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

by Rick Perlstein

“David St. John” was E. Howard Hunt, writing, like a good spook, under a pseudonym. He had started writing novels out of boredom from being put on ice at the CIA. He was quite successful at it, too. The Coven provided a window into the mind of a Plumber. Everette Howard Hunt believed, as many in the White House believed, that behind the earnest humanitarian face of liberalism lay irredeemable evil. George Gordon Battle Liddy suspected Daniel Ellsberg was a KGB agent, or that the Times had acquired the Pentagon Papers through a black-bag job. In their minds, every evil was linked. Liddy gave over twelve pages in his memoirs to an account of his involvement in a raid on the home of Timothy Leary—“one more problem of the sick ’60s.” When he moved to Washington in 1970, Liddy noted his neighbors as “career Democrat-liberal bureaucrats who hated Richard Nixon and had a laissez-faire attitude toward the raising of their children”—so he threatened one of these children with “a restraining hold I had learned before in the FBI.” For, “To permit the thought, spirit, life-style, and ideas of the ’60s movement to achieve power and become the official way of life of the United States was a thought as offensive to me as was the thought of surrender to a career Japanese soldier in 1945.”