Roast in Hell, G. Gordon Liddy, Dark Foe of Democracy

He lived long enough to become a perversely beloved American character, sharing a stage at one point with onetime target Timothy Leary, the LSD guru, and hosting his own right-wing radio show. But G. Gordon Liddy, who died on Tuesday, was not just a “dirty trickster” for President Richard Nixon and “mastermind” of the Watergate break-in. He was a thug, a deep-state gargoyle. And I’m glad that I lived long enough to spit (metaphorically) on his grave.

Among the many felonies that Liddy proposed or actually carried out was an assassination plot against syndicated Washington columnist Jack Anderson, who was seen as a security threat by the Nixon administration (which meant Nixon and his men didn’t like the scoops that Anderson was publishing). Liddy seriously proposed that he and his fellow hit men kill the journalist with a drug overdose or by engineering a car crash. Liddy confessed the planned murder – which was rejected as too extreme even by Nixon’s standards – in a face-to-face meeting with Anderson that was filmed for a 1991 CNBC show.

Anderson escaped unscathed during Nixon’s reign of terror. But how many others fell victim to Liddy and other Nixon henchmen? Dorothy Hunt – the wife of CIA spook and Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt – was among those who died mysterious deaths during these dark times, killed in a 1972 plane crash along with a CBS newswoman who was working with her on a Watergate tell-all.

And Jacobin magazine just ran a lengthy report on the 1969 assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton based on over 400 newly obtained pages of secret FBI documents. According to Jacobin, the FBI and Nixon officials were alarmed by young, charismatic Hampton’s efforts at uniting radical groups across racial lines. It’s important to fully understand the covert violence against radical leaders and others who were deemed national security threats in the 1960s and ‘70s, Jacobin stated, because “a fuller understanding of this thinking and methodology matters for a new left aiming to avoid the bureau’s efforts at disruption in the twenty-first century.”

I’ve been making this case for many years now. The assassination of Hampton, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and many other known and unknown government targets is not only of historical importance. Full disclosure about these traumatic events will also protect future progressive leaders.

Power always resents dissent. It always acts to silence oppositional figures seen as threats. It always seeks to cloak its violence in darkness. So I’m not one of those who note the passing of G. Gordon Liddy with an ironic chuckle. He was a vicious enemy of American democracy – and he had a lot more official stature and muscle than the violent protesters who overran the Capitol on January 6.

So roast in hell, G. Gordon Liddy. Enjoy your eternal barbecue.

Liddy took aim at American democracy