After the Tall Timber (18 page)

Beginning on the Monday of the week in which that issue of
Time
appeared, the switchboard at St. Martin’s Press was overwhelmed with local and long-distance requests for interviews. On Thursday, Liddy was scheduled to be interviewed on the morning news broadcasts of two networks—ABC’s
Good Morning America
and NBC’s
Today
. To talk with Liddy, ABC had invited “a member of our
Good Morning America
family,” Jack Anderson; for
Today
, NBC had invited E. Howard Hunt. Liddy and Anderson, who had never met, agreed to appear together. Hunt had accepted NBC’s invitation (a book of his own, a thriller, was about to be published); but both he and Liddy had, separately, insisted that they appear on separate segments of the program, that they not actually meet.
Today’s
producers hoped, all the same, to bring about a confrontation on the air.

Within ABC, as it happened, there had already been an angry struggle over Liddy—between the network’s entertainment and its news executives. The news branch claimed that he was news and that, as news, he belonged on an early-evening news broadcast. Entertainment claimed him for the mixed format of a morning show. News lost this dispute, but before it was resolved, in the late hours of Tuesday night, ABC news had filmed an interview with Liddy, which was virtually sneaked onto the air at 11:30 P.M., on Wednesday night’s
Nightline
, several hours before Liddy’s scheduled
Good Morning America
debut. Since this scoop marked a little insurrection, Liddy’s name was not listed in newspaper advertisements for Wednesday’s
Nightline
. News listed him instead for
20/20
, on Thursday, at 10:00 P.M. Viewers of ABC’s night news programs thus had two consecutive surprises. On Wednesday night, an unannounced appearance by G. Gordon Liddy. On Thursday night, the following cryptic announcement:

At 6:45 on Thursday morning, G. Gordon Liddy sat in the makeup room of the
Good Morning America
studios, on West Sixty-third Street in New York. He was dressed, as usual, in a dark suit and tie; and he was talking to the makeup people with a combination of formality, attentiveness, and good manners, which seemed always a little to disconcert people who met him for the first time. He had signed three copies of
Will
for members of the ABC crew. A newspaper reporter, one of several assigned to Liddy that first week, mentioned that a letter Liddy wrote in prison had recently been sold for $125. “In that case my wife is sitting on a fortune,” Liddy said. Outside in the hall, Jack Anderson could be heard. “I don’t have to shake hands with him, do I?” Anderson said; “I may have to restrain myself from punching him in the nose.” Some moments later, when they were introduced, Liddy and Anderson shook hands. They entered the lighted set at the front of a darkened studio. They took armchairs across from each other, on either side of the anchorman, David Hartman, who sat on an ample sofa, among plants, yellow walls, bookshelves, lamps, a coffee table. “It’s six fifty-four. Quiet, folks,” a voice said to the people scattered in the dark behind the cameras. “Forty-five seconds, folks. Fifteen seconds. Quiet. Shh.” A stillness. “Good morning,” Hartman said to his viewers across the country. “It’s seven o’clock.” He introduced G. Gordon Liddy, “the best-known of the Watergate conspirators.” He mentioned Liddy’s book, “In it, he reveals that he had plans to kill Jack Anderson.” Then he said, “Good morning, Jack. And good morning, Mr. Liddy.” The program, and G. Gordon Liddy’s eight-week tour of America, were under way.

“Perhaps more than any of the Watergate characters,”
Time
had said, in an obviously bewildered introduction to its excerpts, “Liddy embodied the principles underlying the scandal that destroyed a President.” It seemed clear, however, not just from the excerpts but from Liddy’s conduct in all the years since Watergate, that whatever the “principles” underlying the scandal may have been, no Watergate character embodied them less. Ever since the first reports, in 1972, of the events that became known as Watergate—throughout the trials, the Ervin Committee hearings, the impeachment inquiry, the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the United States, the various prison terms, acquittals, memoirs, commutations—the conduct of G. Gordon Liddy, and his alone, had seemed in two respects remarkable. While other participants talked, in truths, or lies, or half-truths, Gordon Liddy kept his silence. And, in the midst of a political scandal never completely understood but obviously in important ways and on an unprecedented scale financial, Liddy shredded cash. The second fact was less widely remarked on than the first. Destruction of cash, from Natasha’s burning of rubles in
The Brothers Karamazov
to American millionaires’ lighting their cigars with dollars in the tabloids, has always been an imaginatively powerful idea. Amid bribes, hush money, “contributions” foreign and domestic, private and corporate, voluntary and extorted, open and secret, Liddy’s first instinct, when the break-in was discovered, had been not to take or to hide dollars but to destroy them. And far from eliciting money for his silence—in a story that consisted so largely of paid silences alternating with testimony designed to exonerate a speaker, implicate others, get a lenient sentence—Liddy was left, after fifty-two months in various prisons, with debts, for fines and legal fees, of more than $300,000. People thought him crazy, or sinister, or honorable, or even heroic; but Liddy was known primarily for his refusals, and in these he was alone.

Silence and, apparently, indifference to money. Apart from that, in a country that was reading, and watching, tales of espionage, detection, mysteries, thrillers, Liddy was known to have been at least twice, on June 17, 1972, in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate; on September 3, 1971, at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, a conspirator, a burglar, and a sort of secret agent. Before that, he had been a lawyer, a candidate for Congress, a prosecutor in Dutchess County, for five years an agent of the FBI. He seemed to combine, then, in his person several characters in contemporary fiction: the criminal, the policeman, the district attorney, and the spy. In the Ellsberg break-in, moreover, Liddy was a government employee, acting in his official capacity, on the authority of high officials of the government. In the Watergate burglary, he was a private citizen, employed by politicians to act in knowing violation of existing law. Though the personnel and even the objectives of the two events may have been similar, their implications were vastly different. Liddy somehow managed, with these two acts, to pose successively a Nuremberg or Eichmann question (When is a man obliged, in conscience, to disobey what he believes to be a lawful governmental order?) and the key question of civil disobedience (When does a man have the right, in conscience, to defy certain laws within a legal system on whose basic protection he relies?). One is the problem of a functionary, in a government’s abuse of power; the other, almost on the contrary, the problem of a rebel. Both acts occur within a system which the actor regards as, on the whole, legitimate and benign. Both questions were, of course, formulated most precisely and in the greatest depth by Hannah Arendt. But never together—that is, as the predicament of a single spirit. And never, certainly, for a man like Liddy, who took, as Ms. Arendt pointed out a civil disobedient is obliged to take, the legal consequences of his own acts (those years in prison); who never did obey an order at variance with his conscience; and who never, so far as is known or likely, did or caused physical harm to anyone at all. Finally, Liddy had, in his own way and almost incidentally, played out a drama of ex-radicals in the fifties, refusing not just to name names or to extricate himself at the expense of former associates but to invoke any constitutional protection for his reticence.

Throughout the years, and until the publication of
Will
, there was, inevitably, an impression that Liddy’s silence must conceal some vital secret, some great fact or explanation to complete the story of events in which he played a part. “You have played a vitally important role in a major historical development,” Stewart Alsop wrote to Liddy, in July 1973, “and it seems to me that by now you owe it to yourself, and indeed to history, to say more about that role.”
Will
has many qualities, and contains several kinds of information: but one thing clear from it is that Liddy knew nothing quite so broad, even about Watergate. During most of the cover-up, he was in prison. Before that, if one can trust his account of what he knew, and, on the basis of evidence in and outside the book, it is almost impossible not to trust it, Liddy’s own pieces of Watergate information, though not unimportant, were few. Liddy knew that he had told Richard Kleindienst, the Attorney General of the United States, in considerable detail about the Watergate break-in, within hours of its occurrence. Kleindienst rebuffed him, and did nothing to further the investigation until April 1973, when John Dean’s testimony to federal prosecutors led to Kleindienst’s resignation—along with H.R. Haldeman’s, John Ehrlichman’s, and Dean’s. Liddy knew that Robert Mardian, former assistant attorney general for internal security, had taken charge, as early as June 20, 1972, of the initial phases of the cover-up. And he knew that Gordon Strachan, Haldeman’s chief assistant at the White House, had known about the break-ins at the Watergate. None of these three men went to prison. The statute of limitations has, in any event, run out on all Watergate offenses, one reason for Liddy’s having postponed till now the writing of his book. Kleindienst was never indicted for obstruction of justice. Mardian was indicted and convicted of conspiracy, but acquitted on appeal. Strachan, who like Kleindienst and Mardian persistently and indignantly proclaimed his innocence, was never convicted of anything and was particularly commended for his candor at the Ervin Committee hearings by the chairman, Sam Ervin.

From a strictly Watergate point of view, these may all have been facts of historic consequence—particularly the information about Strachan. There had always been a missing link (specifically, a missing memorandum in a numbered series of twenty memoranda) in the chain of evidence from Watergate to Strachan; as there had always been missing pieces (specifically, just what facts Liddy had told him) in the link to Kleindienst. The information about Mardian, whose indictment rested on quite other evidence, was entirely new. Liddy, of course, had details of many other kinds, but Liddy’s allegations about the three men, if he had spoken at the time, would have led, directly and inescapably, to the President; and it is Strachan who would inevitably, by implicating Haldeman, have implicated the President, for having authorized the break-in after all. In that event, on the plane of the historical what-if, if Liddy had, at the time, told all he knew, it is almost certain that President Nixon, immediately after the 1972 election, would have taken responsibility for the break-in, explained it somehow, and gone on to serve out his constitutional term. It was, after all, the cover-up, prolonged, intricate, disintegrating over a period of more than twenty months, that became finally intolerable; it took more than two years of extraordinary events and processes before a mechanism for removal of the President was in place. Of that long disintegration of the cover-up, Liddy, who tries carefully to distinguish what he speculates about from what he knows as fact, has only an impression. A sweep of Jeb Magruder’s hand toward a desk drawer which held Republicans’ derogatory information about Democrats caused Liddy to believe that the purpose of the break-in was to find what derogatory information the Democrats had about Republicans. Liddy does not dwell at all upon these, his Watergate scoops, such as they are (three historic felonies at the highest level, one sweep of the hand). And in the course of all his travels, no interviewer. Watergate reporter, or reviewer mentioned any but the last, the sweep. And few mentioned that.

What they did all mention, and want to talk about, was Liddy as a Nazi sympathizer; Liddy as a racist believer in genetics; Liddy as a burner of his own hand; Liddy, and this with the greatest fascination, as a man prepared to kill. Also, increasingly and perhaps surprisingly, Liddy as a philosopher about the human condition and Liddy as a commentator on American political affairs. He was asked, everywhere, what he would do in President Carter’s place about foreign policy, what were his thoughts on the nature of good and evil, how people ought to raise their children (the Liddys have five, two daughters, three sons, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two), what is the relation between hope and death, free enterprise and regulation, military preparedness and the democratic system, and so on. Some interviewers addressed him in the most respectful terms, as a kind of statesman. Others seemed to bait him as a dangerous fanatic. Others still to treat him as though there were no distinction, as though statesman, fanatic, writer, presumptive killer were all essentially the same.

“Tell me, Mr. Liddy,” a distinctly hostile television interviewer asked him, in Los Angeles, right after the failed helicopter rescue mission to Iran, “if Richard Nixon were still President, would our hostages still be in Teheran?” She spoke with an air of wariness and triumph, as though she had risked the violence of a madman to provoke an item of sensational news. “If Richard Nixon were still President,” Liddy replied, amiably and without hesitation, “the
Shah
would still be in Teheran.”

All over the country, interviewers asked him who he thought had really killed President Kennedy. “I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories of history,” he would say. “Such a conspiracy would have had to be too large. So many people could never keep a secret.” He was often asked the identity of Woodward and Bernstein’s informant, Deep Throat. Each time, he replied that he was virtually certain, just as any reader of
All the President’s Men
would be certain, that there was no single such person, that it was a literary device to cover a variety of sources. And then he would add that since he was in prison during most of the period covered by the book, he could know no more about the matter than anybody else.