Party. His
supporters called him a sellout, but he got a job
running the Dutchess County Nixon campaign. One law you're interviewed
by The Times called it a deal. Right, So basically, look, man,
stop making trouble for this guy who is Yeah, he's
not far right like you, but you know he can
win unlike you because you're a maniac. And if you,

(54:09):
if you play ball, you'll get a job running the
Nixon campaign in this other county. And he says, yes,
you know, he is always a team player, right. That
is you got to give Liddy. He's gonna get you
in trouble because he's a maniac. But like he will
do what he thinks is best for the party, even
if it's not what's best for him. Like that's kind
of what he's famous for. So he's a toady. He's

(54:32):
an ambitions Yeah, he is a hinchman. Right, he's got
a hinch ye. So Lyddy is an adequate performer in
this role. Nixon was more impressed by his loyalty and
his willingness to take a personal hit to his pride
for the team than anything else. Right, this is the thing,
Dick Nixon is a guy who respects loyalty to him, right,

(54:54):
and that's what he sees from Lyddy and so you know,
it becomes it kind of like gets through the grape vine,
like all right, he's somebody that we can trust in
the Nixon White House. And as a reward, when Dick
Nixon wins office, Ge Gordon Lyddy is given a position
as Special Assistant for Organized Crime to the Secretary of Treasury, right,
which is this is kind of a dream gig for him.

(55:15):
He loves the idea of being like a drug warrior,
of like being you know, fighting the gangsters and stuff.
And he, you know, he sees this and I think
it probably was there was this idea, well maybe this
guy's got a future. Maybe one day this guy could
even have a cabinet position. So let's try him out,
you know, at a lower level, see how he works.
Lyddy instantly proves himself to be the kind of guy
that cannot be trusted with power he developed. He gets

(55:38):
in a lot of trouble very quickly at the Department
of Treasury because he keeps trying to set policy right
on his own, the sort of apropos without any backing,
like saying, this is our stance on guns. We won't
pursue these kind of gun control laws. He will give
like all these speeches at like gun control lobby events
saying that Department of Treasury will never do this, and
then his boss will be like, the fuck are you talking?

(56:01):
Like you never cleared this with anybody, Like you're not
supposed to be saying these things. He was also bad
at being a drug warrior right now. Because he had
experience as an FBI agent, he was asked to help
organize an effort to reduce drug smuggling across the Mexican border,
Operation Intercept. The goal of this plan was to punish

(56:22):
the Mexican government for refusing to allow US air power
into their country to spread poison on crops. The response,
Operation Intercept is to punish Mexico by shutting down the
border with legal gridlock. The idea is you have the
police question and search every single person who comes in
from Mexico, right, which is includes Americans and absolutely this

(56:43):
is a busy reason. There's a lot of region, there's
a lot of business that comes through in here, there's
a lot of tourism. It just shatters the way the
region functions, right. It's a calamity for all of these
The US side of the border too. Right. It fucks
up the local economy, It does a lot of damage,
and it's there's no like, nothing but chaos. As the result,

(57:04):
The New York Times summarizes border communities were disrupted by
lengthy searches. Traffic across the frontier was halted for hours,
tourism suffered. Liddy sought to justify the confusion with patriotic
speeches in the local communities. He was dismissed as a
Treasury man in nineteen seventy one. Now, for his part,
Liddy describes Intercept as having been a success. Right. The

(57:26):
people who thought it was a failure just didn't understand
the goal, which was to fuck up life for everyone
on the border. Right. His idea was like, well, look, yeah,
it fucked up everything for Americans, but it fucked them
up worse for Mexicans, and they the Mexican government could
handle the disruption less well.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
And this is this is his defense of Operation Recept.
It was an exercise in international extortion, peer simple and effective,
designed to bend Mexico to our will. Now, Lyddy claims
this is a big win and that he was only
fired right after by the Treasury Department because he made
too many good recommendations to his boss. Yeah, ross a days,

(58:03):
which is like, it's very funny because so number one
Operation Intercept. I guess you can debate, you know, like
there's there's there's definitely like an argument to be made
that like, well, yeah, you can some of their goals
were achieved by creating this much chaos. But like the
Treasury Department considers it kind of a disaster at the

(58:24):
time because of all of the complaints that it generates,
because of how much it pisses people off. So I
don't think it was considered that by anyone but Lyddy.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
Really.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
The other thing is that, like he he cites in
his book, you know, his boss being jealous of him
because every time they would argue, Lyddy was right right,
you know, he was just he made too many good
calls and it was really pissing off his boss embarrassed him.
One of the good decisions we'll go into one of these.
One of the good decisions that Liddy cites as like
the thing that drove his boss crazy was the Customs

(58:54):
Division Department is like trying to figure out how to
arm air marshals at this point because there's a lot
we talked about in are like episodes on the Golden
Age of terrorism, a lot of planes getting hijacked at
this period, late sixties or early seventies. This is the
golden age of hijacking a plane to nothing, to hijack
a commercial aircraft in this period, And so we're starting

(59:14):
to put air marshals on planes, and we're you know,
it's a when you're considering what firearm to give a
man who would be expected to shoot it in a plane,
that's a complicated thing to decide. That's a lot more
a lot more difficult than just deciding, like what's the
best gun to give a cop right where it's like, yeah, no,
there's a lot of like a lot of very complex

(59:36):
engineering questions about like and today, by the way, our
air marshals are armed with firearms that have very specific
kinds of bullets that are made to function in a
certain way on planes to minimize dangers of depressurization, over penetration,
all that kind of stuff. So they're trying to decide
what's the best thing weapon to arm these guys with,

(59:57):
and Lyddy is like, you should give them three fifty
seven magnum fire arms loaded with hollow point. Now he
picks there's not actually a good reason why it should
be a three fifty seven over like a nine millimeter.
Lyddy just loves revolvers, and he loves the three fifty
seven cartridge because it's the quote unquote most powerful gun
in the world. It's the only reason he picks the
three fifty seven. Now, he is right that hollow points

(01:00:17):
are a better choice than full metal jacket, and the
reason for this is that hollow points are less likely
to overpenetrate. Right, The point purpose of a hollow point
is that it expands more when it hits meat. Right,
It expands when it hits meat, and that transfers more
force from the bullet into the body of whoever you've hit,
so it's less likely to go through them and then
through something critical on the plane. Right, That is accurate.

(01:00:38):
Lyddy claims that there's like this big debate, you know,
over it, and nobody believes him all by that just
because it's actually weirdly it's if you study the history
of how people learned about how bullets function, it takes
a weirdly long time to figure out anything about bullets.
So I'll give him. That may have been the case.
But the evidence that he cites to make this case,

(01:00:59):
if he was actually making this argument, you know, as
opposed to everyone being like obviously, hollow points are less
likely to over pendray if he is not lying about that,
the evidence that he cites in his book is how
he made the case about hollow points being of interput.
It's nuts, it's and I'll give you one. I'll give
you one quote like guess as to how it's nuts.
Andrew to the fire, got on a plane. No, no, no,

(01:01:22):
but he brings up the Nazis again, comes into it again.
That's his other move. His other move. He either shot
a gun or brought up the SS right quote. Here's
Lyddy making the case for why air marshals should carry
hollow points. I cited Nazi experiments using live Jews that

(01:01:43):
determined one seven point nine millimeter balls solid bullet from
a Mauser rifle could pass through in gillup to sixteen
humans lined up in a row and solid point round
through the fuselage wouldn't result in compressive decompression of the aircraft.
It might well sever a vital control cable. Now that's
fucking nuts number one, completely irrelevant, right he is We

(01:02:06):
are talking about a handgun and he is talking about
the penetration of a write right, right, Totally different different
planets in every way ballistically a rifle down versus a
handgun round. It is not relevant in any way to
be like, you know, when the Nazis shot lined up
Jews in the end, they were able to kill sixteen
people with a single that has nothing to do with

(01:02:27):
the question. G Gordon Lyddy, that's a crazy thing to
bring up here.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
You gotta stop, you know, lists like you're bringing it
up so many times. It's really Yeah, did have any
other sources?

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
That is not that does not make any point that's
relevant to what you're trying to argue here. Yeah, you
just wanted to talk about the SS killing Jewish people.
That's literally the only reason you said this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
You just imagine like Nickxon being like, anyone have any
thoughts his hand is like, not Nazi thoughts.

Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Thoughts that do not involve the SS. Fucking yeah, just
just a maniac. So Lyddy claims his recommendation is adopted,
and even in his recitation of events, the fact that
his recommendation is adopted is a disaster, right, because the
bureau Nickel plates all of their guns in order to

(01:03:26):
make sure that they're less vulnerable to like you know,
the the air and like see like saltwater, you know,
heavy places, right, And because of this, it like fucks
up the chambering of the round and all of the
guns have to be returned to the factory. Lyddy presumably
knew they were going to do this, but didn't think
to check on if it would matter, because he just

(01:03:48):
loves revolvers so much. Like again, even in his recitation
of events, to make himself look good, he gives them
advice on what kind of gun and round to use,
and it is such a disaster that they have to
recall all of the firearms. Like that's the best that
this goes for him? Is he's completely wrong, Oh my god.
And it's like the thing he loves the most. He's

(01:04:12):
come on very funny. Oh my god, so bizarre. Anyway,
I think that's gonna that's gonna close us out on
episode three of the g Gordon Liddy Story, How are
you feeling, Andrew?

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
This is I should have said probably before we even
started this.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
I'm not a person that knows like a ton of
a Watergate at all. So this is all wonderful. Next episode,
we're really gonna get into it, right, Yeah, but we've
we've had We've had to go through a lot to
set up why Liddy's even there. And I bet you're wondering,
if you're a normal person, I bet you're wondering, like,

(01:04:49):
how the fuck did anyone trust him doing Watergate ship?
Given this guy's background, A solid question, how did he
get that job?

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
I mean, you see the modern version of this in
Trump or the like, you kind of like the reason
he gets it is because he's willing to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is that is You have
anticipated where this very well, very well.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
But yeah, anyway, Andrew, you get anything to plug just
you know, still do the podcast, Jos this racist.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
I am a writer on strike, So if anyone is
wanting to support us, hopefully, I guess there's a chance
I'm not a writer on strike as you're listening to this,
but likely.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
I will still be.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
And even if I'm not still on strike, the overwhelming
possibility is going to be SAG will still be on strike.
The as Green As Guild, So the Entertainment Community Fund
please if you can and are able to send money
to that. You know, it's the only way a lot
of people are getting through. Not the only way, but
it's one very helpful way that a lot of people
are getting through this labor action that you know, there

(01:05:58):
the studios are trying to extract as much pain as.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Possible, and you know, why not not let them? Yeah,
why not not let them? And if you want to
extract pain, you know how to figure that out yourself.
You know, find a way to take pain out of
the world and ideally bottle it in such a fashion
that you can then sell it back to somebody else. Right.

(01:06:24):
That's capitalism, baby, Yeah, that's how it all works.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Yeah, this is what we sell the other people's paid
or our own pain.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
I don't remember. Yeah, anyway, Go to Hell.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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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 Three: G. Gordon Liddy: The Fascist Behind Watergate