G. Gordon Liddy, whose 1980 autobiography Will was a dubious influence on my adolescence, wrote about going to the Justice Department for a meeting in late-April 1971, as anti-war protestors converged on Washington. Liddy, then a Treasury official, was about to be reassigned at the behest of Attorney General John Mitchell to the White House “Plumbers” unit, where he’d oversee the Watergate burglary that, in time, would land various Nixon administration officials, including him and Mitchell, in prison.
Liddy wrote: “I discovered just how sharp the struggle had become with those who had lost the 1968 election and wanted to reverse that result by any means. The corridors of the Justice Department building intersect at acute angles. At those angles, where they could sweep two corridors at once, there were uniformed infantry behind crew-served automatic weapons—belt-fed light machineguns. Any of the mob who managed to overwhelm the [General Services Administration] guards and enter the building to ‘shut it down’ would be cut to pieces by machinegun fire. Nobody fucked with John Mitchell.”
Re-reading, I’m struck by Liddy’s description of Yippies and other militants, who’d chosen May Day to launch D.C. demonstrations, as “those who had lost the 1968 election.” Such protestors had wreaked havoc on the Democrats’ 1968 Chicago convention, damaging the campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a despised member of the Lyndon Johnson administration that escalated the Vietnam War. If the May Day marchers had somehow taken over the government, they wouldn’t have installed Humphrey. But conflating elected Democrats with the far-left is a time-honored political tradition, often but not always disingenuous. Liddy seems to have sincerely believed that blowing away putative leftist invaders at the Justice Department, and burglarizing the Democrats’ headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, were just two facets of the same struggle, in which offense was the best defense.
After Liddy died in 2021, Dan Zak of The Washington Post described him as a “super-klutz” whose efforts often backfired, but wrote “he lives on in any number of characters afflicting our politics with their theatrical machismo or numbskulled shenanigans.” In a gesture at bipartisan evenhandedness, Zak listed Andrew Cuomo as a Liddyesque character, but his focus was on how “TrumpWorld teemed with little Liddys trying to outdo one another with displays of bravado, running off cliffs like Wile E. Coyotes, rigging political bombs that detonated in their faces,” with Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Rudolph Giuliani given as examples. The comparison falls short, in my view, in that these figures (Cuomo included) seem to act largely out of scummy self-interest, lacking the genuineness of Liddy’s fanaticism.
I’ve caught up on some movies lately. The Apprentice impressed me as a study of Donald Trump’s early career and the formation of his character; the depiction of Roy Cohn is noteworthy, the ruthless lawyer shown as both a malign figure and, eventually, a surprisingly sympathetic one, when he’s dying of AIDS and has been tossed aside by the man whose career as a celebrity mogul he’d effectively launched. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump reportedly said in his first term, demanding an attorney general loyal to him over the Constitution and rule of law. While Cohn was adept at dark arts such as blackmail, Liddy had an affinity for violence, honed by self-inflicted ordeals such as holding his arm in a flame. One can imagine, at some future point where a physical threat is needed to tip the balance in some deliberation by the Senate or Supreme Court, Trump might say, “Where’s my Gordon Liddy?” That is, if he happens to know who Liddy was; questionable given John Kelly’s account that Trump demanded “German generals” like Adolf Hitler had, but wasn’t familiar with Erwin Rommel.
Another film I watched is Civil War, which drew me in with its depiction of a secessionist army (the “Western Forces” led by California and Texas, an unlikely pairing) bursting into the White House to take down an autocratic president in his third term. More likely than such military action, it seemed to me, was the prospect of a presidential third term. While that’s widely thought prohibited by the 22nd Amendment, its wording rules out only that a president can be “elected” to a third term. It doesn’t explicitly prevent a president from serving after two terms, which might occur through succession if the person temporarily takes on the role of vice president or speaker of the House. If there’s any resistance toward such a scheme in the halls of power, having some Gordon Liddy types on hand will help.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky
