Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

On July 19 they hired on another staffer, a former FBI agent, assistant district attorney, and failed congressional candidate from Dutchess County, New York. As an FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy had been pushed out because he was, in the words of a superior, “a wild man” and a “superklutz.” As assistant DA he had fired a pistol at the ceiling while summing up a case before a jury. When he lost a Republican congressional primary in 1968 (slogan: “Gordon Liddy doesn’t bail them out—he puts them in”) but won the Conservative Party’s line, he was rewarded for throwing the race with a job at the Treasury Department—which he lost, in 1971, for speaking against the administration’s gun-control bill at an NRA convention. He liked to show off his toughness by putting his hand in a candle flame. He also liked to demonstrate the best way to assassinate a man with office supplies: a puncture to the neck with a freshly sharpened pencil, directly above the Adam’s apple. He confessed an admiration for Adolf Hitler and wrote in his memoirs about the Pledge of Allegiance, “I enjoyed the mass salute and performed it well, unexcelled in speed of thrust and an iron-shaft steadiness throughout the remainder of the pledge. That habit became so deeply ingrained that even today, at assemblies where the pledge is made or the national anthem played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.” Such was the caliber of the men now called to work in the Executive Mansion.