G. Gordon Liddy emerges as a figure of erratic incompetence, debunked by former FBI officials who note his transfer to record-keeping due to unreliability. His delusions include claiming French Foreign Legion units were Waffen-SS veterans—a myth from "The Devil's Guard"—and recommending 357 Magnum revolvers for air marshals based on irrelevant Nazi experiments. From firing blanks in court to nearly blowing the 1966 Timothy Leary raid, Liddy's loyalty to Nixon masked a pattern of dangerous eccentricity and historical ignorance that ultimately undermined his professional credibility. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:05:03
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Oh!
That's probably a bad way to open the 19th most popular podcast on the internet.
You really wanted to say that today, didn't you?
I did.
Ever since you sent me that thing, Sophie, I've 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 fact.
Hell yeah.
But we are number 19.
Andrew Prue.
We are number 90.
Oh, my God.
Congratulations.
We are number 90.
Congratulations to us.
Yeah, from us.
We're not lying.
This is like when I buy myself a Christmas present.
Yeah.
Just like a little treat.
It's like getting an extra, extra donut.
Yeah.
Yeah.
An extra donut.
Andrew T. What up?
How goes the strike, Andrew?
Still striking.
I brought a second dog to the picket line on Friday.
A second dog has hit the picket line.
She was a huge hit.
That's good.
That's all.
I mean, as of this episode coming out, we're closer to it's potentially possible that the strike is over by the time you hear this.
I would give it 15% 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.
Yeah.
Yeah, it'll be good.
Andrew, as we speak this, two great Hollywood celebrities, real like Titans of the industry, just announced that they were bringing their shows back and then got curb stomped.
The verbal equivalent of curb stomped.
Yeah.
Is that funny or not?
How are you?
Where are you landing on that?
Because where I'm sitting, I think it was pretty funny.
The about face came so quickly that it was really like two days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so that kind of like the whiplash of it.
I think 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.
Yes.
I don't, the not funny side of it is the telling people that they can start working again when they actually can't.
And like, that's that's the people that are not, you know, SAG or WGA that work on sets and being like, oh, you're going to get to come back to work.
And the answer is, no, you're not.
And I'm just a selfish narcissist.
Yeah.
There was no good reason for any of this.
I mean, 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.
The Hoover Six Scandal00:15:31
He just didn't have the opportunity.
His season, he was on summer.
Is there anybody else that would have loved to have scabbed more than Bill Maher?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So whatever they have on him, it's very legit.
Yeah.
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 in a much more difficult to prove way.
But, you know, Bill Maher is a member of the Writers Guild.
Yeah.
Fuck Bill Maher is more or less where we're heading here.
You know who, unlike Bill Maher, you know, you know who has been consistent in their principles all of their lives is G. Gordon Liddy, the G-Man.
One thing you got to give Liddy.
Yeah, he never, he's always been honest about who he is.
Yeah.
That's not a great thing.
You know, it's like, but it is a thing.
Yeah.
You got to, you got to acknowledge that.
So when we, when we last left off the G-Man, he had joined the FBI, compared it directly to the SS in a positive sense.
Favorite.
Favorably.
Yeah.
As America's protective echelon.
So he's in Indiana a while.
He learns how to cowboy gunfight from these great cowboy gunfighters.
And then he, and then he totally gets super close to needing to use his handgun, but he never quite has to.
But he does have like multiple stories where he like it's everything up to and then like, but then before I could pull my gun, you know, the situation ended.
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 the, one of these guys that's on the FBI's most wanted list.
And then based according to his like 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 Liddy and not them.
So that's not what happened.
And again, this is, thankfully, this is what I'm not going into 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 erratic and irrational behavior.
One of his supervisors described him as a 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 up constantly, like whenever, whenever he's given a chance to do something, he's going to make some stupid mistake.
He's like a Nazi Elmer Fud in a way that is like really, it's a great comparison and and so the add the kind of attitude that, like some of these people, that 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.
So we don't have as much detail as i'd like on what specifically he up, but given that this is consistent with his performance later in life, i'm going to choose to side with his superiors here rather than claim that he was just super good at the FBI.
Uh yeah, yeah.
And this makes, if he's, if he really is just like kind of incompetent.
It makes his transfer to DC make 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 them a place where you 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.
That's like the punishment in, like the second act of a Loose Cannon cop movie.
Right, like that is, go file some papers.
G Gordon Liddy, stay the away from from the world.
Um, Liddy would go on to claim that he was the youngest bureau supervisor in agency history.
Uh, you'll see this cited in like write-ups of his career periodically, but they only ever cite him.
So i'm gonna go ahead and say that's probably either not true or not impressive, right?
Um, 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.
Uh, Wikipedia also lists those claims as citations needed.
So again, not gonna, not gonna go out on a limb and say he was definitely awarded by Hoover.
Um former FBI officials interviewed by journalist Anthony Lucas later would claim that Liddy got pushed out of the FBI because he was seen as dangerous and unreliable.
Um, you know, we don't get tons of detail on what exactly caused him to get pushed out, but there are some pieces from Liddy's autobiography that may suggest why.
For example this line, my son Jim, was born in april of 1961 and I was 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 in a private ceremony of celebration, just firing his service weapon randomly into the sky to celebrate.
Yeah, unpopulated area.
Okay, Liddy pop man, it is.
It is wild, having done this show a few times now, how much of history's damage has been done by huge nerds.
Yeah, just a big old dork.
It's really like, how does it?
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's why, but it's, it's.
You know, we're not, we're not cruel enough To nerds, I'm realizing.
No, like 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 people.
Because you like somebody needed to G. Gordon 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?
Like really, his dad, I don't know.
I don't know how you like get it.
Like, I think if his dad had been more aware 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 this.
No gun privileges until you're in the game.
You're not allowed to have this.
It's pretty cool.
And he has 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 able to stop it because you don't have a gun, you get in trouble.
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 going to 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 you to know that he carried a gun around for several years.
God.
I know.
The like, the 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 still somehow weasel, which is amazing.
It's just like, oh, it's so funny.
So Liddy 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 in the air.
And this becomes a problem, he says, for their bottom line.
And so, you know, he decides to quit and the FBI is like, we love you, Liddy.
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.
Again.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
People within the FBI are like, yeah, we were doing everything we could to force him to leave.
So, you know, that said, 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 Liddy and his wife are 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 around a billion of Catholics, you know?
So Liddy and his wife, they try to use the rhythm method 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 wife.
Maybe it just doesn't work, G. Gordon Liddy.
Maybe it's a bad method of birth control.
Hey, everyone.
My phrasing here was not great.
I didn't 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 Liddy's case is a pretty good example of this.
There are a lot of others, but obviously, like biologically, if you were to do it perfectly, it would work.
It's just not a very good idea compared to modern forms of contraception.
And what a missed opportunity to talk about what amazing sperm he has.
You know, he could have just claimed he was unbelievably fertile.
He's just too potent.
Yeah.
Now, 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 too.
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 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 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 kind of on some level those.
He's he's bringing real loser genes to the table.
So he's really hedging his bets.
Yeah.
You got to be careful if you're like bringing Liddy grade genetics to the table because it's that kid's just going to be a fuck up.
You know, it's just tough.
He brings fuck up to the table.
So you like, you know, you break out the punted square, a little bit of recessive traits.
Yeah.
How did he, the math that got him personally to six, I would love to see.
I would love to see his little scrawled notebook, like one loser, one dead.
Yeah, at least one of them's going to, you know, lose them, lose their mind.
So we got to, we got to write one off.
And being Liddy's a good, 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's a natural loser.
So yeah, exactly.
This is just the minimum we need.
You know, just given, given my worthless genes, this is the only way to ensure enough liddies survive.
Yes.
It's, it's, it's logic like this that has ensured that we still have G. Gordon Liddy's today, everybody.
So yeah.
Now, unfortunately, Fran's body does not handle multiple pregnancies in quick succession very well, right?
And yeah, I don't say that to like make fun of her.
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?
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 how these things go.
They have one more kid during this process, but Liddy decides to give up after that.
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 Frances to be the mother of my children was her size and strength, which should have enabled her to bear half a dozen high-performance children.
I certainly had not intended to risk damage by pushing her to her design limit.
Oh.
No, you're right.
People don't talk that way about their wives, G. Gordon Liddy.
He's like actual Marvin the Martian.
Yeah, he's talking like about his his ill wife and his children as if he's like a fucking GM factory.
Yeah.
Design limitations.
Their design limit.
She should have been putting out six high performance children by this period.
Well, high performance asterisk Liddy, Liddy failure rate.
All of these kids should already be shooting handguns into the air at random.
They haven't murdered 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 dad was desperate for him to come work for them and like 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 is constantly, no, you have to not do that.
Seems likely.
Yeah.
Seems like the direction.
He's just like a G-man.
Yeah.
So his, 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 for a DA's office in New York State in order to preserve their relationship.
Now, by the point that he does this, this is like 62 or 63, something like that.
Foreign Legion Myths00:14:57
The swing in 60s are well underway.
And our boy is starting to pay attention to the resistance that has built in the country to the involvement of U.S. troops in a little country you might have heard of called Vietnam.
You know, if you're unaware, Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia that we had a disagreement with and they won.
Yeah.
So this had started, the whole kerfuffle in Vietnam had started due to the failure of French forces to maintain control of Indochina and a bunch of unhinged fears among U.S. policymakers that the spread of communism in Vietnam would lead to a series of falling dominoes that ended with a unified communist Asia under China.
Now, if you read Ho 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 bloc.
And they 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.
You know, this is a thing that happens on Yozis 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.
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 had explained to like the leaders of northern Vietnam right at the start of the war with the U.S. that like in 50 years, they'd be allied with the U.S. against China, they would have said, yeah, sounds about right.
Yeah, that's totally possible.
Absolutely.
Could happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's mostly what, yeah.
This is their assholes.
Yeah.
This goes into, we just talked about this a little on our episodes about Scott Adams' 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, 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 beings.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, or their neighbors.
Or their neighbors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those are the people they're actually murdering or whatever.
Yeah.
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 him summarizing the situation with France.
Following the close of World War II, when the French were fighting the Viet Minh in Indochina, 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 in history, the Waffen-SS.
It was only after that pact was made public and political pressure forced their removal that the French began to lose.
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 80s.
This is the 80s.
It's pretty, I mean, this is kind of the last time Nazis were basically universally frowned upon, I would have thought, amongst like G. Gordon Liddy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What do I know?
This is, I should start by saying, nonsense.
It is true.
There were some members of the Waffen, 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 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 in addition to using them to like breed more Aryans.
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 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 Legion, 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 II, right?
It's not because historically, if you look 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 60% of it in the post-war period were Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, or most commonly, German.
And there's a good chance that about 50,000 Germans cycled through French Indochina during the post-war stages of the conflict there.
But that doesn't tell the whole story.
The Viet Minh 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 1947.
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 Indochina 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 historian from the Asked Historian Subreddit noted, the Legion was recruited, recruiting about 10,000 men a year, many of them certainly Germans.
But by the 1950s, with the average age of a legionnaire in the very early 20s, 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 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 Indochina in the late 40s were SS veterans and they were really good.
You know, if they just stayed in there, they would have won that war.
The fact that he believes that and states that says a lot, right?
Because this recitation that like the first Foreign Legion units in Indochina are all SS 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 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 1971.
So this is about nine years before Liddy writes his autobiography.
The Devil's Guard is based on the experience of a former Waffen-SS 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 Indochina, where he fights in a 900-man unit of all former SS men.
And they're just the best at counter.
They're running circles around the Viet Minh using all these different, their combat skills.
And they're so sneaky and they have all these different plans and stuff.
And because of how ruthless they are, the Viet Minh just, you know, can't do anything about them, right?
Now, Elford presents this.
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 900-man unit of former SS veterans, right?
That just did not happen.
Right.
That's from an Indiana Jones sequel.
That's from an Indiana Jones book.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, 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 ass book.
So there's loving descriptions of all the different guns they use and how, and a bunch of the weapons he describes them using in 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 counterinsurgency tactics shown in the book.
Like at one point, these SS guys kidnap the family members of a bunch of Viet Minh fighters and like stick them in vehicles that they're driving through a part of the jungle so that if the Viet Men 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 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 II.
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 one of the most fascist books of military fiction in existence.
And again, I have to really emphasize fiction.
Its claims that it was real have spread myths about the incredible brilliance of the SS as a counterinsurgency force for generations.
In 2006, and this is why I know about it, in 2006, online bookstore A Books noted that it was one of the top 10 novels sold to U.S. 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 advice.
So they read this book about supposedly the best counterinsurgency experts who ever existed, the fucking SS, right?
It's just this very popular book of lies.
And Liddy 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 book of fiction.
Now, I think it's worth spending a little bit more time discussing exactly why Liddy's conception of the Waffen-SS is ahistorical.
First off, the SS were dog shit 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 U.S. is the best counterinsurgency army in the world.
It's like, well, what the fuck are you basing that on?
Right?
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 into all these areas like Ukraine, right, in Eastern Europe, where because of sort of the relationship that Aryad 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 a count, like an insurgent 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 Wehrmacht 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 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.
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 a standard had a standard size of about 20,000 men compared to 16,500 in the regular army.
So if you're saying, well, these Waffen-SS divisions performed better than these Wehrmacht divisions, it's like, well, there were an extra like 350.
500 guys in them.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that they would do better.
Yeah.
Better tank.
Well, you know, that's that's just the uh power of Aryanness, you know?
That's it's like if you weren't Aryan, you wouldn't have all those extra dudes.
Yeah.
How did they fight so much better?
Well, there were like 3,000 extra dudes.
Yeah.
That'll, that'll, that can matter sometimes.
That's so much extra Aryan 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.
It is worth noting, SS men were picked both for racial and ideological purity, right?
Part of what this meant is that regular enlisted soldiers in the Waffen-SS were often healthier and in better physical shape than regular army soldiers.
But it also means that their officers were picked not on based on their performance, right?
On 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?
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 Ask Historians post on this matter, which quotes a February 1943 inspection of an SS division by a Wehrmacht Army major.
Quote, the commanders of this WAP VN SS division did not seem to realize that brave and ideologically misguided young men were being selflessly sacrificed through insane arrogance and a lofty disdain for sound training.
Belief in the Führer 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.
SS Propaganda vs Reality00:05:38
In other words, officers in the Waffen-SS were often young men like Liddy, 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, right?
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 in combat.
It's really a two-way street.
The love for the, like the SS would have loved Liddy.
And yeah, 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 SS would have been like, he's irrational.
Make him an officer.
Right.
He just, yeah, right.
You know, at least he knows where he would have fit in.
Yeah.
Which 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.
Anyway, that was a long digression, but like I felt it was necessary.
Anyway, you know what else is a fascist paramilitary organization?
We'll find out.
The sponsors of our podcast.
Oh.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Voda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, what did I?
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we are back.
And boy, I really loved those ads for the Waffen-SS.
You know, I hope a lot of our listeners join so that they can win the war in French Indochina.
You got it.
It's like, just as, if only there were a few more Nazis there, you know?
Yeah, a couple more Nazis going to put that whole house in order.
Like we always say, that's all we need.
Yeah, I do love the idea that like the SS's experience getting their asses handed to them in the steps of Eastern Europe would have prepared them for a jungle war in Vietnam.
Exactly.
Leary and the Acid Raid00:13:44
Yeah, they were really ready for that.
So by the 1960s, the mid-60s, the anti-war movement has started to pick up serious steam.
And Liddy is horrified by this.
Young people, as he writes, were quote, eroding the national will and respect for authority.
They were sinking into another 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.
Yeah, solid.
It's going to be good.
Valid 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 you.
I still would call that defensive violence, right?
I will admit that was much more measured than I thought it was going to be.
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, I don't think these people, like, he's always going to be the guy who, his racism is more obvious in like the only ways he ever talks about black people, right?
Right.
Where like anytime he deals with a violent criminal, he's going to let you know that it's a black man.
Right.
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, Liddy has come to feel that his only option is to get a job at the district attorney's office in Powkepsie, New York in 1966.
And I hate typing the word Powkepsie.
So I'm very unhappy that this is such a part of the story.
But he points out that part of why 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 lawman, respected by the local police and liked by the judges.
And that is to at least some extent true.
A New York Times reporter who visited in 1973 and asked around about Liddy got this description of him.
Liddy led an unusual, even bizarre life.
He liked to drive around town in a jeep.
He carried 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 cruising the city with policemen.
He's like always hanging out with the cops, going on like raids with them and shit, not for because it's his job, just because he thinks it's fun.
Oh my God.
What a freak.
I love the mental image of a fucking Poughkeepsie PD and G Gordon Liddy drawing their guns at each other.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
I also love that little mention that, like, oh, yeah, he wasn't very good at it, right?
Like, oh, he always lost, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm genuinely surprised he didn't accidentally shoot someone in that moment.
Yeah, we don't, we don't 100% know 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.
Liddy'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 the basis of that stunt, an opposing lawyer Prokold.
And another time, he smashed a piece of wood over the jury rail while prosecuting an assault case involving the use of the plank.
Liddy 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.
He's so funny.
Here's the thing I was going to 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.
This guy, this guy, like G. Gordon Liddy never was seen without a Bud K catalog, 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 G. Gordon Liddy.
And I think that might just be not being a huge dork, 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 a jury.
Yeah.
Like my knives are more like, you know, used for processing animals and stuff.
Like I process roadkill with my knives.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
It's like, I guess it's competence or something.
I can't mild, mild competence, right?
That's all it takes.
Yeah.
That's the difference.
I guess not being a Nazi.
Not being a Nazi.
Yeah, not using them to threaten people for no good reason.
There's a 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 U.S. soldiers in the early parts of the global war on terror, right?
So one of the most 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.
You'll hear this summarized like, yeah, he fired a loaded handgun in a courtroom in order to like make an like emphasize an argument.
The court case in 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 Liddy 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.
This, 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.
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, 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?
Right.
Yeah.
Just don't be a freak and you can get to do your idiosyncratic things.
Yeah, we all like a weirdo, right?
Yeah.
You just went too far, G. Gordon Liddy.
Yeah.
In general, he was seen as an eccentric but decent lawyer.
One of the defense lawyers who worked opposite of Liddy told the Times later, he was fun in court.
You could ridicule him in front of the jury and he never carried a grudge outside the courtroom.
He also worked hard, prepared his cases 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.
That's such an interesting thing because I, up to this point, it's actually really hard to not visualize him in anything but flop sweat constantly.
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 Liddy as a character.
There's the one that has one, the one show that starred Justin Thoreau playing him.
And then I forget the actor for the other show that features him.
But like one of them shows him as flipping out and screaming and 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, who like constantly is always in this sort of, and I think that that's the Justin Thoreau version.
I think that's closer to how Liddy actually behaved, right?
I do think he, he is very good at maintaining this like cool 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 Liddy's time in Powkepsy was his run-in with Dr. Timothy Leary during a raid.
And these two guys are really tied together.
They will wind up touring the country doing a floor show together later.
Yeah, yeah.
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 fabulist, right?
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 genuinely and is extremely committed to those things.
And obviously those are better because he's not a Nazi, right?
So he's better, 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, 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 1966 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 decided to do a mini series about like the birth of the psychedelic drug movement of acid, of like a lot of things we consider core to like the hippie movement, you started at this raid in 1966, right?
Tim Leary, and the background of this is that like Tim Leary and a bunch of his, he was, you know, a professor at a, I think it was Harvard.
Maybe I'm wrong about it.
I think it was Harvard.
And he like becomes aware of LSD.
He starts taking it.
He starts doing studies with it.
This is during a period where it's legal, right?
It gets made 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 this mansion is bought.
There's this like rich kid stockbroker who like continues to make a lot of money doing stock shit.
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 at my mansion.
Remember when the rich used to be cool?
This guy does sound as cool as a stockbroker could be.
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.
Being this like soulless business guy.
So this Leary in between 30 and 60 at any given point, hippie dropout types live in this mansion and do hella drugs, right?
Mostly acid and weed, 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, 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 has kind of, he has by this point already gotten this reputation as like the devil to a lot of conservatives, right?
He is the absolute worst person on earth.
He's corrupting the youth.
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 Liddy is at this point a well-known anti-drug crusader, he winds up helping to organize the raid on Millbrook, right?
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 cohorts have gone to bed, Leary is like wearing a shirt and nothing.
He's shirtcocking it, right?
Like his dick's just swinging in the breeze.
And while all, there's this whole argument over like, is this raid legal?
What are they doing?
Like, where, you know, 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 in my home.
I will have my dick out if I want to.
Just repeatedly refuses to not have his wang hanging out, which is honorable, I think.
Yeah.
It's also worth noting that Liddy, who volunteers, he's not asked.
Like the only thing he's needed there for is to make sure that like legal procedure, but he volunteers to help the cops surveil the hippies beforehand for no reason and nearly blows the whole op as a result of this because again, he's bad at everything.
Quote.
And this is from the New York Times.
It seems that Liddy and some policemen, complete with binoculars and walkie-talkie, were staked out in the bushes of the estate when a young woman stepped completely nude from one of the tents 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 hideout 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.
Treasury Operation Intercept00:14:57
It's like porkies for Nazis.
It's all Nazis, I know, but come on.
Yeah.
You know what else is like porkies?
The sponsors of this podcast.
We are in fact sponsored by the movie Porkies.
Yeah.
Or the bar, the establishment, the establishment, all of those things.
If it's called porkies, we are legally responsible for it.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are B-A-Q.
That's how you spell back.
That's it.
Anyway.
So Liddy spends three years, I think, working for the DA's office in Powkepsy 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 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 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, Mr. Tepper, who 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 he was made known to him.
There's not going to be a space for you here forever.
Right, right, right.
He was always expecting the big narcotics bust, Mr. 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, he had the feeling, I'm not going to always have a role here, right?
Right, right, right.
So Liddy, now 38, decides he's going to challenge the leading Republican candidate in New York's 28th congressional district, the relative of one of our former guests, Maggie May Fish, Hamilton Fish Jr.
So these guys are related to that serial killer and the political dynasty, the fishes.
Yeah.
So that's cool.
Anyway, Hamilton Fish Jr. is kind of like an establishment Republican, right?
He's probably someone who would like, was closer to the dims than like a dude like G. Gordon Liddy.
And so Liddy is kind of running against him on a very extreme right-wing platform.
His campaign had three planks, taxes, which were too high, crime, and Vietnam, right?
On crime, Liddy 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 guy.
Someone had to be.
Someone got it.
It is funny how like all of the thin blue linist guys wind up in prison for committing crimes.
Yeah.
I do love how consistent that is.
Meanwhile, on Vietnam, he was clear that he supported U.S. 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 all we was taking.
We needed more SS guys out in the jungle.
So give it, yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's very funny.
He would have like, 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 Liddy lost badly and eventually was forced to drop out and back fish in 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 lawyer 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, 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 something you got to give Liddy.
He's going to 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 an ambitious person.
He's a toady.
Yeah.
He is a henchman, right?
He's got a hench.
Yeah.
So Liddy 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?
And that's what he sees from Liddy.
And so, you know, it becomes, it kind of like gets through the grapevine, like, all right, Liddy's somebody that we can trust in the Nixon White House.
And as a reward, when Dick Nixon wins office, G. Gordon Liddy 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.
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.
Liddy instantly proves himself to be the kind of guy that cannot be trusted with power.
He gets in a lot of trouble very quickly at the Department of Treasury because he keeps trying to set policy, right, on his own, just 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'll give like all these speeches at like gun control lobby events saying that the Department of Treasury will never do this.
And then his boss will be like, the fuck are you talking about?
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 the Mexican government for refusing to allow U.S. 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 includes Americans.
And absolutely, this 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 U.S. side of the border, too, right?
It fucks up the local economy.
It does a lot of damage.
And there's no like nothing but chaos as the result.
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 1971.
Now, for his part, Liddy describes Intercept as having been a success, right?
The 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 the Mexican government could handle the disruption less well, right?
And this is his defense of Operation Intercept.
It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will.
Now, Liddy 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, G Rossades, which is like, it's very funny because so number one, Operation Intercept, I guess you could debate, you know, like there's, there's, there's definitely like an argument to be made that like, well, yeah, you can, you, some of their goals were achieved by creating this much chaos,
but like the Treasury Department considers it kind of a disaster at the 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 Liddy really.
The other thing is that like he cites in his book, you know, his boss being jealous of him because every time they would argue, Liddy 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 division department is like trying to figure out how to arm air marshals at this point because there's a lot.
We talk about this in our like episodes on the golden age of terrorism.
A lot of planes getting hijacked at this period, late 60s, early 70s.
This is the golden age of hijacking a plane.
Just nothing to hijack a commercial aircraft in this period.
And so we're starting 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, 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?
Right.
Where it's like, yeah, no, you had, there's a lot of like, a lot of very complex engineering questions about like, and to, to, today, by the way, um, 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, overpenetration, all that kind of stuff.
So they're trying to decide what's the best thing, weapon to arm these guys with.
And Liddy is like, you should give them 357 Magnum firearms.
Go to the hollow point.
Now, he picks, there's not actually a good reason why it should be a 357 over like a nine millimeter.
Liddy just loves revolvers and he loves the 357 cartridge because it's the quote unquote most powerful gun in the world.
It's the only reason he picks the 357.
Now, he is right that hollow points are a better choice than full metal jackets.
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 in the plane, right?
That is accurate.
Liddy 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, if he was actually making this argument, you know, as opposed to everyone being like, well, obviously hollow points are less likely to overpenetrate.
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, it's nuts.
And I'll give you one, I'll give you one quote, like guess as to how it's nuts, Andrew.
Oh, did he fire a gun on a plane?
Hollow Points on a Plane00:07:17
No, no, no, but he brings up the Nazis again.
He comes into it again.
That's his other move.
He has two points.
He either shot a gun or brought up the SS, right?
Quote, here's Liddy making the case for why air marshals should carry hollow points.
I cited Nazi experiments using live Jews that determined one 7.9 millimeter ball solid bullet from a Mauser rifle could pass through and kill up to 16 humans lined up in a row and noted that while a stray 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 are talking about a handgun and he is talking about the penetration of a rifle, right?
Right?
Totally different, different planets in every way, ballistically, a rifle round 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 16 people with a single.
That has nothing to do with the question, G. Gordon Liddy.
That's a crazy thing to bring up here.
You got to stop.
You're bringing it up so many times.
It's really other sources.
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.
You just imagine like Nixon being like, anyone have any thoughts?
Liddy raises his hand.
It's like, not Nazi thoughts.
And then his head just slowly goes down.
Thoughts that do not involve the SS.
Fucking, I guess.
Yeah, just a maniac.
So Liddy 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 make sure that they're less vulnerable to like, you know, the air and like sea, 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.
Liddy presumably knew they were going to do this, but didn't think to check on if it would matter because he just 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 like, come on.
Very funny.
Oh my God.
So bizarre.
Anyway, I think that's going to, that's going to close us out on episode three of the G. Gordon Liddy story.
How are you feeling, Andrew?
This is, I, I should have said probably before we even started this, I'm not a person that knows like a ton about Watergate at all.
So this is all wonderful.
We're really going to get into it, right?
Can't wait.
Yeah.
But we've, we've had to, 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, how the fuck did anyone trust him doing Watergate shit, given this guy's background?
That's a solid question, right?
How did he get that job?
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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is, that is, you have anticipated where this is.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Very well.
Very well.
So yeah.
Anyway, Andrew, you got anything to plug?
Just, you know, still do the podcast.
Yo, is this racist?
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 I will still be.
And even if I'm not still on strike, the overwhelming possibility is going to be SAG will still be on strike, the Screen Actors Guild.
So the Entertainment Community Fund, please, if you can and are able, 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, the studios are trying to extract as much pain as 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?
That's capitalism, baby.
Yes.
That's how it all works.
Yeah.
This is what we sell, other people's pain.
Or our own pain.
I don't remember.
Yeah.
Anyway, go to hell.
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