Behind the Bastards - Part Four: G. Gordon Liddy: The Fascist Behind Watergate
Aired: 2023-10-12
Duration: 01:44:09


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=== The Lost Stealth Plane (05:44) ===

[00:02:02]  Not for me.
[00:02:03]  It would be fun-ish.
[00:02:06]  Yeah, because you're the one who's going to get robbed, Sophie.
[00:02:09]  I know.
[00:02:10]  That is not fun for me.
[00:02:14]  Speaking of things getting lost, I got something I want to deal with here.
[00:02:20]  I got some policing we need to do here because people are people are people have gotten too Twitter-brained, right?
[00:02:29]  And I say this as someone who uses Twitter too much, you know?
[00:02:32]  I'm not coming out of this from like a moralizing standpoint, right?
[00:02:35]  Like I'm, let me start this by saying, like, I've definitely used, like, had a problematic relationship with Twitter.
[00:02:42]  I'm not trying to be judgmental, but like, this shit needs to stop.
[00:02:46]  And specifically, the thing that made me realize it, as we record this, it's like a day after the United States Marine Corps, like an airbase announced, like, hey, guys, one of our F-35s went missing.
[00:03:00]  The pilot leapt out during flight for reasons that we will not explain to you, left it on autopilot, and we don't know where it is.
[00:03:07]  We don't even know if it's crashed.
[00:03:09]  Like, we have no idea where this multi, multi-million dollar, like it fuck cost a trillion dollars to develop $80 million to manufacture plane went.
[00:03:19]  No idea.
[00:03:22]  If you see it, give us a call at this number.
[00:03:24]  Like it's a cat, like it's someone's cat who got out.
[00:03:27]  They're just like, hey, guys, Mr. Sniffles, the F-35 is lost.
[00:03:32]  Give us a ring if you see him.
[00:03:33]  Don't try to chase him.
[00:03:35]  Like, for real, how is that possible?
[00:03:37]  Like, that something can be lost in airspace.
[00:03:40]  I just assumed it crashed.
[00:03:41]  When I saw the eject and from the headline, I assumed.
[00:03:45]  It probably has, but like, they don't.
[00:03:48]  So it's a stealth plane, right?
[00:03:50]  One of the reasons why this is a problem is that like, that is legitimately an issue.
[00:03:54]  So most, every plane that's not like an army plane, right?
[00:03:58]  That's not some sort of like government, you know, jet has what's what's called an ADS-B.
[00:04:03]  I think that's the name of it.
[00:04:04]  Like it's a transponder that lets you know where all of the aircraft are, right?
[00:04:08]  Because that's important to making sure they don't hit each other.
[00:04:11]  Military and government aircraft don't have to have that, right?
[00:04:14]  And if you're running a stealth plane, you wouldn't necessarily want that on, right?
[00:04:19]  So I think that's probably anyway.
[00:04:21]  It doesn't matter.
[00:04:22]  This is funny.
[00:04:23]  And it's funny specifically.
[00:04:24]  I made a comment online about like this being America being the only country that could both develop, you know, this fucking trillion dollar, like hyper-advanced weapons platform and lose it and need to just like go to Twitter to be like, hey, everybody, keep an eye out, right?
[00:04:42]  No other country could do.
[00:04:43]  And people, like a bunch of people got like angry and started defending the like, well, China loses planes too.
[00:04:48]  It's like that, number one, it's not the point.
[00:04:50]  Number two, like they're like, why are you trying to like, you know, defend like, why are you trying to like attack the U.S. government over this?
[00:04:58]  Or like, why are you trying to pretend the Chinese government is?
[00:05:00]  I'm not doing any of that.
[00:05:02]  It's funny.
[00:05:03]  And it's specifically funny that we are treating a lost, hyper-advanced self-craft like a lost cat.
[00:05:09]  That's all.
[00:05:10]  That's all.
[00:05:11]  Not making a point about politics, not making a point about like the DOD, not making any kind of political point.
[00:05:17]  It's just kind of funny.
[00:05:19]  What up?
[00:05:20]  Twitter has ruined our ability to just like laugh about this stuff.
[00:05:24]  We lost.
[00:05:26]  So here's what happened.
[00:05:28]  We misplaced our F-35.
[00:05:31]  Not a big deal.
[00:05:33]  Not a big deal.
[00:05:34]  If anyone sees that shit, hit me up.
[00:05:37]  The DSP.
[00:05:38]  Keeps an eye out.
[00:05:40]  Like, yeah.
[00:05:41]  Like, my, my dream is that the autopilot set it down safely somewhere in North Carolina and it's just in a man's barn right now.
[00:05:49]  Some guy just towed that shit back and it's like, I don't know.
[00:05:52]  I haven't made up my mind as to how I'm going to deal with this, but I got it now.
[00:05:57]  I mean, this, this would, yeah, this is such a great opening to an actual James Bond movie.
[00:06:04]  Cause now it's just, this person should really, just in the interest of everyone learning their lesson, try to sell it to Russia at this point.
[00:06:12]  Yeah.
[00:06:12]  Just try.
[00:06:12]  Yeah.
[00:06:13]  Sure.
[00:06:13]  Just like give them a ring.
[00:06:15]  Call the Russian embassy.
[00:06:16]  Hey, guys.
[00:06:18]  I got something you might be interested in.
[00:06:23]  Like, I will tell you right now: if this were me, you know, if I if I lived out in the boonies and gained control of an F-35, the only thing that I would do with it, because I think it's really the only thing to do with it, because I don't know how to fly a plane.
[00:06:36]  I don't know that like any normal pilot knows how to fly.
[00:06:38]  I'm sure there's a bunch of special training to fly this specific plane, right?
[00:06:42]  Otherwise, it's a fucking death trap.
[00:06:44]  I would just drag it out, like tow it out into my yard every couple of months and just shoot at it.
[00:06:50]  You know, just fucking shoot at it with my rifles.
[00:06:55]  You know, just play around, see what happens.
[00:06:58]  In part because when I would try to make friends with the AI, just turn it on, see if you can talk it out.
[00:07:05]  Throw chat GPT on it.
[00:07:07]  I think we could, I think we could iron giant it with the AI.
[00:07:10]  I think we could turn this one into the good plane.
[00:07:13]  Superman.
[00:07:14]  Yeah.
[00:07:17]  Anyway, there's a lot of ideas.
[00:07:18]  There's a lot of ideas.
[00:07:20]  Folks, sometimes you need to just be able to enjoy the world when beautiful things happen, beautiful things like the F-35 going missing, like doing a homeward bound with our apocalypse fighter.
[00:07:37]  It's going to get led back to home by like a fucking rogued chinook.
[00:07:42]  Yeah.
[00:07:42]  Yeah.
[00:07:43]  It's going to be so cute.
[00:07:46]  Yeah.

=== Turning Chaos into Superman (11:14) ===

[00:07:47]  So we're talking about G. Gordon Liddy still for so many, so many five hours now, something like that.
[00:07:54]  Anyway, going to be close.
[00:07:55]  Yeah.
[00:07:56]  When we left off, he had just gotten shit canned by the Treasury Department for rank incompetence and repeatedly comparing stuff to the Holocaust for no reason.
[00:08:06]  Well, it does seem pretty clear he was never fired for the SS stuff, which is the weirdest part of all of this.
[00:08:14]  That is fair.
[00:08:15]  Yeah.
[00:08:16]  Because I feel like there is an amount of comparing things unnecessarily to the SS that you should be fired for, right?
[00:08:22]  I don't know what that amount is precisely.
[00:08:24]  That amount is really low.
[00:08:26]  I don't think it's high, right?
[00:08:27]  I think it should be once.
[00:08:30]  Yeah.
[00:08:30]  Once you get one freebie, and then everyone's like, man, stop falling asleep to the fucking history channel.
[00:08:38]  Like, come on.
[00:08:39]  He's past where I think the number should be significantly.
[00:08:43]  Yeah, that's good to know.
[00:08:44]  I'm glad that we're, I'm glad that it's like your fucking Kevin Bacon number, right?
[00:08:48]  Your unnecessary SS references number.
[00:08:53]  So Liddy is getting forced out of the Treasury Department.
[00:08:58]  This is a real embarrassment for him.
[00:08:59]  So he completely ignores it in his autobiography in favor of telling a long story about his sons getting bullied at school and how he taught them like the only way to respond to bullies is like violence, is immediately escalating to violence.
[00:09:14]  And the school is like, that's not what we like our students to do here at this private school.
[00:09:20]  We would prefer they not immediately go to violence.
[00:09:22]  And his wife is also like, I don't think this is a good lesson to give the kids, right?
[00:09:27]  I think they're probably going to wind up creating more problems for themselves if they respond this way.
[00:09:32]  And so when the school and his wife are both like, I don't think our advice to them is immediately respond to with violence to kids like making fun of them.
[00:09:42]  Liddy's response to that is that before World War II, the French schools started educating children not to respond violently.
[00:09:49]  They tried to stop kids from fighting in schools.
[00:09:51]  And then in World War II, the French lost because German kids had been taught to be aggressive and get into fights at schools.
[00:09:57]  So I'm going to do what the Germans did and teach my kids to get into pointless fights.
[00:10:01]  Now, first off, yet another unnecessary Nazi reference.
[00:10:06]  Second, what happened next, G. Gordon Liddy?
[00:10:10]  Like, you're right.
[00:10:10]  You're right.
[00:10:11]  The French did lose the first part of that war.
[00:10:13]  What happened next to the Germans?
[00:10:16]  How far did starting fights in every conceivable situation take Germany?
[00:10:21]  It's really just like, imagine being so convinced of your rightness and having so little attention span that like, yeah, he's like a real like first act of every movie kind of guy.
[00:10:34]  Yeah.
[00:10:34]  What happened, let's say two years later, G. Gordon Liddy?
[00:10:38]  Like where was Germany then?
[00:10:42]  And obviously, this works the same way for his kids pretty much that it does for Germany.
[00:10:47]  And that the fact that they're told to like escalate physically and like they're not big kids, right?
[00:10:52]  I think they're getting made fun of.
[00:10:53]  And like, so they start escalating things physically and it doesn't work out well for them.
[00:10:58]  And in fact, not only do kids not stop bullying them, but teens from the local high school escalate.
[00:11:03]  And it's very funny.
[00:11:05]  In his book, Liddy notes that like, like when describing these teens that are going to harass him and his kids at their house, he notes many of them larger are larger than me.
[00:11:14]  Yeah.
[00:11:15]  I am smaller than a child.
[00:11:19]  So some of these kids escalate to egging his house and the family cars and throwing firecrackers at the Liddy house at night.
[00:11:26]  I think because they realize that like the dad's a maniac too.
[00:11:29]  So we can really fuck with this family.
[00:11:31]  Now, Liddy knows he can't call the cops because in his mind, we live in a dangerous part of DC and they've got enough on their plate.
[00:11:39]  I got to handle this on my own.
[00:11:41]  Right.
[00:11:42]  Like he's, he's, he's at, and he, the way he writes this all out is very much like fucking Liam Neeson and Taken, where he's like, I have a very particular set of skills that makes me a nightmare to a 15-year-old like you.
[00:11:55]  Yeah.
[00:11:56]  I mean, I guess that's true.
[00:11:57]  That is undeniable.
[00:11:59]  He starts staying up at night and like waiting for the kids to show up.
[00:12:05]  And then like when they come out, he like chases them and gets one of these children in a headlock.
[00:12:11]  And then he says one of the kids pulls a knife and he explains in detail how he'll break that knife into pieces and use them to like, he'll like cut this kid.
[00:12:21]  Like, I'll kill you if you fucking pull that knife out on me.
[00:12:24]  And like, number one, I don't, I don't really believe that a knife got pulled on him.
[00:12:27]  Number two, he tells that story as if it makes him look cool.
[00:12:31]  He never provides evidence that these kids actually had done anything.
[00:12:34]  Like theoretically, he just chased down and choked a child.
[00:12:39]  Like, there's no evidence given to us that shows anything but that like there's a real reason for him to chase these kids because he's a maniac.
[00:12:47]  Like he just is pretty sure these are the kids.
[00:12:50]  So he attacks them in the street.
[00:12:52]  There's like no version of this in the real life version that didn't end with him getting pants, right?
[00:12:57]  No, for sure.
[00:12:59]  They fell down as he was chasing them.
[00:13:01]  Like, I don't know that I actually believe any of that he actually even caught a kid.
[00:13:06]  But if he did, and if a kid pulled a knife, my guess is that like these kids were walking past the house and he suddenly runs out screaming and attacks one and some kid pulls a pocket knife because he's like, I don't know what else to do in this situation.
[00:13:18]  Yeah.
[00:13:19]  And yeah, like that's probably how it goes.
[00:13:22]  Nothing like at no point does this, this is not like whether or not he actually got the culprits, they don't stop throwing eggs at his house, right?
[00:13:30]  Like the minor vandalism continues.
[00:13:34]  And here's what he writes.
[00:13:36]  About a week later, another egg hit the house.
[00:13:38]  So I took to patrolling the alleys on my own.
[00:13:41]  Now I was hunting them.
[00:13:43]  That's just Batman on them.
[00:13:45]  He's like actively wandering the neighborhood at night looking for teenagers to fight.
[00:13:50]  Oh my God.
[00:13:52]  That spoiled all their fun.
[00:13:53]  And I assumed one complained to his parents one evening as I was cleaning my gun collection, which was spread out for that purpose over newspapers on the dining room table.
[00:14:03]  Many of the pistols disassembled.
[00:14:05]  I received a telephone call.
[00:14:07]  A neighbor wanted to talk to me about my nocturnal activities.
[00:14:10]  I told him, fine, come on over.
[00:14:12]  Figuring he was one of the father of one of the vandals, I wanted to talk to him.
[00:14:17]  So, first off, in the book, Liddy lays out all of the different guns and descriptions of what, and by the way, nearly all of them German, right?
[00:14:25]  All of these are like fucking lugers.
[00:14:27]  Like, they're all old Nazi guns.
[00:14:28]  That's the only kind of gun he buys cowboy revolvers and Nazi pistols.
[00:14:33]  That's it for G. Gordon Liddy.
[00:14:36]  So, he lays out all of this and he like spends all this detail on these guns that are laying out.
[00:14:40]  And then this guy comes over and Liddy, he clearly is like, wants us to believe that like this terrified the man that he like sees, oh my God, Liddy's got all these guns.
[00:14:48]  I better not fuck with him.
[00:14:50]  There's, he doesn't even provide in this story any evidence that this has an impact on the guy, right?
[00:14:54]  Like, the dude is like, you need to stop hunting children in the night, right?
[00:14:59]  And yeah, Liddy is like, I don't want to stop hunting children in the night.
[00:15:04]  And the guy says, well, you should.
[00:15:06]  And like, it's kind of over.
[00:15:08]  Like, there's no evidence that his guns had any influence on any of this.
[00:15:11]  Like, we don't need to know this.
[00:15:13]  It's completely irrelevant, right?
[00:15:15]  But eventually, kids stop egging his house.
[00:15:18]  Like, not even immediately.
[00:15:19]  They keep going for a while.
[00:15:21]  And I think it just peters out because children don't do anything forever.
[00:15:25]  Yeah.
[00:15:26]  And he's like, it was clearly because of how scared this man was of my guns.
[00:15:29]  It's like, no, man, they kept egging your fucking house.
[00:15:32]  You did nothing.
[00:15:33]  You had no influence on this situation.
[00:15:36]  It's really remarkable that he didn't wind up getting like his ass kicked by the neighborhood dads.
[00:15:43]  I think he might.
[00:15:44]  I think there's a non-zero chance that like one night when he's going Batman on some children, he gets hit in the face with an egg and gets like a staph infection in his eye.
[00:15:54]  Look, there's as much evidence for that as anything Liddy claims.
[00:15:58]  For real.
[00:15:58]  Jesus Christ.
[00:16:00]  What a maniac.
[00:16:01]  What a funny, funny man.
[00:16:02]  So Liddy also claims that he found during his time before getting shit canned, a stack of Treasury Department badges laying around the office that weren't real badges.
[00:16:12]  They were made up for the CIA, for CIA men who needed a cover.
[00:16:16]  And so he stole one and that allowed him to carry a gun anywhere in the country.
[00:16:20]  Again, at no point does G. Gordon Liddy ever do anything involving a gun.
[00:16:25]  This is not relevant.
[00:16:26]  There is no question that is answered by the fact that he theoretically has this CIA badge.
[00:16:31]  Like he doesn't do anything with that.
[00:16:34]  We don't ever need this information.
[00:16:36]  He just cannot.
[00:16:39]  He emotionally, he needs us to know he always had a gun on him.
[00:16:44]  Like he can't stand the fact that we wouldn't know that.
[00:16:47]  It's so funny.
[00:16:49]  So bizarre.
[00:16:50]  Also, I kind of don't believe that.
[00:16:52]  Like, I believe the CIA gave people fake covers using other government agencies.
[00:16:57]  Absolutely.
[00:16:57]  I don't believe that they left their badges hanging out in the Treasury Department in a big pile where G. Gordon Liddy could grab one.
[00:17:04]  I do believe that he illegally carried a firearm for years.
[00:17:07]  I'll give him that.
[00:17:08]  I'll give him that.
[00:17:10]  I bet he broke those laws.
[00:17:11]  Just like a stack of fake badges that somehow would let you carry a gun illegally, just sitting by the coffee machine.
[00:17:20]  Yeah.
[00:17:21]  Yeah.
[00:17:21]  Just like hanging out.
[00:17:22]  Oh, yeah, that's our CIA badges.
[00:17:24]  Don't take one, G. Gordon Liddy, to let you carry a gun anywhere you want.
[00:17:29]  So again, he dedicates pages after this to talking, like telling all these fake stories about how bad his neighborhood is in DC.
[00:17:36]  And he, he cannot, again, every time he encounters a black person, he lets you know, right?
[00:17:42]  And he tells one of the stories he tells is that like one night, this like black man knocks on the door and G. Gordon Liddy pulls a 45 and threatens to shoot him with it.
[00:17:51]  And again, provides no evidence this man wanted to do anything illegal, that like this was anything but like a guy coming to his door by mistake.
[00:17:58]  But by God, G. Gordon Liddy is going to point a firearm at a stranger.
[00:18:02]  Great man, hero.
[00:18:05]  So Liddy gets pushed out of the Treasury Department.
[00:18:09]  And I'm not sure why.
[00:18:10]  Maybe it's that he had made enough friends.
[00:18:12]  Maybe it's that he had some lingering family connections, but they can't, they don't feel like they can get rid of him entirely, right?
[00:18:19]  So instead of immediately pushing Liddy out, they like, they find a job for him.
[00:18:24]  They get, switch him to a new boss, and they're like, you can stay here for a while, but you need to find something else.
[00:18:30]  So don't let it be too long, right?
[00:18:33]  And it just so happens that this is, this is the point at which Liddy wits up in the Nixon White House, right?
[00:18:40]  So this is the, at this point, his career is was an FBI agent, got forced out for incompetence, was a, worked for the DA's office, probably got forced out for incompetence, ran for office, lost badly, and then was at the Treasury Department, got forced out for incompetence, right?
[00:18:58]  That is G. Gordon Liddy's working career at this point, right?

=== Shady Secrets from Vietnam (07:39) ===

[00:19:01]  Luckily for, you know, him, unluck, and luckily for his coworkers at Treasury, but unluckily for Richard Nixon and the rest of the country, the collapse of his career at Treasury occurred right alongside an event of much greater historic importance, the release of the Pentagon Papers.
[00:19:17]  Have you heard about this?
[00:19:18]  Do you know what like the Pentagon papers were?
[00:19:20]  Was not enough, actually.
[00:19:22]  I'm happy to learn.
[00:19:23]  I'll give you an overview here because people need to know this, especially since Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who's kind of behind the leak of these, just died very recently.
[00:19:30]  The Pentagon Papers were an internal history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967, commissioned by the Defense Department, right?
[00:19:39]  It was this kind of thing.
[00:19:40]  You know, again, the Defense Department is completely morally in the wrong about most conflicts.
[00:19:45]  It's in post-World War II, but this is a reasonable thing to do, right?
[00:19:48]  You've just had this big disaster of a war, right?
[00:19:51]  And it's like, it's going terribly.
[00:19:53]  It's been going terribly.
[00:19:54]  1967, it's still going on.
[00:19:56]  You should probably sit down and like try to lay out all the facts about what happened and figure out like what the fuck went on here, right?
[00:20:01]  Reasonable thing to want to do.
[00:20:04]  So among the fun facts revealed in the Pentagon Papers was the fact that despite President Johnson's claim to the contrary, at no point were we involved in Vietnam to help South Vietnam, right?
[00:20:16]  The papers include the admission from the U.S. government, we were there because we were in conflict with China, right?
[00:20:22]  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and others had come to view China as a Nazi-like expansionist threat to the entirety of Asia.
[00:20:30]  And that's why we got involved in Vietnam.
[00:20:31]  It had nothing to do with supporting democracy in South Vietnam, especially since South Vietnam was not really functionally a democracy for at least most of its history.
[00:20:38]  Like it was just because of our fears about China, right?
[00:20:41]  That's one of the things we get out of the Pentagon Papers.
[00:20:44]  The papers also contained evidence of U.S. involvement in the 1963 South Vietnamese coup and the assassination of President Diem.
[00:20:50]  And there's always been like these theories that did the U.S. have this guy fucking iced?
[00:20:54]  And like, yes, basically yes, right?
[00:20:57]  And there's a bunch of other very shady or outright criminal acts that are kind of revealed in the Pentagon Papers because these are not meant for public release, right?
[00:21:05]  The guy, one of the guys who compiles this report is a Rand Corporation employee named Daniel Ellsberg.
[00:21:11]  Prior to working for the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg had worked for the CIA on a rural pacification campaign in Vietnam.
[00:21:18]  So he was one of the guys doing shady, dangerous shit for the U.S. in Vietnam.
[00:21:22]  He had also been an aide to Hank Kissinger.
[00:21:24]  So like this is a guy who's pretty intimately involved in everything that's going on.
[00:21:29]  And as a result of kind of that process, of some of the things he sees, and as a result of being part of the assembly of these Pentagon papers, he gets radicalized against the war, right?
[00:21:39]  Now, there's some other, again, we're not going to give a comprehensive thing here.
[00:21:42]  There's some other like arguments over like Ellsberg and like why he did what he did, but that's the broad story.
[00:21:47]  I think it's generally accurate.
[00:21:49]  And in 1969, he leaks some of these papers to a New York Times journalist.
[00:21:54]  And the whole thing blows up from there.
[00:21:55]  The Times starts writing these stories about all this shady and illegal shit that people had suspected for years about U.S. conduct in Vietnam.
[00:22:02]  And because Nixon's the president, all of this shit kind of winds up on his desk and it supercharges the protest movement, the anti-war movement.
[00:22:10]  And suddenly, like they're surrounding the White House and like fucking box trucks and National Guardsmen to keep away the crowds of protesters.
[00:22:18]  Like it's this massive, massive like the Nixon campaign has other fears that like the protesters might breach the fucking perimeter, right?
[00:22:25]  Like that's a worry for a while that they've got.
[00:22:28]  Well, that's crazy.
[00:22:29]  That'll never, ever happen.
[00:22:30]  That'll never happen again.
[00:22:32]  So what's relevant to us today about the Pentagon Papers is that they have a massive impact on the paranoia of one Richard M. Nixon president, right?
[00:22:41]  This is when you hear about Nixon being a paranoid maniac, the Pentagon Papers are a big part of why, because he becomes convinced they don't know for a while who's done it.
[00:22:48]  They become eventually aware it was probably Ellsberg, but like there's all these fears about like who's a leaker, who can we trust?
[00:22:54]  You know, they're trying to screw us over.
[00:22:55]  You know, they're trying to fuck me out of the White House.
[00:22:58]  So I'm going to quote now from a very readable history of the Watergate scandal, a book called King Richard by Michael Dobbs.
[00:23:04]  When the New York Times began publishing a classified history of the war known as the Pentagon Papers in June 1971, Kissinger exploded.
[00:23:12]  This will totally destroy American credibility forever, he raged.
[00:23:15]  No foreign government will ever trust us again.
[00:23:18]  The president needed little persuading that draconian action was necessary.
[00:23:21]  According to Haldeman and Haldeman's Nixon's chief of staff, I think, Henry got Nixon cranked up and then they started cranking each other up until they were both in a frenzy.
[00:23:29]  This in turn inspired the creation of a special investigations unit to track down leakers of government documents.
[00:23:35]  The team set up shop in a warren of offices on the ground floor of the executive office building known as room 16 because they were charged with plugging leaks.
[00:23:44]  Unit members jokingly affixed a sign to the entryway that read simply, plumbers.
[00:23:49]  Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt were among the first recruits.
[00:23:52]  So pretty reasonable, like understand, not reasonable, but an understandable story, right?
[00:23:58]  There's a leak, Nixon goes crazy.
[00:24:00]  He's like, I need guys to fix leaks.
[00:24:02]  And G. Gordon Liddy, however, because he's being forced out, Liddy gets stuck in this job, right?
[00:24:08]  Like this is where he gets moved to.
[00:24:09]  And this is kind of a dream for his.
[00:24:11]  Like a guy who fucks up as much as Liddy, you probably shouldn't reward with a White House gig, but they do.
[00:24:18]  So this is his dream.
[00:24:21]  This is his chance to do all the spy shit that he dreamed about, all the shit he'd read about in books as a little kid and stuff.
[00:24:27]  Like now he's got a chance to be that guy, right?
[00:24:30]  So Liddy proved the FBI right for firing him almost instantly by sitting down with his new colleagues and insisting their investigations unit should be based on.
[00:24:40]  You want to make a guess as to what he thinks they should base their new unit on?
[00:24:44]  You want to make a guess, Andrew?
[00:24:45]  What organization do you think he harkens back to in history?
[00:24:50]  It's the SS.
[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:52]  Once again.
[00:24:54]  And always.
[00:24:55]  He does.
[00:24:56]  It's so weird that he's not aware that they lost the war.
[00:25:00]  Yeah.
[00:25:00]  That it didn't work.
[00:25:02]  That it was, that the whole country gets destroyed.
[00:25:05]  That Germany is shattered in a way that almost no nation in history has ever been shattered.
[00:25:12]  But no, he's like, you know who I think we should take a page out of their book for our illegal spying unit in the White House is the fucking SS.
[00:25:22]  Here's what he writes.
[00:25:24]  Our organization had been directed to eliminate subversion of the secrets of the administration.
[00:25:28]  So I created an acronym using the initial letter of those descripted words.
[00:25:32]  It appealed to me because when I organize, I'm inclined to think in German terms.
[00:25:36]  And the acronym was also used by a World War II German veterans organization, belonged to by some acquaintances of mine, Odessa, on the Blackboard in German for clarity and added security.
[00:25:48]  I diagrammed the new Odessa organization.
[00:25:50]  Have you heard of Odessa?
[00:25:52]  Andrew, do you know who these guys were?
[00:25:54]  Oh my God.
[00:25:54]  I mean, not enough.
[00:25:56]  Yeah.
[00:25:56]  So Odessa is not a real organization for one thing.
[00:25:59]  There was never like a group called Odessa.
[00:26:01]  It was a code name U.S. intelligence came up with to describe a mix of different smaller organizations and like escape plans by different Nazi war criminals, specifically generally members of the SS who had been responsible for the Holocaust.
[00:26:15]  Odessa was the name that intelligence gave all these plans to get them out of Europe and generally over to Latin America, right?
[00:26:23]  So Liddy is like, I want to base our Intel network on the group that helped SS war criminals, some of whom are my friends, get away from Europe, avoid justice.
[00:26:36]  Yeah.
[00:26:36]  You know the guys who helped Adolph Eichmann and Joseph Mengele get away?

=== Nazi Escape Plans Revealed (03:39) ===

[00:26:40]  That's who I want to.
[00:26:43]  And it's also.
[00:26:44]  Yeah.
[00:26:45]  That's no, just fucking.
[00:26:47]  Oh my God.
[00:26:48]  It's nuts.
[00:26:49]  He's always got one.
[00:26:51]  Jesus Christ.
[00:26:52]  What a note.
[00:26:53]  What a fucking note to have be the only thing that you do.
[00:26:57]  And we'll talk about one other thing that G. Gordon Liddy does.
[00:27:01]  But first, Andrew.
[00:27:04]  Maybe two plugs.
[00:27:05]  You know, we might have a couple of plugs in there.
[00:27:09]  Well, we're not plugging leaks.
[00:27:10]  That's for sure.
[00:27:11]  We're not plugging leaks.
[00:27:14]  What's up, everyone?
[00:27:15]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:27:16]  My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:27:24]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:27:27]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:27:30]  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.
[00:27:35]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:27:38]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:27:39]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:27:42]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:27:47]  Yeah.
[00:27:47]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:27:50]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:27:52]  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.
[00:28:00]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:28:03]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:28:10]  Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:28:13]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:28:14]  Yeah.
[00:28:15]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:24]  10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
[00:28:28]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:28:32]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
[00:28:38]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:28:40]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
[00:28:41]  What did I love you?
[00:28:42]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:28:49]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:28:52]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:29:00]  Everybody in the chambers ducks.
[00:29:03]  A shocking public murder.
[00:29:04]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:29:06]  Those are shots.
[00:29:07]  Those are shots.
[00:29:08]  Get down.
[00:29:08]  A charismatic politician.
[00:29:10]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:29:12]  I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
[00:29:18]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:29:19]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:29:22]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:29:24]  That may have been about sex.
[00:29:26]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:29:30]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:39]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:29:43]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:29:46]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:29:49]  And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
[00:29:53]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:29:56]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:30:02]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:30:07]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:30:09]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:30:11]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:30:13]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:30:16]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:30:17]  I vowed I will be his last target.

=== Discrediting the Con Artist (15:26) ===

[00:30:20]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:30:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:30:26]  Trust me, babe.
[00:30:27]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:30:38]  So we're back from outer space, Andrew.
[00:30:43]  I just walked in.
[00:30:44]  Wow.
[00:30:45]  I think I've made that.
[00:30:46]  I think I made that reference before.
[00:30:47]  Anyway, you definitely have.
[00:30:51]  At least once, but it's so natural that just just go.
[00:30:53]  Thank you.
[00:30:57]  So, Liddy.
[00:30:58]  So he decides to make his own Odessa organization for the Nixon White House.
[00:31:04]  And like, it is funny.
[00:31:05]  Like, the reason why he picks Odessa, because it really doesn't have anything to do with what he wants to do, right?
[00:31:10]  It wasn't an organization for plugging leaks, for one thing, is that Odessa, again, it's not an actual organization, but in the post-war era, all of these spy books pretend it is because it's a great bad guy for your spy novel, right?
[00:31:25]  If you're writing like a bunch of pot boiler James Bond type books, the Organization of SS Veterans, great idea for like, these will be our bad guys, right?
[00:31:33]  These old Nazis and stuff, you know, this secret Nazi organization around the country.
[00:31:37]  That's why he, that's why he focuses on them because like he'd read all these books as a kid where they were the bad guys.
[00:31:43]  Like Odessa is G. Gordon Liddy's generation's Cobra, right?
[00:31:47]  Yeah.
[00:31:47]  And so that's like that's who he wants to be.
[00:31:49]  Basically, they're Spectre, right?
[00:31:52]  Yeah, and he is, he is the, he is the same as modern fascists who like play Warhammer 40K as kids and then like decide Trump is the god emperor, right?
[00:32:00]  Like that's all he's doing is he's like, I want to be like these guys in these fictional novels that I thought are cool.
[00:32:06]  So yeah, that's literally what's going on here.
[00:32:10]  Liddy's partner in this endeavor, in this plumbing endeavor, is E. Howard Hunt.
[00:32:15]  And Hunt is an interesting guy who's kind of in some ways weirdly similar to Liddy.
[00:32:19]  Now, Hunt is a former CIA man, right?
[00:32:22]  He was with the company for a long time.
[00:32:25]  He had worked overseas.
[00:32:28]  He was there during Guatemala.
[00:32:29]  He played a role in the coup in Guatemala.
[00:32:32]  I think also in Chile.
[00:32:33]  Maybe I'm wrong about that one.
[00:32:34]  But he's involved in a lot in these decades of fuckery in South and Central America by the CIA.
[00:32:40]  And then he torpedoes his career because he's also deeply involved in the Bay of Pigs, which does not go high, right?
[00:32:45]  That's kind of the end of his like, you know, career for the CIA of like meaning anything in it, right?
[00:32:50]  Now, the thing is, though, while Hunt is definitely involved in doing a bunch of crimes for the CIA, he's like a paper pusher.
[00:32:57]  He's like a logistics guy.
[00:32:58]  He's not doing cool shit.
[00:33:00]  He's not kicking indoors.
[00:33:01]  He's not assassinating people.
[00:33:03]  He's certainly not romancing exotic lady spies, right?
[00:33:06]  He is, he is the spy.
[00:33:07]  He's the spook equivalent of a middle manager, right?
[00:33:10]  Yeah.
[00:33:11]  Which is obviously necessary, right?
[00:33:12]  If you're running an illegal spying organization that's committing crimes against humanity, you need a bunch of paper.
[00:33:18]  Most of what you need are papers, right?
[00:33:20]  That is most of the job.
[00:33:21]  You never need the other shit.
[00:33:22]  You very rarely need a j like, and that's usually not it.
[00:33:25]  Usually it's just like, well, we have a lot of guns.
[00:33:27]  Let's just keep giving them to guys in the jungle and like, you know, using our contacts to give them a place to train in the nearby country.
[00:33:33]  And eventually they'll overthrow the government, right?
[00:33:34]  Like that's most of what goes on in these actual cases.
[00:33:38]  So Hunt, Hunt, you know, despite the fact that on paper, his background's legitimate, he kind of always feels like he missed out on getting to have the exciting spy career.
[00:33:47]  Part of how Hunt deals with that is he is an author of spy books, like the same kind of books that Liddy reads as a young man.
[00:33:54]  He's published like 40 different novels by this point.
[00:33:57]  And they're all like kind of James Bond-ish, right?
[00:34:01]  Like slightly worse than Ian Fleming's novels, but like mid-grade airport fiction grade, like spy thrillers, right?
[00:34:09]  And so Hunt is, he's got some backstory, he has some connections, but he's also like, like Liddy, kind of insecure about his lack of doing anything cool.
[00:34:19]  And so you put both of these guys together and that's a fucking disaster, right?
[00:34:24]  Like, cause they're just going to lead each other into fucking calamity well beyond their degree of competence.
[00:34:29]  So the disaster starts right away with their project of destroying Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers leaker.
[00:34:36]  The way they decide to do this is they're going to break into his therapist's office and steal the file on him with the idea that like this probably contains something damning about the man, right?
[00:34:45]  Now, in his book, Liddy lovingly describes all of the spy cameras they get to buy and how they work and all the different gear, this listening devices.
[00:34:54]  He talks about he has like this terrible wig.
[00:34:57]  There's a photo of him at this like horrible wig that he wears that looks like fucking shit.
[00:35:01]  And he has this gait altering device that he wears to make it him like force him to have a limp so that it'll disguise him.
[00:35:07]  And like the it none of this winds up working.
[00:35:11]  Like all of the shit that they buy is pointless, right?
[00:35:14]  Because on their first break-in, which is the only one where Liddy does any actual spy work, they like bust into this guy's office illegally and take photos of a bunch of paperwork.
[00:35:23]  And Liddy doesn't know how to use the spy camera.
[00:35:25]  So the photos they take don't work.
[00:35:27]  There's like nothing in them, right?
[00:35:29]  He gets a bunch of blurry pictures of trash, right?
[00:35:32]  That's all that is his, the extent of his real career as a spy, right?
[00:35:37]  Is he fails to use a spy camera properly and pointlessly breaks into a therapist's office.
[00:35:44]  This is like any reasonable person would be embarrassed of this, right?
[00:35:47]  This is shameful.
[00:35:48]  Liddy describes it as a successful op where he like proved that he really had what it took to be a spy.
[00:35:54]  We can see this evidence of this in the fact that his boss, Bud Krogh, who was the White House FBI liaison and thus did know real G-Men, right?
[00:36:02]  Like Krogh knows actual spies, immediately told them, You guys can never do an entry again.
[00:36:08]  Like, I don't ever want to hear that you've broken into a place.
[00:36:11]  You are employees of the White House.
[00:36:13]  If you get arrested, if an employee of the White House gets arrested performing illegal surveillance, that could ruin the whole administration.
[00:36:20]  You're not allowed to ever go in on this again.
[00:36:22]  So Liddy goes over to Hunt and Hunt has friends, Cuban friends from the Bay of Pigs, right?
[00:36:28]  These like criminals who had tried to overthrow the cast regime and failed, right?
[00:36:31]  Most of these guys are some kind of gangster, right?
[00:36:34]  As well as being, you know, want to be revolutionary.
[00:36:37]  So he has Hunt call up some of these Bay of Pigs guys.
[00:36:40]  And again, also, I don't know, man, if you're looking at like an op that went well that you might want to like hire dudes from, Bay of Pigs probably isn't the op, right?
[00:36:49]  Like, yeah, the famously successful Bay of Pigs.
[00:36:54]  So they bring in these Bay of Pigs guys and they just spend tens of thousands of dollars on even more fancy camera equipment.
[00:37:01]  And Liddy, he's not allowed to do anything, right?
[00:37:04]  So he decides, I'll be their backup, right?
[00:37:07]  I'm gonna, I'll hang around outside of this building that they're breaking into to try to get papers with a weapon in case I gotta kill somebody to keep them quiet, right?
[00:37:16]  So he goes through how like he thought he should he wanted to bring a gun, but the only gun he has that'd be good for this, he's got an he has an unregistered CIA nine millimeter that was manufactured specifically for assassinations.
[00:37:29]  But God, it couldn't take a silencer, right?
[00:37:34]  So he brings his next best weapon, quote, a folding Browning knife, deadly and quiet, a pocket knife.
[00:37:41]  He calls it like a Browning knife because Browning also makes sense.
[00:37:44]  He brings a pocket knife.
[00:37:46]  You take a pocket knife to your spy mission in case you need to murder someone on the street.
[00:37:52]  Oh, I mean, also, given his early history, I guess he's probably physically capable of doing something.
[00:37:58]  Maybe.
[00:38:00]  Maybe not.
[00:38:01]  It's actually a coward.
[00:38:02]  Here's the thing.
[00:38:03]  It's hard to kill people with a knife, right?
[00:38:07]  It is not a quiet weapon.
[00:38:09]  People, number one, most of the time when somebody pulls a knife and uses it on another person, both of them get stabbed.
[00:38:17]  It is a weapon that leads to a lot of screaming, right?
[00:38:21]  You can, even with an unsilenced weapon, you can shoot someone with it and they can drop immediately, right?
[00:38:25]  Without making any noise, right?
[00:38:26]  It's possible.
[00:38:27]  With a knife, it is always going to be loud and horrific because you're stabbing someone.
[00:38:33]  Like, yeah, maybe there's the odd spy out there who really can quietly use a knife.
[00:38:37]  But like, if you read actual stories of spies, very uncommon for knives to be used in this situation.
[00:38:44]  Yeah, not the tool of choice.
[00:38:46]  Yeah.
[00:38:47]  Liddy, certainly not qualified to use this, right?
[00:38:50]  It doesn't matter, though.
[00:38:51]  This is all a LARP because again, while he describes this because he wants us to know he totally might have killed a guy, all that actually happens is he hangs out outside this office while his guys are breaking in for a couple of minutes with a pocket knife on his bait.
[00:39:04]  And to make it even nerdier, he has a holster for it on his belt.
[00:39:07]  He's like wearing a pocket knife and a fucking holster to like maybe murder a fucking dude walking his dog if they come out, right?
[00:39:16]  And he writes this about this moment.
[00:39:19]  I can run for miles and there were numerous deeply shadowed hiding places in the area from which I could pause to warn the men inside with the transceiver.
[00:39:26]  Only if there were no other recourse would I have used the knife, but I would if I'd had to.
[00:39:31]  I had given my men my word that I would protect them.
[00:39:35]  Great.
[00:39:36]  Totally believable, G. Gordon.
[00:39:38]  Yeah.
[00:39:39]  Oh my God.
[00:39:40]  His team does succeed at the operation because it turns out, I mean, kind of, right?
[00:39:45]  They get in there, they get pictures and stuff of a bunch of papers, but like, and they get his file, but like none of it, there's nothing in there, right?
[00:39:52]  Because Ellsberg, there's nothing really impeachable about him.
[00:39:55]  And he certainly didn't go tell his therapists, like, so yeah, I'm committing a major crime by leaking classified data to the New York Times.
[00:40:03]  Like, he doesn't do that because Daniel Ellsberg wasn't a fucking idiot.
[00:40:08]  So, after ransacking this office, they leave a bunch of random pills to disguise the break-in as having been carried out by a junkie.
[00:40:17]  And this is what's sad: a man with a history of addiction is arrested for the break-in and coerced into confessing.
[00:40:23]  He goes to prison because of this, like just some random dude.
[00:40:27]  Liddy has absolutely no sympathy for this guy because he's a junkie, you know?
[00:40:32]  So, he goes, he and Hunt go back to the drawing board.
[00:40:34]  And according to Hunt, Hunt tells Liddy Ellsberg is scheduled to speak at a fundraising dinner that's going to be held in Washington.
[00:40:41]  And they decide, like, oh, this is a good opportunity to discredit him, right?
[00:40:44]  We can like, we can embarrass him at this dinner in a way that will make people less likely to trust what he's saying.
[00:40:50]  It's going to be the dinner is going to be attended by media, you know, tastemakers and shit.
[00:40:54]  And so, this is a good opportunity.
[00:40:56]  And the suggestion some guys, Chuck Colson at the White House has, is like, hey, could Liddy, could you guys drug Ellsberg to make him appear that he's like an addict and not trustworthy?
[00:41:08]  So, the plan that fucking Liddy and Hunt work up is to have these same Cuban guys to dress them up as waiters and have them drug Ellsberg with acid and his champagne.
[00:41:20]  Never gets past the drawing board because it's a terrible plan.
[00:41:23]  So, next, they decide to start, they draw plans to start fucking with the Brookings Institute, which is this liberal think tank that Ellsberg is involved with, right?
[00:41:32]  And Liddy suspects Ellsberg hid his copy of the Pentagon papers in their safe, right?
[00:41:37]  So, he thinks there's the full copy of these documents that he can leak to the Times.
[00:41:41]  I believe they're hiding out at the Brookings Institute.
[00:41:44]  So, here's what we're going to do: we're going to firebomb the Brookings Institute, and then we're going to buy a brand new fire truck for the Cubans, and we'll train them all as firefighters, and they'll be waiting around the corner and will be the first responders to the fire.
[00:41:59]  And then, while the fire is going on and they pretend to fight it, they'll bust in and crack the safe to get whatever's inside it.
[00:42:08]  Genius, that's that's a thing that could happen, G. Gordon Lenny.
[00:42:13]  Little boys reading comic books, making boys.
[00:42:17]  And they present this plan to Nixon, and Nixon's like, The fuck is wrong with you people?
[00:42:23]  No, of course not.
[00:42:24]  Um, Liddy is like, They just weren't willing to spend the money, it was too much money for the Nixon administration.
[00:42:29]  That might have been part of it.
[00:42:30]  I also think that even Dick Nixon was like, So, you want to light the building on fire, bring in fake firefighters, have them crack the code before real firefighters show up, and like, then ditch a brand new fire truck and hope that nobody tries it back to you.
[00:42:47]  I don't know, doesn't seem like a good plan to me.
[00:42:49]  I'm just Dick Nixon, though.
[00:42:53]  So, one fact makes the case for Hunt and Liddy's fundamental incompetence better than any other.
[00:42:59]  Um, now, Andrew, I know you have limited experience in clandestine operations, but if you, you know, think back to they carry out these like first two illegal burglaries on fucking uh Ellsberg and his psychiatrist.
[00:43:11]  Uh, if you had just done that, you had carried out these burglaries and gotten away, would you A, destroy all evidence that might link you to this crime later?
[00:43:21]  Or B, take multiple pictures of yourself wearing disguises, including a hideous wig, and holding break-in equipment at the site of the break-in, and then send those photo negatives in with pictures of private documents you found in the break-in to the CIA to get developed.
[00:43:38]  Which of those two would you do?
[00:43:40]  They take pictures of themselves and the documents they stole with their illegal equipment the White House paid for, and they send those photos to the CIA to get developed.
[00:43:52]  So the CIA has a copy of photos proving that Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were connected to these crimes.
[00:44:00]  Oh my God.
[00:44:02]  Why did they do that?
[00:44:04]  I mean, never mind.
[00:44:05]  I just, I listen, I mean, that's the A and B side, and I think we may, it may, wasn't it, was it you and I that had this conversation on Twitter potentially, which is like the clownishness of fascists is only really overshadowed by the fact that like non-fascists are barely winning some of the time.
[00:44:24]  Yeah, occasionally, barely winning.
[00:44:27]  It's not an optimistic thing when you think about it.
[00:44:29]  But like, one of the things, the thing that repeatedly fucks over fascists, not as often as it should, but ultimately always does, right?
[00:44:37]  Is that they're incapable constitutionally, fundamentally, fascists are incapable of estimating threats correctly.
[00:44:46]  Yes.
[00:44:47]  Right.
[00:44:48]  Like that's, that, that's the way it is, right?
[00:44:49]  And that's the thing that ultimately has destroyed them every time in history, right?
[00:44:53]  They're not, they're not actually able to accurately determine whether or not they're taking unreasonable risks, whether or not they can handle it.
[00:45:01]  Like they can't, they can't understand the real like forces arrayed against them because of something about like the way in which fascism fundamentally deranges its adherents, right?
[00:45:09]  Yeah.
[00:45:10]  Well, or it's the over like, you know, the over-reliance on the power of martial power in general.
[00:45:20]  Yeah.
[00:45:21]  You see that a lot in Liddy, where like he just, he, there's a lot of own goals constantly because he can't, he can't actually tell what a good idea is.
[00:45:31]  He can't tell what a real risk is, right?
[00:45:32]  Any reasonable person would be like, I don't know, man, it kind of feels like that's going to get you in some trouble.
[00:45:37]  I kind of feel like you shouldn't have any photos that could tie you to this crime you're committing.
[00:45:41]  But Liddy's like, no, we need that.
[00:45:43]  People need to know that I had all this cool spy gear, right?

=== Internal Politics of Power (08:25) ===

[00:45:46]  At some point, I want this on the historical record.
[00:45:49]  This is important.
[00:45:51]  While Liddy is playing dipshit James Bond, he continues his irrepressible habit of inserting his weird Nazi fetish everywhere possible.
[00:46:00]  And in this case, that now means the White House.
[00:46:03]  So this is happening while there's all these protests developing around like the Vietnam War, and it's like really bumming everyone out, right?
[00:46:09]  As you'd expect, like all these guys yelling at you and calling you baby killer.
[00:46:12]  Like that bums them out.
[00:46:13]  So, quote, I got awfully tired of stories about giant rallies with all the balloons going up in unison.
[00:46:19]  Finally, I had enough of it.
[00:46:20]  Hey, you guys, I said one day, you want to see a real rally?
[00:46:24]  Curious.
[00:46:25]  They asked what I was talking about.
[00:46:27]  One of the advantages of living in Washington is the availability of the museums, art galleries, and libraries.
[00:46:32]  One of my favorite haunts had been the National Archives.
[00:46:34]  And I subscribed to the little schedule of motion pictures to be shown at the theater there.
[00:46:39]  I had taken my children to see Linny Riefenstahl's cinematic masterpiece, Triumph of the Will.
[00:46:45]  I called the National Archives and set up a special showing for the White House staff.
[00:46:49]  About 15 people attended.
[00:46:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:46:54]  Got to show your, man, all these people are calling us fascists.
[00:46:57]  We better go watch Triumph of the Will.
[00:47:00]  My Nazi movie night was not as well attended as I had hoped.
[00:47:04]  I had thought.
[00:47:05]  And he's like, everyone was very impressed about how good the Nazis were at like forming a rally.
[00:47:11]  Maybe.
[00:47:12]  You know what?
[00:47:12]  I'll give you this.
[00:47:13]  You may be telling the truth about this.
[00:47:15]  I do believe you could find 15 people in the Nixon White House who could be legitimately impressed by Triumph of the Will.
[00:47:21]  I'm not going to question G. Gordon Liddy on that fact.
[00:47:23]  He didn't lie about everything, right?
[00:47:25]  Right, right, right.
[00:47:26]  That seems like a reasonable claim.
[00:47:28]  Oh, my God.
[00:47:30]  Now, you do get the feeling that like shit like this maybe, because again, only 15 do show up.
[00:47:36]  And like the fact that he's failing, right?
[00:47:38]  Ultimately, nothing that he does works.
[00:47:40]  And it's all very expensive in part because of all of the fancy spy gear he has to buy.
[00:47:44]  This kind of gets he and Hunt pushed out of the White House in the same way that Liddy had been pushed out of the treasury not all that long ago.
[00:47:50]  Unfortunately, this didn't mean that Nixon had no use for him.
[00:47:54]  So by late 1971, after a couple of years of the Pentagon Papers being out and like, you know, this really supercharging protests, Dick Nixon is as paranoid a man as has ever held the presidency.
[00:48:06]  He was, among other things, certain that Howard Hughes, the billionaire, was funding a secret war against his reelection.
[00:48:12]  He was convinced that during his 68 election, Democrats had paid for protesters and funded secret espionage against his campaign.
[00:48:20]  And like you get a lot of statements from people that like, well, everyone knew that everyone did this kind of stuff.
[00:48:24]  The kind of shit that happened in Watergate was common.
[00:48:27]  Perhaps it was.
[00:48:28]  I'm not going to, I'm not going to take bat for like fucking anybody who's in power at this point that they wouldn't do some of this shit, right?
[00:48:37]  But that is the, I don't know that they did either.
[00:48:40]  The fact that Nixon believes this, though, is a big part of what why Watergate happens, why everything that comes is that he is, number one, there are real leaks.
[00:48:48]  There are definitely people who don't want him to win re-election.
[00:48:52]  And he's convinced that he got spied on in 68.
[00:48:55]  So he's justified in doing it now, right?
[00:48:58]  So Nixon is obsessed with the fact, the idea that he needs to fight back and build an apparatus that will warn him of any future leaks before they happen.
[00:49:07]  And as he's putting together a list of task forces before the end of 1971 for his campaign the next year, he tells his chief of staff and political soulmate, Bob Haldeman, make sure we have a political intelligence capability better than we had in previous campaigns.
[00:49:21]  Now, Haldeman is an interesting guy.
[00:49:24]  Bob Haldeman is about as power-hungry a political climber as has ever existed in DC politics.
[00:49:30]  He is Nixon's top, they're often described as soulmates, right?
[00:49:33]  Haldeman and Nixon.
[00:49:34]  Like they are just, they were born waiting for each other, right?
[00:49:39]  And like Nixon is, he's, Nixon's a big picture guy, right?
[00:49:42]  He's a visionary, whereas Bob Haldeman is a put the screws to people, get shit done, fucking that kind of dude.
[00:49:50]  He's very practical, like make things happen kind of dude.
[00:49:53]  So they fit together pretty well.
[00:49:56]  Haldeman spends his first couple of years in the White House kind of devouring the portfolios of other cabinet members, right?
[00:50:02]  Expanding his territory like a medieval lord.
[00:50:04]  He's very much like an internal politics kind of guy.
[00:50:08]  And while he's doing this, Nixon obsesses over these conspiratorial fears of his ever-widening circle of enemies.
[00:50:15]  Nixon is the kind of guy who's unethical enough to approve an illegal dirty trick section of the campaign, but is savvy enough that he doesn't want to be on record saying that, right?
[00:50:24]  So he and Haldeman, Nixon tells Haldeman, I want a dirty tricks chunk of the campaign.
[00:50:30]  I want people who can spy on the enemy for us.
[00:50:32]  And Haldeman uses his, doesn't want to like just say, hey, guys, make us a crime division.
[00:50:37]  So he uses this organizational structure he had created within the Nixon White House in order to kind of push his people to develop this without directly tying it to him.
[00:50:48]  And the name of this structure, this machine that Haldeman builds within the Nixon White House is called the Tickler by former White House counselor John Counsel John Dean.
[00:50:58]  At its core, the Tickler is half phone tree, half harassment campaign, right?
[00:51:03]  Men will be given in person, will be told, something like, yeah, I want you to make a spy division of the campaign, right?
[00:51:09]  And then Haldeman will task other members of the White House staff with calling this person every couple of days and be like, hey, you done that thing for Bob yet?
[00:51:17]  You done that thing for Bob yet?
[00:51:18]  Right.
[00:51:19]  And this is meant to escalate over time so that the calls get more and more frequent, right?
[00:51:24]  In order to kind of push people, give them this ticking clock, make them like kind of work obsessively towards this end, right?
[00:51:31]  That's the way the tickler works, right?
[00:51:33]  You're never just sort of writing, saying, I need you to do this.
[00:51:37]  You're kind of like using people's peers in order to like develop this sense of urgency in them to act, right?
[00:51:45]  So, yeah, yeah, this is how Aldeman works.
[00:51:48]  And in his own memoirs, John Dean writes, the tickler was an extension of Haldeman and was probably more responsible for the chief of staff's awesome reputation than was his own aluminum personality.
[00:52:00]  It was a self-perpetuating paper monster with a computer's memory and a Portuguese manowars touch.
[00:52:05]  Often those who were ticklers made calls for the sake of making calls to impress Haldeman with their efficiency.
[00:52:10]  Their machine never forgot or tired.
[00:52:13]  Once a staff man was nailed with the responsibility for the slightest project, the tickler would keep pestering until it was fed something, a status report, a piece of paper, a bit of information to chew on.
[00:52:23]  No one could ignore the tickler because no one could afford to ignore Haldeman.
[00:52:27]  That's how the Nixon White House works.
[00:52:29]  That's right.
[00:52:29]  That's how big Bob Haldeman works.
[00:52:31]  Oh my God.
[00:52:32]  Right.
[00:52:33]  It is just like, just like the type of bureaucracy that's, you know, this is what Republicans are actually talking about when they say big government is inefficient or insane.
[00:52:46]  And when you think about, when you think about this organizational structure, right?
[00:52:50]  I think a reasonable person can predict two things are going to be the result of this organizational structure.
[00:52:55]  One is people will, in order to get this thing off their back, right?
[00:53:00]  To push back this harassment campaign, they will feel pressured to just do something, to show up, shut out something, even if it's not ready, even if it's not a good idea, because you need to present the tickler with some evidence that you're making progress, right?
[00:53:13]  So number one, people might get pressured into like approving or allowing things just to have done it, right?
[00:53:19]  Even if it's not a good idea.
[00:53:21]  And number two, this is a great way to harass people into action, but there's no, it does not provide any actual oversight over what's being done, right?
[00:53:30]  Because the product doesn't matter.
[00:53:32]  Making progress matters, right?
[00:53:34]  Like that's the way in which this works.
[00:53:35]  So you might have a situation which people might approve shit that's a bad idea just to get the tickler off their back without watching what's happening, right?
[00:53:44]  That's that's how Watergate is allowed to happen, right?
[00:53:47]  It's because of this structure that Haldeman has built.
[00:53:50]  And we'll talk about exactly how that results in Watergate.
[00:53:53]  But first, you know who is actively spying on the Democratic National Committee?
[00:54:01]  I'm going to go with a variety of people.
[00:54:06]  Probably a variety of people, but almost certainly the good people at Blue Apron, right?

=== Making Progress Over Oversight (04:13) ===

[00:54:11]  Yeah.
[00:54:12]  Well, actually, we probably shouldn't continue that because again, people are incapable of recognizing jokes.
[00:54:17]  Yeah.
[00:54:17]  There's somebody, somebody on the subreddit the other week being like, why does Robert hate the FDA?
[00:54:22]  And people being like, oh, you know, it's because he's a, like, like, we make jokes about the FDA because the idea of going to war with the FDA of all government agencies is funny, right?
[00:54:31]  That's it.
[00:54:32]  That's it.
[00:54:32]  I don't have a specific beef with the FDA.
[00:54:35]  It's a bit, again, people, like, anyway, whatever.
[00:54:38]  Everyone has a bit of a title.
[00:54:39]  It's okay.
[00:54:39]  Take it seriously.
[00:54:40]  I do, in fact, want to carry out terrorist attacks against the FDA.
[00:54:44]  That's the point of that joke.
[00:54:46]  It's a real statement of my political beliefs.
[00:54:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:54:51]  Good times, everybody.
[00:54:52]  Good times.
[00:54:53]  I can't wait for that FDA raid to hit now.
[00:54:55]  Now that I've admitted that online.
[00:55:01]  What's up, everyone?
[00:55:02]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:55:03]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:55:10]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:55:14]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:55:17]  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.
[00:55:22]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:55:25]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:55:29]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:55:34]  Yeah.
[00:55:34]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:55:37]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:55:38]  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.
[00:55:47]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:55:49]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:55:56]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:55:58]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:55:59]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:56:00]  Yeah.
[00:56:01]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:56:11]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:56:14]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:56:18]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:56:24]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:56:26]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:56:29]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:56:35]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:56:38]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:56:47]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:56:49]  A shocking public murder.
[00:56:51]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:56:53]  Those are shots.
[00:56:54]  Those are shots.
[00:56:54]  Get down.
[00:56:55]  A charismatic politician.
[00:56:56]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:56:59]  I still have a weapon.
[00:57:01]  And I could shoot you.
[00:57:04]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:57:06]  He alleged you a victim of flat down.
[00:57:09]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:57:10]  That may have been about sex.
[00:57:12]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:57:16]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:57:25]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:57:29]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:57:33]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:57:36]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:57:39]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:57:43]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:57:44]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:57:49]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:57:54]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:57:56]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:57:57]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:57:59]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:58:02]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:58:04]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:58:06]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:58:11]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:58:12]  Trust me, babe.
[00:58:13]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Hiring Thugs for Dirty Tricks (15:10) ===

[00:58:24]  Ah, we're back.
[00:58:27]  So let's keep on talking.
[00:58:30]  So Haldeman, you know, the tickler kind of starts the process of bugging these guys lower on in the White House list.
[00:58:38]  Make a spy division, right?
[00:58:40]  Make a spy division, you know?
[00:58:41]  And again, one thing you might note about the tickler is that while it's effective at pushing people into action, it is also effectively a giant game of telephone, right?
[00:58:49]  And so inevitably, when you're playing telephone, the message gets distorted both ways, right?
[00:58:54]  So no one's getting accurate information about what is being developed, but something is being developed because you have to provide responses to the tickler, right?
[00:59:03]  And Haldeman has not really specified what kind of intelligence Nixon wants, right?
[00:59:07]  And his hope is kind of that by keeping, continually poking the guys who are running the committee to re-elect the president, usually just called Creep, who are the two guys running this, who are getting harassed by the Tickler to make this intelligence division, are John Mitchell, who's a close friend of Nixon, then the former attorney general, and Jeb Magruder, who's like the deputy manager or whatever of Creep, right?
[00:59:29]  And basically they're being pushed.
[00:59:32]  Their reaction is like, we have to give the White House something.
[00:59:34]  Let's just find some maniac who will break the law in creative ways and like give him, you know, the job of running Intel.
[00:59:40]  Yeah, the guy who gets that job is going to be G. Gordon Liddy, right?
[00:59:44]  That's it.
[00:59:45]  That's that's the end result of all this.
[00:59:47]  He found his perfect place.
[00:59:49]  You know what I will say is this whole vibe is also very Silicon Valley.
[00:59:53]  This is like indistinguishable from breakfast and move fast.
[01:00:00]  Yeah.
[01:00:01]  So in his autobiography, Liddy claims that he gets this very prestigious job as a reward for his hard work at the Department of Treasury.
[01:00:09]  It came with a huge pay bump.
[01:00:10]  He claims he's making what would be the modern equivalent of like a quarter of a million dollars a year, right?
[01:00:16]  He also claims, which is like 30 grand or something at that time.
[01:00:19]  He also claims, in addition to this, that he had been promised a million dollar budget for his dirty tricks project.
[01:00:26]  Now, this was never the case.
[01:00:27]  No one ever told Liddy he was going to get a million dollars.
[01:00:30]  What happened is that, like, so there's this, the first person to kind of propose a dirty tricks campaign for the Nixon White House is this dude named Caulfield, who was put forward as director for the alcohol tax and firearms division of the IRS, right?
[01:00:47]  And the IRS commissioner had blocked Caulfield from getting the job because Caulfield is a maniac, right?
[01:00:52]  So Caulfield comes up and is like, hey, guys, I'm going to start a private security firm since I didn't get that job.
[01:00:57]  And maybe you guys could be the first people to hire me.
[01:00:59]  I've got this great idea.
[01:01:01]  We're calling it Operation Sandwedge, right?
[01:01:03]  And if you give me a half a million dollars, I'll hire double agents and infiltrate them into the Democratic Party and carry out all of these different schemes to like illegally spy on them.
[01:01:13]  Now, a lot of people are like, well, this is a good idea.
[01:01:16]  And especially once Nixon says, I want a dirty tricks division, they're like, well, this is what Nixon wants.
[01:01:21]  So we should make this thing happen.
[01:01:23]  But everyone agrees Caulfield doesn't know what he's doing, in part because he's not a good old boy, right?
[01:01:28]  Caulfield does not come from any Ivy League school.
[01:01:31]  He's not part of like the family of people who should be trusted with a job like this.
[01:01:35]  Whereas despite all of the time Liddy tries to make himself out as like an outsider, he very much is an insider, right?
[01:01:43]  Yeah.
[01:01:44]  So Magruder, the second man at Creep, eventually comes to John Dean and is like, we need someone to run this crime department.
[01:01:51]  And we don't trust this guy who pitched us, you know, a pretty good plan for doing it.
[01:01:55]  We love his ideas about crimes, just not him.
[01:01:58]  Who else can we get to do the job for him?
[01:02:00]  Right.
[01:02:01]  And so because he's also being harassed by the tickler, John Dean goes back to Bud Krogh, who had been Liddy's boss at the plumbing White House Plumbers, right?
[01:02:10]  And is the liaison to the FBI.
[01:02:12]  And Bud Krogh is like, because Krogh wants to get rid of G. Gordon Liddy, like everyone who works with him does.
[01:02:17]  Krogh is like, oh, you need a guy to do dirty tricks?
[01:02:21]  I know a dude.
[01:02:22]  A former FBI guy.
[01:02:23]  He's got this reputation of being a wild man, but he's a great lawyer.
[01:02:26]  And because John Dean is also one of these like Ivy League pricks is like, oh, he's a, this guy went to a good college, right?
[01:02:35]  He went to Fordham.
[01:02:36]  You know, he's got a great, he's got it.
[01:02:37]  He's a lawyer.
[01:02:38]  He'll, this is the calm hand that we need on this program to really make sure nobody goes too far with anything.
[01:02:47]  So that's how Liddy gets hired to run this, right?
[01:02:51]  And, you know, Krogh seems to, it's kind of unclear if Krogh thinks that Liddy will accomplish anything or just wants to get rid of him.
[01:03:00]  You know, for Woodsworth, Jeb Magruder, who's running the committee to re-elect the president more or less, is like, is like most people, he's immediately off-put by Liddy.
[01:03:08]  And this paragraph from the book, King Richard, because Bud Krogh writes one book about Watergate.
[01:03:15]  I think that's the one the show with Justin Thoreau, White House Plumbers, is based off of.
[01:03:20]  And John Dean writes another book about his experiences.
[01:03:24]  And I believe that that's the book that the other Watergate show is based off of.
[01:03:29]  I've read a number of different accounts, large pieces of them from all the guys involved.
[01:03:33]  None of them are trustworthy, right?
[01:03:34]  When it comes to like who is right here, well, they're all liars, right?
[01:03:37]  These guys were all Nixon administration snaps.
[01:03:39]  The point is they're all liars.
[01:03:41]  Generally, people triangulate truth by kind of going through all of them.
[01:03:46]  And so I'm going to read a paragraph from the book King Richard that gives an idea of how Jeb Magruder responds to the G-Man in a professional setting.
[01:03:54]  Liddy struck Magruder as a cocky little bantam rooster who liked to brag about his James Bondish exploits.
[01:04:01]  An exercise fanatic.
[01:04:02]  He had a disconcerting habit of dropping to the floor and without notice, performing 100 push-ups.
[01:04:06]  He boasted about his method for killing people with a pencil.
[01:04:09]  Hold the eraser end in your hand and ram the finely sharpened point into your victim's neck just above the Adam's apple.
[01:04:16]  And again, Liddy never kills a man with a pencil, nor was he trained to do it.
[01:04:20]  Obviously, yes, you could in fact kill a man with a pencil, right?
[01:04:24]  That's a thing that is theoretically possible.
[01:04:27]  Liddy is no more capable of doing it than anyone at your middle school.
[01:04:30]  He has never provided any evidence to the contrary.
[01:04:33]  So there's a moment in one of the Watergate shows where like Liddy winds up in a room with John Dean after they both gotten in trouble and like Dean is rolled on the Nixon White House and Liddy picks up a pencil and like threatens to stab him with it.
[01:04:47]  That never happens.
[01:04:48]  In Liddy's autobiography, all he does, he writes about how he wanted to do that when they're in this room together, but ultimately he was very polite, right?
[01:04:55]  Like that's again the perfect, like the perfect kind of like mix between the claims of Liddy and sort of this pop culture image of him as this dangerous madman.
[01:05:04]  He's going to stab John Dean to death in the reality, which is like he thought a lot about threatening him with a pencil, but did nothing.
[01:05:11]  So again, the more I learn about fucking G. Gordon Liddy, the more I've come to the conclusion, he's like the fascist Walter Mitty, right?
[01:05:21]  Like every moment he is nothing but like a bureaucrat, but every single second when anything happens, he has these big fantasies of being a hero, right?
[01:05:31]  I do kind of want Ben Stiller to play G. Gordon Liddy in a movie now.
[01:05:37]  Yeah, it is that like seething small man rage.
[01:05:41]  Yeah.
[01:05:42]  That, yeah, I guess except for all the Nazi stuff, Ben Stiller is pretty perfect.
[01:05:47]  Yeah, he could do it.
[01:05:48]  He could do it.
[01:05:49]  So not long after their first meeting, Magruder makes the mistake.
[01:05:55]  He puts a hand on Liddy's shoulder when they're like, they're working in the office.
[01:05:58]  They're going over a legal brief.
[01:06:00]  Liddy calls him over and he like puts a hand on his shoulder.
[01:06:03]  I'm not going to say you should do that, but not like an abnormal gesture, right?
[01:06:07]  Liddy, Liddy yells at him, Jeb, if you don't take your arm off my shoulder, I'm going to tear it off and beat you to death with it.
[01:06:14]  Yeah.
[01:06:15]  Again, Jeb Magruder, I think, is a pretty big guy.
[01:06:17]  Liddy is five foot nine.
[01:06:19]  So anyway, one tricky thing we've come up against over and over is separating Liddy's performance of badassery, which does seem to have worked on Jeb Magruder because Jeb is one of these soulless Ivy League pricks.
[01:06:34]  Magruder, by the way, is widely considered to be the second dumbest man in the Nixon administration.
[01:06:39]  Like universally regarded as a fool.
[01:06:42]  So I'm not surprised that Liddy's bullshit like works on him.
[01:06:45]  It's trying, but there's this, there's a difficulty in separating what does Liddy really think is happening with the smoke and mirrors that he presents because it's his image now, right?
[01:06:54]  And the thing is, Liddy is, despite all of his, his, his inanity, a committed ideologue with a hard core of belief.
[01:07:00]  And most of this belief is based around his revulsion at the left and the Vietnam protests, right?
[01:07:06]  And he comes to believe, he writes in his book, he thinks that permitting the spirit, lifestyle, and ideas of the 60s movement to achieve power would be as horrifying to him as the thought of surrender to a Japanese soldier in 1945.
[01:07:20]  Yeah.
[01:07:20]  So, hey, he finally compares himself to a fascist that's not a Nazi, guys.
[01:07:25]  We did it.
[01:07:26]  We did it.
[01:07:27]  No, I mean, right.
[01:07:29]  The asterisk, I would have loved to surrender to a German soldier.
[01:07:35]  No, and he's talking about like it's as horrifying to me to do this as it would be to a Japanese soldier.
[01:07:41]  Oh, no, yes.
[01:07:42]  That is, that is the one time.
[01:07:43]  Um, yeah, yeah, he has like nightmares.
[01:07:47]  It's nightmares of Jane Fonda visiting Hanoi.
[01:07:50]  Um, he's convinced that the U.S. is having a cold civil war, right?
[01:07:53]  That that's that's going on right now.
[01:07:55]  And so he's willing certainly right about that.
[01:07:58]  Yeah, yeah, he's willing to blow up anything, right, in order to prevent this.
[01:08:02]  There's no action, no matter how dangerous or immoral, that isn't justified in his mind by beating these hippies, right?
[01:08:09]  Uh, and Haldeman, one of Haldeman's aides, Gordon Straken, who's involved intimately in Watergate, uh, puts he says this when Magruder tells him, like, maybe we should get Liddy out of this department, maybe he should not be involved in committing crimes for us.
[01:08:23]  Straken says, Liddy's a Hitler, but at least he's our Hitler.
[01:08:28]  Why do you need a Hitler?
[01:08:30]  Why do you want a Hitler?
[01:08:33]  It's like, I mean, that is, it truly is like so mind-bending to me that you'd think there was a brief moment in time when the right wing at least had like a sense of optics, but I guess not.
[01:08:48]  I guess that's the answer: they never have ever.
[01:08:52]  It's like if you're running a bar and your bartender is like creeping out all of the clientele and like dangerous, and you're like, look, so-and-so is a Bill Cosby, but at least he's our Bill Cosby.
[01:09:02]  Well, do we want a Bill Cosby at this bar?
[01:09:04]  Do we need a Bill Cosby?
[01:09:06]  Like, maybe that's a bad thing to have at the bar.
[01:09:09]  No one ever suggests that.
[01:09:11]  So Dean decides, well, we'll give Liddy a shot and he offers him the job, right?
[01:09:16]  And for a while, Liddy is kind of working as a lawyer for the campaign, but Dean keeps getting poked by the tickler to get this intel operation up and running.
[01:09:24]  And so he brings in Gordon and he's like, put together a proposal for a dirty tricks campaign, right?
[01:09:29]  And Liddy's like, how much money can I have?
[01:09:31]  And Dean's like, well, this other guy said half a million dollars.
[01:09:34]  So maybe we could do half a million dollars.
[01:09:36]  And Liddy's like, that must mean a million dollars.
[01:09:39]  So I'm going to build a plan that will cost a million dollars.
[01:09:42]  So what results is he calls it Operation Gymstone.
[01:09:47]  And it is both profoundly illegal and so far beyond G. Gordon Liddy's limited competence that I think I wish it had gotten green lit, right?
[01:09:57]  Some of the stuff in there is that like, we're going to drug hippies and we're going to sneak them into opponent George McGovern's campaign headquarters so they can piss on the floor, right?
[01:10:06]  Like while he's being interviewed on TV, right?
[01:10:09]  Which is, he might have gotten away with that.
[01:10:12]  That's possibly within his limited competence.
[01:10:14]  But there was also outrageously ambitious shit like this plan, related by John Dean in his memoir.
[01:10:20]  Quote, he had consulted specialists, one of the world's leading experts, and solved the problem of finding untraceable equipment.
[01:10:26]  Then he launched into an extremely technical description of microwave telephone communications, speaking of relay stations, routing frequencies, and the difficulties of intercepting non-cabled signals.
[01:10:36]  His point became clear when he said there was equipment capable of intercepting all communications between an opposing candidate's airplane and the ground.
[01:10:44]  The intercepting equipment was required to be near the airplane, but not within sight, of course.
[01:10:48]  So Liddy proposed hiring a chase plane to follow the Democratic campaign planes and make transcriptions of all airborne communities.
[01:10:55]  He wants to have a plane following in secret, hidden in the clouds, the Democratic campaign plane at all times to intercept their comms.
[01:11:06]  There is no way he would have pulled this off.
[01:11:09]  Not possible.
[01:11:11]  So amazing.
[01:11:12]  What I mean, right?
[01:11:13]  He is just, this is just Blofeld shit.
[01:11:16]  Yes, yes.
[01:11:19]  Yeah.
[01:11:20]  I guess you got a dream.
[01:11:21]  You got to have a dreamer on every campaign, you know?
[01:11:24]  I don't know that you do, but he is there.
[01:11:28]  He is there.
[01:11:29]  So, another plan that he prefers is to rent an expensive houseboat.
[01:11:33]  And Liddy is constantly being like, We got to rent this now.
[01:11:36]  I got a handshake deal with the owner.
[01:11:38]  You know, give me the money now.
[01:11:39]  Give me, and like Dean's like, we don't even talk this through, man.
[01:11:41]  And Liddy's like, But I gotta, I want to fill it with high-dollar prostitutes, right?
[01:11:45]  And we're gonna sail it around the whole election to everywhere the DNC goes to like their, you know, we'll have it just always in port anywhere the Democrats do a big meeting so that we can we can pull in Democratic officials and then these prostitutes can ply them for information and record it, right?
[01:12:00]  And yeah, it's very funny.
[01:12:02]  Everyone is like, this seems like a terrible idea.
[01:12:04]  And Liddy's like, no, it's not.
[01:12:05]  These are the finest call girls in the country.
[01:12:06]  You know, I can tell you from first-hand experience, they're not dumb broads.
[01:12:10]  They're girls who can be trained and programmed.
[01:12:12]  I've spoken with the madam in Baltimore and we've been assured of their services at the convention.
[01:12:18]  Part of why they don't do this is because someone intelligent is like, hey, we don't want to like make a big deal about Democratic staffers utilizing prostitutes because like everyone does.
[01:12:30]  Like you go into any brothel in like a place where there's a big political convention and it's an even list of Dims and Republic.
[01:12:37]  We don't want to, we don't want to tug that string.
[01:12:40]  That doesn't work out for us in the long run.
[01:12:44]  Liddy also had plans to utilize his dreamed of budget to hire thugs to do violence to protesters.
[01:12:50]  Now, the simplest version of this is literally hire CIA street fighters, as he calls them, to beat up hippies in public at protests, right?
[01:12:58]  But his more advanced plan is to hire a second team who will be paid for by Richard Nixon to kidnap American citizens and traffic them into foreign countries.
[01:13:10]  Quote, these teams are experienced in surgical relocation activities.
[01:13:15]  In a word, general, he's calling Mitchell general.
[01:13:17]  They can kidnap a hostile leader with maximum secrecy and a minimum use of force.
[01:13:22]  If, for example, a prominent radical comes to our San Diego convention to marshal his army of demonstrators, these teams can drug him and take him across the border into Mexico until the convention is over.
[01:13:32]  He'd never see the face of a single one of our operatives.

=== Kidnapping Hippies and Citizens (04:18) ===

[01:13:35]  My God.
[01:13:36]  And this is extra funny because of something else that Liddy says during this, right?
[01:13:44]  Because he's, he's G. Gordon Liddy.
[01:13:45]  And you can probably guess it's bringing the Nazis into it, right?
[01:13:49]  Here's what Liddy writes about: quote, with Magruder and Dean out to lunch, I felt obliged to impress Mitchell with my seriousness of purpose, that my people were the kind and I was the kind and could and would do whatever was necessary to deal with organized mass violence.
[01:14:03]  Both Magruder and Dean were too young to know what I was talking about, but I knew that Mitchell, a naval officer in World War II, would get the message if I translated the English special action group into German.
[01:14:14]  Given the history involved, it was a gross exaggeration, but it made my point.
[01:14:19]  An Einsatzgruppe, general, I said, inadvertently using a hard G for the word general and turning it too into German.
[01:14:25]  These men include professional killers who have accounted for between them 22 dead so far, including two hanged from a beam in a garage.
[01:14:32]  And like, so the Einsteins Group, if you've forgotten, are the division of the SS who carried out the first stages of the Holocaust, which was largely shooting babies and women and like women and children and burying tens of thousands of them in mass graves.
[01:14:47]  That's what he names this operation to kidnap hippies after.
[01:14:52]  Well, and also to be like, and you know who's going to be impressed by this?
[01:14:56]  A World War II veteran.
[01:14:58]  World War II veteran.
[01:15:00]  That's the U.S. Navy.
[01:15:02]  Yeah.
[01:15:03]  And Mitchell, he's like, I could tell he was impressed.
[01:15:06]  And for all we can know, Mitchell gets angry about this.
[01:15:08]  He's like, get this fucking dude out of here.
[01:15:10]  And they do, again, because none of them are very competent.
[01:15:13]  They're like, come back with a plan that doesn't cost a million dollars, right?
[01:15:17]  Like, cut some of this maniac shit off and try to bring us something else, right?
[01:15:21]  In part because they just need to have updates for the tickler, right?
[01:15:24]  So Liddy gets kind of yelled out of the room and he comes back a few weeks later with a different idea, right?
[01:15:32]  Operation Crystal, which is cheaper and involves installing wiretaps in Democratic offices, right?
[01:15:38]  And this is what becomes Watergate, right?
[01:15:40]  Listen, thankfully it's just Crystal with a C.
[01:15:43]  Yeah, thankfully it's crystal with a fucking C, right?
[01:15:46]  In his autobiography, Liddy makes it clear that as soon as he got told to start drawing this shit up, he assumed he had a million dollar budget.
[01:15:52]  So he has Hunt start paying retainers to his Cubans and promising all these guys money.
[01:15:57]  And then he's like freaking out to Dean, like, I promise dangerous men money.
[01:16:01]  Like they have to get paid.
[01:16:02]  You know, yeah.
[01:16:03]  And Dean's like, but we never told you you had a million dollars.
[01:16:06]  Why are you paying people already?
[01:16:08]  Oh my God.
[01:16:09]  It is, it is, it's very funny.
[01:16:11]  So one of the dudes that he and Hunt bring in to carry out their crime plan to wiretap the Democratic National Committee is a man named Jim McCord.
[01:16:21]  And of all of the spy adjacent man children in these plots, Jim McCord is the closest to the real deal, which is not a compliment.
[01:16:28]  Born in Oklahoma, he'd been a bombardier in the Army Air Corps in World War II and had then joined the FBI and transferred after a little while to the CIA at kind of the height of its crimes against the humanity phase.
[01:16:40]  He became a GS-15, which had him put in charge of the CIA's physical security at its Langley HQ.
[01:16:47]  So he is running security for the CIA headquarters, right?
[01:16:50]  That's a big job, right?
[01:16:51]  That is like a legit gig.
[01:16:53]  Alan Dolas called him my top man.
[01:16:55]  So he has the rep. He is the kind of spy both Hunt and Liddy want to pretend to be, right?
[01:17:02]  And McCord on paper should be a bugging expert.
[01:17:06]  You know, I cannot blame Liddy for trusting the man's credentials.
[01:17:10]  He's got everything you'd want in the resume of a guy to handle bugging for you.
[01:17:15]  So Jim is, the problem with Jim is that he is the security head for creep.
[01:17:19]  So he is an employee of the Nixon White House, right?
[01:17:22]  Well, not the White House, but of Nixon's campaign, right?
[01:17:25]  He's directly tied to Nixon.
[01:17:27]  So he does seem like an obvious guy to run the watertapping op, but he's also, for the same reason why Liddy and Hunt aren't allowed to be doing physical ops together, he shouldn't be on scene at anything.
[01:17:39]  So Liddy puts together a pared down version of his wiretapping plans and he gets approved a quarter of a million dollar budget, a significant amount of what he and Howard Hunt are spending lots of this money on luxury hotels and fine dining, traveling around trying to find criminals to do things.

=== Hardening Against Torture (15:16) ===

[01:17:54]  They can never help themselves.
[01:17:56]  They cannot help.
[01:17:58]  His defense of this is that like, well, no serious criminal will trust us if we're not spending a lot of money on nonsense.
[01:18:03]  That's right.
[01:18:04]  That's true.
[01:18:04]  Yeah.
[01:18:05]  Maybe.
[01:18:06]  Maybe, maybe, Liddy.
[01:18:07]  Gotta hand it to the man.
[01:18:09]  Yeah.
[01:18:10]  So this is somewhat counteracted.
[01:18:12]  The fact that like this is the only way to make people trust them is a little counteracted by other claims Liddy makes about his recruitment efforts and how he tried to get these criminals to impress him.
[01:18:21]  And this brings us to perhaps the most infamous story about G. Gordon Liddy, his pinchant for lighting his own hand on fire.
[01:18:31]  What a funny man.
[01:18:34]  If you believe Liddy, in the late 60s, as he's continually trying to increase his willpower and make himself a tough man, he decides, well, this war between us and the left is about to ex like, so I need to make myself hardened to torture, right?
[01:18:50]  And the only way to do that, he describes this as a technique recognized in the East for increasing willpower, where he burns himself for increasing periods of time to build up a tolerance for pain, quote, much as one might build muscles by lifting.
[01:19:08]  Insane thing to compare lighting yourself on fire to.
[01:19:12]  And like, I also don't really think there's any ancient Eastern technique for lighting your own hand on fire, but perhaps, you know, perhaps.
[01:19:19]  Yeah, I guess.
[01:19:20]  Maybe.
[01:19:22]  So he felt that he needed to harden his body to torture.
[01:19:25]  So in 1967, he starts burning himself regularly with cigarettes and matches.
[01:19:29]  And he's always careful to light his left hand and forearm on fire because he doesn't want to damage his gun hand.
[01:19:36]  But one day, Liddy relates, quote, I made a mistake.
[01:19:39]  I burned the underside of the second joint of my left index finger so badly it required surgical attention.
[01:19:45]  Fortunately, the surgeon was from India and familiar with the practice, although he found it unusual and an accidental.
[01:19:52]  I told him, he told me that it would take a year before he could fully straighten my left index finger.
[01:19:56]  And then only after repeated exercise to stretch the scar tissue that would form in the angle of the joint.
[01:20:02]  I had, it seemed, nearly cooked out the joint and lost a tendon.
[01:20:06]  Oh.
[01:20:09]  I mean, that sounds delicious, of course.
[01:20:11]  You gotta look at it.
[01:20:11]  Yeah, it sounds like it smelled great.
[01:20:12]  Yeah.
[01:20:13]  Love enough.
[01:20:14]  Thankfully, the doctor was Indian, and so he'd seen many men light their own hands on fire, as everyone does in India.
[01:20:21]  Fuck.
[01:20:24]  It's not amazing how many casual, clear cries for help that himself admits to constantly.
[01:20:37]  I'm so rarely like the whole process of involuntary commitment is real fucked up.
[01:20:43]  But like, I don't know, man, if a guy comes to me saying, I have developed a habit of lighting my hand on fire to increase my willpower.
[01:20:50]  Yeah, maybe that guy, maybe that guy needs to be in medical care.
[01:20:53]  Even if he doesn't want to be, he needs some sort of help, right?
[01:20:56]  Yeah.
[01:20:56]  That is, he's a danger to himself and others if you're doing this, right?
[01:20:59]  This is not reasonable behavior.
[01:21:01]  This is not healthy.
[01:21:03]  This is not certainly the behavior that a man with five children should be carrying out.
[01:21:10]  Yeah, it's bad news.
[01:21:12]  And you gotta.
[01:21:13]  Yeah.
[01:21:14]  The way he describes this too, I think this is compulsive.
[01:21:18]  I think there is something compulsive in his need to scarify and injure himself, right?
[01:21:24]  Yeah.
[01:21:25]  This is far beyond any kind of actual willpower building, right?
[01:21:29]  I mean, look, it does seem like over the course of this tale, between the like animal mutilation at the top and this shit, it is like a little like of the bastards that I've been party to and that the show has been party to.
[01:21:42]  I guess it's just like his sheer incompetence and cowardice is what prevented.
[01:21:48]  I mean, he has a lot of other tool.
[01:21:50]  He has a lot of other character tools that.
[01:21:52]  Yeah.
[01:21:54]  This potentially could have gotten a lot worse for humanity.
[01:21:56]  This could have gone like Liddy does not go as badly.
[01:21:59]  And I think maybe his dad is credit for that.
[01:22:02]  Maybe he's constantly held back from like setting off a series of bombs in like the fucking White House lawn by the fact that his dad wouldn't have been proud of that, right?
[01:22:12]  Like that he we may like that may be the maybe like we were just I was criticized the family a little bit like maybe this is the best case scenario for Liddy because he had that that teeny bit of restraint on his actions.
[01:22:26]  Yeah, it really is like so hard to know to go back and just go to the other timeline where maybe a little bit of a dexter situation, right?
[01:22:36]  Yes.
[01:22:36]  Yes, we never know.
[01:22:38]  We currently don't know.
[01:22:39]  Maybe we can't do it all though.
[01:22:41]  Yeah.
[01:22:42]  So despite the fact that he's permanently injured himself doing this, Liddy keeps burning himself both as a hobby and in the days before Watergate, as a recruitment tactic.
[01:22:53]  Quote, she was flashily good looking, young, and had secretarial skills and expertise and appeared able to attract men sexually if she wished, possibly even the candidate.
[01:23:03]  That means Nixon's opponent.
[01:23:04]  At dinner, Miss Stevens seemed reluctant, balking at the risks involved.
[01:23:08]  And when I told her her identity would be revealed to no one and she could walk away anytime if she feared exposure, she pointed out that I would know her identity.
[01:23:15]  I told her that no one could force me to disclose anything I chose not to reveal.
[01:23:18]  She didn't believe me, and I was casting about for some way to convince her when I noticed she smoked.
[01:23:23]  I told her to light her cigarette lighter and hold it out.
[01:23:25]  She did, and I locked my gaze upon her eyes and placed my hand palm down over the flame.
[01:23:30]  Presently, the flesh turned black, and when she smelled the scent of burning meat, Sherry Stevens broke from my gaze and pulled the lighter away from my hand.
[01:23:38]  She seemed frightened badly, so I took pains to calm her, wrapping an ice cube against the burn with a napkin and returning to my dinner.
[01:23:44]  Pale, Miss Stevens said she was sure I would never betray her, but she excused herself as a candidate, invoking a just-remembered plan to marry a Swiss airplane pilot in September of 1972.
[01:23:54]  When I told her that I'd be glad to have her services through August at a very generous rate of pay, she refused and, expressing concern for my hand, asked to be taken home.
[01:24:02]  Now, good on you, Sherry.
[01:24:05]  That was the you're the only person in this entire series who's made an intelligent decision.
[01:24:09]  Like, if a stranger makes you burn his hand to the bone, you leave, right?
[01:24:17]  You bounce again.
[01:24:19]  He's telling this story.
[01:24:22]  It is, I, it's so incomprehensible to me that, like, from doing this to telling anyone about it, I don't know what is more bonkers.
[01:24:33]  What a, yeah, like, bragging about this particular story, even if it's made up, is so fucking nuts.
[01:24:40]  Because he does brag about it.
[01:24:41]  He's like, yeah, I did do this.
[01:24:42]  You know, I'm dealing with some real hard people.
[01:24:44]  This is the only way to convince them I was serious.
[01:24:46]  Like, but it doesn't work.
[01:24:48]  Yeah.
[01:24:49]  Like a normal person, she sees a man light himself on fire during a job interview and it's like, probably don't want to be involved.
[01:24:56]  I don't want to be in business with that dude.
[01:24:58]  It's like if you put in your LinkedIn, I can cut my wrist to the bone without bleeding to death.
[01:25:04]  Well, that's great, but I don't want to work for you.
[01:25:07]  Like, I think I'm out.
[01:25:09]  I think, yeah, I may be out of this one.
[01:25:11]  So, and again, one thing that's funny about this to me is that, like, you've got this lady who's, you know, living on the wrong side of the law, but she sees this man do this and is like, oh, I don't want to be anywhere near this guy.
[01:25:22]  This guy's dangerous.
[01:25:24]  At the same time as this is happening, multiple Nixon staff members, men of privileged pedigree with Ivy League degrees, find themselves in the same situation.
[01:25:32]  Deep Throat will later claim that he saw Liddy do this light himself on fire trick at a party, right?
[01:25:38]  That like he was, and like, so multiple men in politics, you know, powerful men, are in the same situation and they fail to act with the same perceptiveness Sherry shows.
[01:25:50]  They're like, well, clearly we need to be in business with this man.
[01:25:54]  By way of an example, here's what John Dean writes about his first experience with Liddy's burning fetish.
[01:26:01]  As he spoke, I noticed a bulky white bandage wrapped around his fist.
[01:26:05]  What happened to your hand, Gordon?
[01:26:07]  He shrugged.
[01:26:08]  Oh, nothing really.
[01:26:09]  It looks serious.
[01:26:10]  Well, some might feel that way, but I don't.
[01:26:12]  It was necessary, you see, that I prove my strength to the men I'm thinking of recruiting to assist me at the convention.
[01:26:17]  What do you mean?
[01:26:18]  Well, in my business, John, it's important that those I work with understand I'm a man of strength, macho, as they say.
[01:26:24]  So to prove myself to them, I held my hand over a candle until the flesh burned, which I did without flinching.
[01:26:28]  I wanted them to know that I could stand any amount of physical pain.
[01:26:31]  My God, Gordon, I didn't really know what to say.
[01:26:33]  So I told him I hoped his hand healed quickly, which he also shrugged off.
[01:26:37]  And again, this lady who is just like, you know, kind of in the shadier part of the world, immediately recognizes, nope, don't want anything.
[01:26:44]  John Dean sees this as crazy and is like, guess I'll continue working with this man.
[01:26:51]  Guess I'll task him with breaking the law for Richard Nixon.
[01:26:54]  Hey, it must just be that this woman actually knows tough people.
[01:26:58]  And John Dean is like, well, this is nuts, but it is in fact tough.
[01:27:03]  Having made a number of mistakes in my life, like the last people who are ever going to do something like this are dangerous people.
[01:27:10]  Yeah.
[01:27:10]  Right.
[01:27:11]  People who can, someone who like actually might be able to murder you and disappear the body is not going to try to prove that to you by lighting themselves on fire, right?
[01:27:19]  They generally don't need to lie.
[01:27:22]  Like, actively.
[01:27:26]  They're actually real people, right?
[01:27:29]  So Dean claims that this moment is the point at which he realizes Liddy is nuts and that Bud Krogh had pushed Liddy off on him so that Dean would take him off of the White House's hands, right?
[01:27:40]  That's why Dean thinks all of this gets started, right?
[01:27:44]  And so all of this shit, basically, everything that's happened here is like this desire to keep pushing Liddy down the ladder where he's not your problem and this tickler, which is constantly forcing people to provide updates on this illegal scheme.
[01:27:56]  It leads to a situation where eventually G. Gordon Liddy is working for creep and has a pocket full of cash to live out his Cold War thriller dreams.
[01:28:04]  So while John Dean and Jeb Magruder and John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman and Big Dickie Nicks himself are all sleeping comfy, Liddy and Hunt are unguarded and unwatched as they send their Cubans into the DNC HQ at the Watergate Hotel on June 17th, 1972.
[01:28:21]  Bugs are installed in the telephones of several stappers.
[01:28:24]  And there are some fuck ups, Hunt, and I think one other guy gets stuck in the Watergate overnight in like a closet with like all the liquor and like Hunt winds up pissing in a whiskey bottle.
[01:28:35]  But in the end, they get out and escape with the job done and nobody gets caught, right?
[01:28:40]  That's the first Watergate break-in.
[01:28:43]  Unfortunately, it's a shit job because all of these people are buffoons.
[01:28:48]  And like McCord, the bugging expert, doesn't like they pick the wrong bugs.
[01:28:53]  The bugs aren't put in right.
[01:28:54]  Whatever the case, it's kind of unclear as to why, but like most of the taps don't work.
[01:28:59]  And the ones that do, they just kind of have some random secretaries and shit bugged.
[01:29:03]  And it's mostly them like talking about who they're fucking, right?
[01:29:06]  It's like normal shit, right?
[01:29:09]  Nothing that's going to swing an election.
[01:29:11]  So after all this goes down, Liddy's superiors are disappointed.
[01:29:16]  One of the bugs he'd spent 30 grand on did not even function at all.
[01:29:20]  Jeb Magruder described it as James Bond had been exposed as a bumbling clown.
[01:29:25]  Yeah.
[01:29:28]  That should have been the end of it, right?
[01:29:30]  But in spite of this, there's still this need to provide some sort of intel thing.
[01:29:34]  So Liddy gets even more money to go back to fix the broken bugs.
[01:29:39]  And this time they're like, you know what?
[01:29:41]  So we know we get something.
[01:29:43]  Have your guys take photos of every document in DA DNC HQ, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of shit.
[01:29:49]  So this necessitates, number one, not just a quick break-in, but spending four hours in the office.
[01:29:56]  High odds, you're going to get caught doing that.
[01:29:58]  And Liddy becomes convinced because how everything fucks up the last time, I need to put my bug expert, McCord, in the room.
[01:30:06]  He needs to be in there to fix and set up these new bugs, right?
[01:30:10]  And the only absolute direct guidance Liddy's gotten is do not let this get tied back to Nixon, right?
[01:30:17]  McCord is running security for Nixon's re-election campaign.
[01:30:21]  He is also a former CIA man and a sitting lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve with a public history as a spy.
[01:30:28]  Like there is no way this guy gets arrested and it does not immediately expose the president to unacceptable risk.
[01:30:34]  But as Liddy sees it, he has to break back in, not because it's likely to work, but because he and Hunt will look like dummies if they don't, right?
[01:30:43]  They won't be taken seriously.
[01:30:44]  They'll be exposed as buffoons and he'll probably stop getting money, right?
[01:30:48]  This will probably be the end of his career if they don't go and get something.
[01:30:52]  In his book, Liddy bitches endlessly about how his funding had gotten slashed and how, you know, I couldn't afford to put anyone but McCord in there, right?
[01:31:00]  Because they weren't paying me enough to get a really good criminal who'd be impressed with my hand burning.
[01:31:05]  So He sends McCord in and our boy Liddy is responsible for that.
[01:31:11]  And he's also responsible for the main tactical error that the break-in team makes on the ground, which is that they're trying, they don't want this door to lock after them when they break in because it's going to make it hard to do everything they need to do.
[01:31:22]  So they put a piece of tape across the lock, right?
[01:31:25]  Which is like a thing you can do.
[01:31:26]  You know, it'll stop a door from auto-latching.
[01:31:30]  They place the tape horizontally rather than vertically.
[01:31:34]  So part of the tape is sticking out, which makes it easy for, say, a security guard to spot.
[01:31:39]  Now, that is in fact what happened.
[01:31:42]  A security guard notices the tape and busts them, right?
[01:31:46]  Or calls the cops and they bust them.
[01:31:47]  But like Liddy makes the call to place it horizontally.
[01:31:51]  And he does this because of his perceived expertise as a spy.
[01:31:55]  He has like a whole defense for why this is necessary.
[01:31:58]  And here's what he, here's what he says: quote, taping was a common, if disapproved practice of maintenance personnel in large buildings.
[01:32:04]  This should not have alarmed the guard who could have been expected to remove it.
[01:32:08]  I saw no reason that the guard should think of anything other than that the maintenance people would have to be lectured.
[01:32:12]  And he's like, maintenance staff always tape locks horizontally.
[01:32:15]  Burglars do it vertically.
[01:32:17]  Therefore, if he finds it vertically taped, then he's going to call the cops, but he won't call the cops if it's horizontal.
[01:32:22]  This is totally reasonable and the only way things should have gone.
[01:32:25]  But it's like, well, that's not how it went.
[01:32:27]  Like you immediately got caught for doing this.
[01:32:29]  So like, why are you defending this that way?
[01:32:32]  Like, why are you acting as if like this is the way things should have gone?
[01:32:35]  When it's like, yeah, but it didn't.
[01:32:36]  It didn't work.
[01:32:39]  Like, you failed.
[01:32:41]  I mean, it's, it is just like so childish to like justification of everything in a way that is genuinely impressive.
[01:32:50]  I'm just like, how, yeah, again, this is like fascists are some of the least competent people on earth and somehow and yet.
[01:33:00]  And yet we're barely keeping them at bay.
[01:33:06]  We're not going to belabor this point.
[01:33:08]  The Cubans and McCord get busted, right?

=== The Failed Cover Up (07:38) ===

[01:33:11]  Liddy and Hunt escape.
[01:33:12]  And Liddy, he seems to have immediately known, I'm going to prison, right?
[01:33:16]  Like he, that, that night, he tells his wife, like, something went wrong.
[01:33:20]  They got busted.
[01:33:21]  I'm going to go to jail.
[01:33:22]  Right.
[01:33:22]  And the way he describes it, he immediately recognizes as soon as this happens, I am the highest up person in the Nixon campaign involved in this.
[01:33:30]  None of the others know the full story or know who else approved this.
[01:33:35]  So I'm the tourniquet, right?
[01:33:36]  If I keep my mouth shut, this can't go any higher than me, you know?
[01:33:40]  And this gets us to the last thing.
[01:33:42]  And the only thing that's exceptional about Liddy, right?
[01:33:45]  The only thing he's good at, right?
[01:33:47]  Because he is a believer.
[01:33:48]  He's a believer in the way no one else in politics is, really.
[01:33:51]  And every other member of the conspiracy, save the Cubans, will immediately roll on their fellows, right?
[01:33:56]  They start making deals with the DOJ, Magruder and Dean, like they all immediately like turn a fuck job on their own buddies, right?
[01:34:04]  John Mitchell, like they all, they all roll right away, right?
[01:34:08]  Liddy from the jump says, I will not testify.
[01:34:11]  I will not say a word.
[01:34:13]  I don't speak, you know, I don't testify.
[01:34:15]  I don't talk to the feds.
[01:34:16]  I don't do nothing.
[01:34:17]  And he doesn't.
[01:34:18]  Like he does understand on that degree.
[01:34:21]  That is the, he's a loyal henchman, right?
[01:34:24]  Yeah.
[01:34:24]  He does not fucking say anything.
[01:34:27]  Now, does that make him a good henchman?
[01:34:29]  Well, he's the reason why Nixon resigns, right?
[01:34:32]  He is the, he is the whole cause of Watergate, right?
[01:34:35]  So I don't know if he's a good henchman, but he is loyal, right?
[01:34:39]  Nixon seems to have recognized this.
[01:34:41]  And in recorded conversations, he starts talking about how Liddy has a screw loose.
[01:34:44]  He's not all there mentally.
[01:34:46]  How did we let this guy be in charge of this?
[01:34:48]  He's clearly not like not like, he's not doing well.
[01:34:53]  And this is especially the case when the CIA, because like once this all blows up and it becomes clear that like the Nixon White House is fucked, the CIA turns over photos, the photos that they'd had developed, like that show Liddy there.
[01:35:06]  And like, yeah, because he had sent participation, evidence of his participation in a BNE to the Central Intelligence Agency.
[01:35:15]  Oh, my God.
[01:35:16]  But he doesn't say shit.
[01:35:18]  He keeps his mouth shut.
[01:35:20]  His refusal to help the investigation gets him this gnarly 20-year prison sentence.
[01:35:24]  Now, Liddy gets off after like four years, four years in change, something like that.
[01:35:30]  And it's because in part because he's just the guy who doesn't roll.
[01:35:34]  He earns a lot of sympathy in weird places.
[01:35:37]  The New York Times eventually writes an article talking about how he needs to be pardoned.
[01:35:42]  And like, it's Carter who pardons him, right?
[01:35:45]  Like, it's, it's this gross.
[01:35:47]  That's also classic, classic Democrats.
[01:35:51]  Classic Democrats.
[01:35:52]  Like, well, you know, he did the wrong thing, but he wasn't a bad man.
[01:35:55]  No, he's a bad man.
[01:35:56]  He did a bad thing.
[01:35:57]  And like, like, yes, there is, I will say, you know, as again, as a guy who's been shady for a chunk of his life, there's a thing that's respectable about refusing to roll, right?
[01:36:09]  I'll give him that.
[01:36:09]  I will give him that.
[01:36:10]  Especially when you compare it to these descendants of his, like the Jan 6 people, all of whom immediately rolled on their buddies, immediately disavowed publicly, said, oh, you know, even if they were like going on podcasts to talk about how I was just lying when I said that I'm ashamed of my behavior, they all claim publicly, I did the wrong thing.
[01:36:27]  This was bad.
[01:36:28]  It shouldn't have happened.
[01:36:29]  Liddy never apologizes, never pretends he's anything but proud of what he did, and he never rolls.
[01:36:36]  And compared to a lot of, like that is, there's a thing you have to respect in that, even if it's not good, but you respect it, right?
[01:36:44]  Which I do.
[01:36:45]  Like there is, there was one honest, legitimate thing about G. Gordon Liddy because he had always, and I think you get the feeling part of why he behaves so consistently in this regard is that he sees this finally as his chance to prove that he's he's got courage, that he's a warrior, right?
[01:37:03]  Never got to fight, never got to pull my gun on anyone really, but I can refuse to talk and be willing to do 20 years in prison.
[01:37:12]  And he was.
[01:37:13]  I can be a good soldier finally.
[01:37:15]  He is, and he is in this regard.
[01:37:16]  He's bad up to that point.
[01:37:18]  Yeah.
[01:37:19]  He is the reason all of this happens, but that's the one thing about him that's real, you know?
[01:37:26]  Yeah.
[01:37:27]  I listen, I still, going back to what we said earlier, I still think having heard more of this story, there's a real chance this is probably even for humanity's sake, the best case version of the G. Gordon Liddy story.
[01:37:40]  I think so, right?
[01:37:42]  I think that may actually still be the case.
[01:37:44]  Now, he's going to be more toxic actually later in life, you know, and we'll talk about it.
[01:37:49]  We'll talk about one of these.
[01:37:50]  We'll come back later.
[01:37:50]  I don't want to do more than two weeks in a row on Liddy.
[01:37:54]  His time in prison is a fascinating story.
[01:37:56]  He's a really interesting guy there.
[01:37:58]  His time after prison, his, you know, this, this speaking tour he goes on with Tim Leary and his, he helps to invent talk radio.
[01:38:06]  He actually gets his job in radio in part because of Rush Limbaugh.
[01:38:10]  Yeah.
[01:38:11]  All that is interesting.
[01:38:12]  It's more toxic, certainly.
[01:38:14]  It's valuable.
[01:38:16]  But this should let you know who the man was and why he matters.
[01:38:20]  Yeah, Jesus Christ.
[01:38:22]  Yeah.
[01:38:22]  It's fucking, oh, I mean, again, it's the, I guess you can't say sniveling, but whatever the fuck was wrong with him.
[01:38:31]  Just what a, what a little wiener.
[01:38:33]  Yeah.
[01:38:34]  That's the man.
[01:38:34]  He is a wiener.
[01:38:35]  He is a weirdo.
[01:38:37]  He is also somehow more honorable and respectable than every living member of the Republican establishment today.
[01:38:44]  Yes.
[01:38:45]  Yes.
[01:38:46]  All those things are true.
[01:38:47]  An objectively, because again, there is some degree to which he was willing to sacrifice for something greater than himself.
[01:38:54]  Yeah.
[01:38:55]  That was Richard Nixon.
[01:38:56]  But because again, the man had terrible judgment, but that is something, right?
[01:39:01]  It's more than like Enrique fucking Tario ever would have managed, you know?
[01:39:05]  Right, right.
[01:39:06]  Like all these folks, like it's not, it's not cynical.
[01:39:10]  He's a very like, you know, 50s version of this fucking right-wing.
[01:39:15]  He's not at all fucking cynical.
[01:39:17]  Yeah, because he does, and it's one of those things where he's like, he's told at the time, like, you know, there's a chance you'll never even get a pardon, right?
[01:39:23]  That that won't be possible.
[01:39:24]  And he's like, that's fine.
[01:39:25]  If I got to spend the rest of my life in prison for this, I'll do it, you know?
[01:39:29]  Yeah.
[01:39:30]  So there you go.
[01:39:34]  The G. Gordon Liddy story.
[01:39:36]  Oh, I mean, it's, it's, it's fucking bonkers.
[01:39:40]  That's not even the whole of it, but yeah.
[01:39:42]  No, no.
[01:39:42]  Certainly plenty.
[01:39:43]  Jesus.
[01:39:44]  I, I, you know, I didn't think, I thought we would do an episode on his life before getting into the White House.
[01:39:53]  And then an episode that's the White House in Watergate, right?
[01:39:56]  And what do you cut out?
[01:39:58]  Really?
[01:39:59]  What do you cut out of this man's story?
[01:40:01]  Should I have not given it every single time he brings up the SS?
[01:40:05]  It was too many times to not talk about.
[01:40:09]  And truly, this is just in his book.
[01:40:12]  That means he did it constantly way more times.
[01:40:16]  Yeah.
[01:40:18]  God.
[01:40:18]  Because an editor for sure was like, I gotta, I'm holding you to a tenth of the SS stories.
[01:40:26]  G yeah.
[01:40:30]  There's no fucking way.
[01:40:32]  No fucking way.
[01:40:34]  So funny.
[01:40:35]  All right.
[01:40:37]  Well, that's going to be, that's going to be it for us at Behind the Bastards.
[01:40:39]  Andrew, you got anything to plug?
[01:40:41]  Yeah, same old.
[01:40:42]  Thanks for having me.
[01:40:43]  Yo, this race is my podcast.
[01:40:46]  The Entertainment Community Fund.

=== Behind the Baystards Outro (03:20) ===

[01:40:49]  I don't know.
[01:40:49]  That's it.
[01:40:50]  Maybe, maybe by the time this comes out, we'll have stuff, you know, we'll be done striking.
[01:40:56]  Yeah.
[01:40:57]  Asterisk, almost certainly not.
[01:40:59]  It's possible.
[01:41:00]  And it's possible, but not probable.
[01:41:02]  Yeah.
[01:41:03]  Look, if you want to make the strike end, find the most dangerous and irrational person you know and give them a quarter of a million dollars to try something, you know?
[01:41:14]  I know.
[01:41:15]  There's a, I'm realizing there's a real chance I'm the Writers Guild's G. Gordon Liddy.
[01:41:20]  That you're going to be the G. That's Andrew.
[01:41:23]  That's the whole reason behind Super Soaker full of piss.
[01:41:27]  Right.
[01:41:28]  That's our dream.
[01:41:29]  You and I can be the Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy of the WGA.
[01:41:34]  Oh, we're the crazies.
[01:41:35]  Yeah, we're the crazies.
[01:41:37]  Yeah.
[01:41:37]  You know what?
[01:41:37]  Say what you will.
[01:41:38]  We are loyal as fuck.
[01:41:40]  That's right.
[01:41:41]  We will be loyal to the end, even as we destroy the entire guild with our incompetence.
[01:41:47]  Does that make you Andrew Tiddy?
[01:41:51]  For now.
[01:41:52]  Wow.
[01:41:53]  Wow.
[01:41:54]  You can tell we've been here for three hours because that's not normally a Sophie joke.
[01:41:59]  That's true.
[01:42:02]  But it was really necessary.
[01:42:04]  Uh-huh.
[01:42:09]  What did we say?
[01:42:09]  Go to hell.
[01:42:10]  Go to hell.
[01:42:11]  I love you.
[01:42:14]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:42:17]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:42:33]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:42:41]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:42:43]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:42:45]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:42:47]  We always say that.
[01:42:49]  Trust your girlfriends.
[01:42:52]  Listen to the girlfriends.
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[01:42:54]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:43:05]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:43:09]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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[01:43:43]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:43:46]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:43:48]  That's so funny.
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