Until
the late 1960s, the "drug menace," despite
the apocalyptic metaphors associated with it, served
mainly as a rhetorical theme in New York State politics.
The addicts arrested in occasional police sweeps were
almost always booked, for the statistical record, then
released in what became known as "revolving door"
arrests. G. Gordon Liddy, however, foresaw a more durable
purpose in the drug menace: the public's fear of an
uncontrollable army of addicts, if properly organized,
could be forged into a new instrument for social control.
George Gordon Battle Liddy,
named after a New York political leader, was born on
November 30, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. Brought up
a staunch Catholic, Liddy was educated at St. Benedict's
Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, and at Fordham
University, where he made a reputation for himself as
a fervent antiCommunist. Upon graduation in 1952, Liddy
immediately enlisted in the Army, with the aim of becoming
a paratrooper. An appendicitis attack, however, disqualified
him from airborne training, and instead he fought a
more prosaic war in Korea as a lieutenant in the artillery.
Discharged in 1954, he returned to Fordham Law School,
where he distinguished himself on Fordham Law Review
and graduated in 1957.
For the next five years Liddy
realized a childhood ambition by serving in the FBI
under J. Edgar Hoover. After the gunpoint capture of
one of the ten most wanted fugitives in 1959, Liddy
became the youngest supervisor in the entire FBI and
was attached to J. Edgar Hoover's personal staff at
FBI national headquarters, in Washington. Combining
a skill with words and a zeal for anticommunism, Liddy
served as Hoover's personal ghostwriter, writing law-and-order
articles for various magazines and preparing speeches
for the director to give at public functions. He quickly
became well versed in the use of dramatic metaphors
and symbolic code words in the rhetoric of law and order.
From his vantage point on the director's personal staff
he also became familiar with the extralegal operations
of the FBI, such as break-ins and wiretaps. Despite
his admiration for Hoover, he realized during these
years of service that the FBI was an inefficient and
bureaucratic agency and was somewhat less than an effective
national police force. In a memorandum to President
Nixon ten years later he analyzed the deficiencies of
the FBI and concluded that because it conformed too
closely to rules and to congressional measures of performance,
it could not be counted on as a potent instrument of
the presidency. Disappointed in the FBI, Liddy resigned
from Hoover's staff in 1962 and went into private law
practice with his father, Sylvester L. Liddy, in New
York City. (The exact nature of his private practice
during these years has never been ascertained.)
Since his wife, Frances Purcell
Liddy, came from a lawyer's family in Poughkeepsie,
New York, he decided to move there in 1966 and apply
for a job as an assistant district attorney in Dutchess
County.
Raymond Baratta, then district
attorney of Dutchess County, interviewed Liddy and found
him "militant but soft-spoken." Liddy carried
with him sealed recommendations from the FBI, and Baratta,
impressed with his energy, decided to give him the position
he sought. Liddy quickly became famous, if not notorious,
in Poughkeepsie as a gun-toting prosecutor. During one
criminal trial he even fired off a gun in the courtroom
to dramatize a minor point in the case. He also proved
himself a local crusader against drugs. Joining forces
with the chief of police in Wappingers Falls, he traveled
from high school to high school in the county, lecturing
on the dangers of narcotics and employing the rich rhetoric
of Captain Hobson. The police chief, Robert Berberich,
recalled in 1975 that Liddy carried with him samples
of "everything but heroin" for his lectures.
In speeches before church groups and fraternal orders
in 1966, Liddy also warned, in a variation of Hobson's
yellow-peril theme, that the addicts of New York City
would eventually make their way up the Hudson Valley
and contaminate Poughkeepsie with their vice and crime.
As the "legal advisor" in 1966 to the Poughkeepsie
police department he also went along on every marijuana
and narcotics raid that he could find or inspire, and
his colleagues in the district attorney's office found
him brilliant in presenting what otherwise would be
routine arrests to the local newspapers. Despite his
constant efforts to alarm the citizens of Dutchess County,
Liddy found that "the menace ... was still thought
of as principally a threat to others."
On a cold midnight in March,
1966, Liddy finally found a way to shatter the illusions
of Dutchess County and gain national publicity for himself.
The coup began with a raid on the home of Timothy Leary,
a former psychologist at Harvard who had gained some
prominence (and notoriety) from his experiments with
the hallucinogenic drug LSD. After being dismissed from
Harvard for distributing LSD to students, he made the
mistake of renting a large mansion in Liddy's bailiwick
a, Millbrook, New York. LSD was neither an addictive
drug nor one associated with crime, but Leary's presence
in Dutchess County provided Liddy with a golden opportunity.
"For some time, the major media had been covering
the activities of Dr. Timothy Leary," Liddy subsequently
explained in Trite magazine. "Leary's ability to
influence the young made him feared by parents everywhere.
His message ran directly contrary to everything they
believed in and sought to teach their children: 'tune
in' (to my values; reject those of your parents), 'turn
on' (drug yourself); 'drop out' (deal with your problems
and those of society by running away from them)."
In other words, Liddy realized that Leary could be portrayed
as a Pied Piper, using mysterious drugs to turn the
young against their parents. He also noted, "Local
boys and girls have been seen entering and leaving the
estate ... fleeting glimpses were reported of persons
strolling the grounds in the nude." He thus suggested
that drugs were eroding the morality (and virginity)
of Dutchess County youths, or, as he put It, "to
fears of drug induced dementia were added pot induced
pregnancy." He even foresaw that if citizens' fears
about drugs were properly stimulated, "there would
be reenacted at Millbrook the classic motion picture
scene in which enraged Transylvanian town folks storm
Dr. Frankenstein's castle." Even though Liddy was
mixing his myths up a bit (Transylvania was the haunting
place of the vampire Dracula, not of Frankenstein's
monster). He correctly perceived the connection in the
public imagination between the drug addict and the medieval
legend of the living dead. And it was this connection
of fears that Liddy set out to exploit with his midnight
raid.
In planning the night operation,
Liddy explained, "We hoped to find not only a central
supply of LSD belonging to Leary, but also his guests'
personal supplies of marijuana and hashish... it was
necessary to strike quickly, with benefit of surprise,
if the inhabitants were to be caught in their rooms
and any contraband found in the rooms established as
possessed by the tenants." To avoid the necessity
of having to depend on testimony of witnesses, Liddy
planned to wait until Leary and his friends were all
asleep in their rooms, then, to catch them red-handed,
"We would perform a classic 'no knock' entry-that
is, kick in the front door." After that, Liddy
himself was to lead "a quick charge upstairs by
the bulk of the force of deputies, who were then to
fan out and hold the inhabitants in their rooms pending
a systematic search."
All, however, did not go as
Liddy planned. Instead of retiring at about eleven P.M.,
as Liddy presumed, the residents of the estate gathered
at about that time in the living room and began showing
a film. Liddy recounted in True magazine in 1974: "The
deputies assumed that the movies were pornographic,
and there was some competition for the assignment to
move into binocular range to obtain further information
... [but] presently the lucky man returned to report
in a tone of complete disgust, 'it ain't no dirty movie;
You'll never guess what them hippies are watching. A
waterfall.' "
The film did not finish until
nearly one A.M., by which time most of the deputies
were extremely cold and exhausted. Finally, the raiding
party moved in on the sleeping foe. Liddy introduced
himself to Dr. Leary, who meekly surrendered. And some
incriminating marijuana and LSD were indeed found on
the premises. However, because Liddy had not fully advised
Leary of his rights, as they were defined by the United
States Supreme Court in the Miranda decision that year,
the judge dismissed the charges against Leary and his
followers. Though Liddy viewed the Supreme Court as
an "unelected elite" that had usurped power
in the United States, he acquiesced in the decision.
After all, he had successfully "exposed" Leary
in the newspapers of Dutchess County (and Leary subsequently
left the county), and he had established his own reputation
as a drug fighter.
By successfully waging his
crusade against drugs (albeit in a county which had
few, if any, criminal addicts), Liddy established a
formidable reputation for himself in the county. The
next logical step was gaining power. Liddy saw life
itself as a contest for power. He said, on a national
television broadcast some years later, "Power exists
to be used ... the first obligation of ... someone seeking
power is to get himself elected...... In this contest
for power Liddy posited that the man with the strongest
will for power would win. He wrote his wife, philosophically,
"if any one component of man ought to be exercised,
cultivated, and strengthened above all others, it is
the will; and that will must have but one objective-to
win." In June, 1968, Liddy first attempted to win
the race for office by running against the incumbent,
Albert Rosenblatt, for the Republican nomination for
district attorney of Dutchess County. He had little
support from Republican politicians and was defeated
in a party caucus by a vote of 25 to 4.
Liddy next turned the focus
of his attention to the Republican nomination for Congress
from the Poughkeepsie district. Openly challenging Hamilton
Fish, Jr., who held the Republican seat, he mounted
a bitter primary campaign in the summer of 1968, which
the Democratic opponent, John S. Dyson, described as
"hyperadrenaloid and bitterly anti-communist."
He traveled from fraternal lodge to fraternal lodge
in Dutchess County, relentlessly pursuing the theme
of vampire-addicts jeopardizing the life and safety
of Dutchess County citizens. Law and order became his
battle cry; his campaign advertisements contained such
slogans as "Gordon Liddy doesn't bail them out-he
puts them in" and "He knows the answer is
law and order, not weak-kneed sociology." Despite
the vigor of his campaign, he was defeated in the primary
by the incumbent, Hamilton Fish, by only a few thousand
votes.
Liddy had lost a few battles
in 1968, but not the war. Victory, he realized, proceeded
from a superior mind-set, and not from any temporary
configuration of voters: "The master who instructed
me in the deadliest of the Oriental martial arts taught
me that the outcome of a battle is decided in the minds
of the opponents before the first blow is struck."
Liddy, in a letter to his wife published in Harper's
magazine in October. 1974, credited the "mind-set
of the ... SS division Leibenstandarte" for the
Nazi victories, and contrasted this with "the ill-disciplined,
often drugged dropouts that make up a significant portion
of the nation's armed forces today. He entered the congressional
fray again in 1968, this time as a candidate for the
nomination of the New York State Conservative party.
And as the strongest law-and-order candidate of Dutchess
County, he easily won this nomination.
Liddy now presented Hamilton
Fish with a serious problem in his bid for reelection
to Congress. The public-opinion polls showed in September,
1968, that it was going to be an exceedingly close race
between Fish and Dyson. As the Conservative candidate
and the locally celebrated prosecutor who had "captured
Timothy Leary," Liddy threatened to win enough
votes among conservative Republicans to ensure Fish's
defeat and a Democratic victory. Though Liddy himself
could not win the election, he had cleverly maneuvered
himself into a position to make a deal. Gerald Ford,
then the Republican leader in the House of Representatives
and a friend of Hamilton Fish's, went that fall to Poughkeepsie
and personally arranged for Liddy to endorse the candidacy
of Hamilton Fish. In return for abandoning his Conservative
campaign Liddy was promised a high position in the Nixon
administration, if Nixon was elected. Liddy also agreed
to head Nixon's campaign effort in Dutchess County.
After Nixon's victory in 1968
Hamilton Fish returned to Congress, and Gordon Liddy
also went to Washington. In 1969 Liddy was appointed
special assistant to the secretary of the treasury.
He served directly under Eugene T. Rossides, who had
direct responsibility for all the law-enforcement activities
of the Treasury Department, including the Customs Bureau,
the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit, the Internal
Revenue Service enforcement division, and the Secret
Service. Rossides, a shrewd and enterprising Greek American
who had been an all-American football player at Columbia
University and had managed a number of Governor Rockefeller's
campaigns in New York City, now planned to expand the
role of the Treasury Department in law enforcement.
He found that Gordon Liddy's high energy level and determination
were 'ust what he needed in the impending struggle for
power within the administration. Liddy thus became Rossides's
"spear carrier." One of his first assignments
was to work on Task Force Number One, a joint task force
being set up by the Justice Department and the Treasury
Department to combat narcotics smugglers. Rossides was
concerned that John Mitchell would use this task force
to expand his own Justice Department domain to the detriment
of the Treasury Department's customs bureau, and Liddy
was given the task of protecting and promoting Treasury
interests on the task force. Though most of the energy
of the presidential task force was consumed in bureaucratic
wrangles, Liddy foresaw the 'full potential of the drug
issue as an instrument for reorganizing agencies of
the government. It contained an undisputed moral vantage
point-since no one in the Nixon administration could
be expected to sympathize with addicts, or even with
drug users-and could therefore be used to support extraordinarily
hard-line positions. Moreover, since the drug problem
implied a new and mysterious threat (no one in the Nixon
administration had very much knowledge about the effects
or the epidemiology of narcotics), one could argue that
existing agencies and methods were inadequate to meet
this new menace. Because they were dealing with an unprecedented
"epidemic," any innovative measure, no matter
how unorthodox, could be considered and discussed. Liddy's
experience in the FBI had taught him that government
agencies tend to expend their potential power on routine
activities in their established areas of competency,
and that a new area of competency, such as the drug
menace, could lead to a new potential for power.
Rossides also assigned Liddy
to work as his representative on the working group of
the ad hoc committee established by the president to
deal with international narcotics traffic. Rossides
was especially interested in suppressing the opium grown
in Turkey. On the working group Liddy met with executives
from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Although
the CIA was prohibited by its charter from domestic
activities, drug traffic was international in scope;
therefore, Liddy realized, it provided a unique liaison
between the intelligence community and the government.
In drafting various pieces
of legislation for the Treasury Department (including
sections of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970
and the Explosives Control Act of 1970) Liddy also had
considerable contact with congressional subcommittees.
Here again he found the drug issue a great potential
for power: though few individual congressmen fully understood
the medical issues involved in drug abuse, most understood
the potential political consequences for failing to
support measures directed against drug abuse. More important,
congressmen tended to see drug abuse as an issue that
didn't fall within the traditional lines of authority
of any single agency, and were therefore more willing
to consider "reorganization" measures to deal
with it.
Liddy's expertise in drug abuse
brought him into direct contact with the inner circle
of the White House. He especially impressed Egil Krogh
with his knowledge of the Leary case and his subsequent
plans for legally or illegally extraditing Leary from
Afghanistan, where he was then a fugitive. By 1971,
when Liddy was enforcement legislative counsel of the
Treasury Department, the White House had become progressively
interested in ways of bypassing the bureaucrats in the
various investigative agencies of the government, such
as the FBI, Customs Bureau, and CIA. G. Gordon Liddy
had developed a plan for using the war against heroin
as a cover for reorganizing various agencies of the
government, or at least for making them more effective.
Thus, with his "will to power," Liddy began
drawing up memoranda for the White House staff for the
creation of a unique special police unit attached, in
all but name, to the White House, with uncommon powers
to deal with drug abuse.
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