After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  In the California group, Simon Casady said to Warren Hinckle, executive editor of Ramparts, “I guess what they’re asking is to let them hold our wallet, and we might as well let them.”

  “Especially since there’s nothing in it,” Hinckle said.

  At the Third Party Caucus, rhetoric had lapsed into the style of another age. “We have preserved the unity of this convention,” a delegate of the Socialist Workers Party was saying, “to present an alternative to the American people.” “Hear! Hear!” the delegates replied.

  At that evening’s plenary, where the Black Caucus demand for half the convention’s vote was introduced, Communist Party and Du Bois Club members rose one after another to endorse “our black brothers’ ” position. What had happened, it turned out, was that while the white radicals were planning their local-organizing coup, and then settling for the California Compromise, the Communist Party and the Du Bois Clubs had temporarily, for whatever it might be worth to them, taken over the Black Caucus, and, through it, the entire convention—an achievement roughly comparable to embezzling a sieveful of smog. By inducing the Black Caucus to make the demand at all, the Communists had turned blacks against whites: if the white radicals voted for it, they lost their power over any further decisions of the New Politics (including the power to paralyze a third ticket); if against, they lost black cooperation. “Radicalized,” they voted for. (“Masochistic fascists,” the Reverend James Bevel, a black veteran of innumerable civil-rights campaigns, called them later on.) In the plenary, any black who walked up to a microphone to speak—even for the new demand—was approached by two tall young members of the Black Caucus and persuaded to sit down again. The demand was accepted, and a pink card representing half the convention’s votes was given to Carlos Russell, a poverty worker from Brooklyn, who was now the Black Caucus chairman.

  From this moment on, the Black Caucus showed itself to be more intelligent, more sensible, and more independent than any other group at the convention, and than the convention as a whole. To begin with, after a unity speech by Russell, the Black Caucus adjourned the plenary. Then, as white petitioners from the White Radical Caucus, the Third Ticket Caucus, the newly formed Israel Caucus, and even the pre-convention Resolutions Committee and the Progressive Labor Party cooled their heels in an anteroom, and delegates from SANE and Women Strike for Peace (who had either abstained or voted for) wandered about in the ranks of the “radicalized,” the Black Caucus—in a surge of good feeling—let any black in who cared to come. As a result, the Black Caucus may have had the first genuine discussion of the entire convention. When William Higgs, a white associate of the radical National Lawyers Guild, who was out in the corridor, cast about in his mind for the name of some black he might know inside the caucus, and finally succeeded in summoning one—a woman delegate from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—he failed to persuade her that a national third ticket would really help her much in Mississippi. (“I see what you mean, Bill,” she said when she came out into the hall, “but I can’t help thinking I need all the energy I got for the local issues.”) And Steve Newman, of the Progressive Labor Party, who now threw in his lot with the local organizers, and against the conservative, third-ticket-strategy Communists (since Maoists believe in revolution by non-electoral means), never got a chance to talk to anyone at all. By the time the plenary reconvened, at midnight, the Black Caucus had endorsed a proposal by the Communist Party’s Claude Lightfoot: local organizing, with a third-ticket decision to be deferred. But, in another surge of fellow-feeling, the spokesman for the Black Caucus—having heard the White Radical Caucus’s point of view through an intermediary, Ivanhoe Donaldson—phrased his proposal as though it were the California Compromise. No one protested. Everyone was baffled. And it passed.

  Monday morning, Arthur Waskow, of the Institute for Policy Studies and of the Steering Committee, tried to dissuade a woman from the Women’s Rights Caucus from introducing a proposal that women be granted fifty-one per cent of the vote at the plenary. “You’re not thinking politically,” he said. “It will sound like a joke. A parody. I think you’re completely insensitive to the politics of this convention.” The White Radical Caucus was in session once again. Eric Mann said he thought that they would have to reckon with the possibility that most of the money except the Communist Party money would now withdraw from the Conference but that there was no point in being too fussy about where money for local organizing was coming from. In the two half-black, half-white committees—one for organizing, one for the third ticket—that would be set up in that afternoon’s plenary, he went on, Scheer’s people could be counted on to see to it that the Communist Party did not run away with the third ticket. And the white half of the local organizers could be turned into a white SNCC.

  Then the plotting began again, in the intimate, nearly inaudible voices that are part of the white-radical mystique: “people already in motion,” “implement specific programs at the local level,” “relate,” “in that bag,” “where they’re at,” “doing their thing,” “power structure,” “coalesce with,” “crystal-clear,” “relevant,” “beautiful.” It seemed that some awful rhetorical cycle was coming to a close. A radical movement born out of a corruption of the vocabulary of civil rights—preempting the terms that belonged to a truly oppressed minority and applying them to the situation of some bored children committed to choosing what intellectual morsels they liked from the buffet of life at a middle-class educational institution in California—now luxuriated in the cool political vocabulary, while the urban civil-rights movement, having nearly abandoned its access to the power structure, thrashed about in local paroxysms of self-destruction. Both had become so simplistically opposed to order of any kind that society may become simplistic and repressive in dealing with them. There just may be no romance in moving forward at the pace that keeping two ideas in one’s head at the same time implies; at least, there have been no heroes of the radical center yet. But the New Politics, black and white, seems to have turned from a political or moral force into an incendiary spectacle, a sterile, mindless, violence-enamored form of play. In the final plenary, the Black Caucus, in addition to reversing its Israel resolution, managed to pass a few resolutions opposing Vietnam and the draft, and to appoint the two committees to recommend things for the New Politics—if there should be any—to do in the future.

  The New Yorker

  September 23, 1967

  Originally titled “Letter from Palmer House”

  G. GORDON LIDDY IN AMERICA

  “HIS EYES. They’re so cold,” one woman said to another, on the sidewalk outside a radio station in Portland, Oregon. “I’ve never seen such flat, cold eyes. He looks just like a reptile. A reptile.”

  When Frances Purcell Liddy heard, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, that Robert Conrad, an actor, might buy the screen rights to her husband’s autobiography, Will, she was pleased. She had seen Conrad on television, in A Man Called Sloan, and noticed what she called a twinkle in his eyes. She thought photographs somehow never managed to convey the twinkle in the eyes of her husband, G. Gordon Liddy.

  Liddy himself had overheard the comment of the lady in Oregon; he knew, as was evident from the lady’s tone, that she intended to express intense admiration. At the same time, since the comment was accompanied and followed by a hopeful glance at him, he thought politeness obliged him to reply. “I didn’t know what to say,” he said, regretfully, some moments later. “I just didn’t feel I could say thank you.” So he said nothing.

  Will, by G. Gordon Liddy, was published in late April by St. Martin’s Press. Time, in its issue of April 21, 1980 (cover story, “Is Capitalism Working?”), had run excerpts from the book, under the heading “Exclusive: Watergate Sphinx Finally Talks.” The excerpts contained five pieces of information which seemed to determine all subsequent coverage of the book, in reviews and by the press: that Liddy, as a small boy in the care of a German maid, had been impressed by prewar Nazi radio broadcasts and even, until
his father explained to him what Naziism was, inspired by them; that, as a fearful and neurasthenic child, and later, as a man, in times of stress, he had tested his courage by subjecting himself to physical ordeals, most disturbingly the holding of flames to his arms and hands; that, being less tall and less good at mathematics than he would have liked, he hoped to, and in fact did, marry a tall blond woman who was good at math, a choice which, he wrote, was influenced by considerations of his “gene pool”; that he had apparently been prepared, as a civil servant, if ordered to and for reasons of “national security,” to kill the columnist Jack Anderson; and that he had later been prepared, in prison and for reasons that seemed unclear even to him, to kill his fellow prisoner, former friend, and co-conspirator in the break-in at the Watergate, E. Howard Hunt.

  Beginning on the Monday of the week in which that issue of Time appeared, the switchboard at St. Martin’s Press was overwhelmed with local and long-distance requests for interviews. On Thursday, Liddy was scheduled to be interviewed on the morning news broadcasts of two networks—ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today. To talk with Liddy, ABC had invited “a member of our Good Morning America family,” Jack Anderson; for Today, NBC had invited E. Howard Hunt. Liddy and Anderson, who had never met, agreed to appear together. Hunt had accepted NBC’s invitation (a book of his own, a thriller, was about to be published); but both he and Liddy had, separately, insisted that they appear on separate segments of the program, that they not actually meet. Today’s producers hoped, all the same, to bring about a confrontation on the air.

  Within ABC, as it happened, there had already been an angry struggle over Liddy—between the network’s entertainment and its news executives. The news branch claimed that he was news and that, as news, he belonged on an early-evening news broadcast. Entertainment claimed him for the mixed format of a morning show. News lost this dispute, but before it was resolved, in the late hours of Tuesday night, ABC news had filmed an interview with Liddy, which was virtually sneaked onto the air at 11:30 P.M., on Wednesday night’s Nightline, several hours before Liddy’s scheduled Good Morning America debut. Since this scoop marked a little insurrection, Liddy’s name was not listed in newspaper advertisements for Wednesday’s Nightline. News listed him instead for 20/20, on Thursday, at 10:00 P.M. Viewers of ABC’s night news programs thus had two consecutive surprises. On Wednesday night, an unannounced appearance by G. Gordon Liddy. On Thursday night, the following cryptic announcement:

  This final note. The interview with G. Gordon Liddy scheduled for tonight on 20/20 was broadcast last night on Nightline.

  At 6:45 on Thursday morning, G. Gordon Liddy sat in the makeup room of the Good Morning America studios, on West Sixty-third Street in New York. He was dressed, as usual, in a dark suit and tie; and he was talking to the makeup people with a combination of formality, attentiveness, and good manners, which seemed always a little to disconcert people who met him for the first time. He had signed three copies of Will for members of the ABC crew. A newspaper reporter, one of several assigned to Liddy that first week, mentioned that a letter Liddy wrote in prison had recently been sold for $125. “In that case my wife is sitting on a fortune,” Liddy said. Outside in the hall, Jack Anderson could be heard. “I don’t have to shake hands with him, do I?” Anderson said; “I may have to restrain myself from punching him in the nose.” Some moments later, when they were introduced, Liddy and Anderson shook hands. They entered the lighted set at the front of a darkened studio. They took armchairs across from each other, on either side of the anchorman, David Hartman, who sat on an ample sofa, among plants, yellow walls, bookshelves, lamps, a coffee table. “It’s six fifty-four. Quiet, folks,” a voice said to the people scattered in the dark behind the cameras. “Forty-five seconds, folks. Fifteen seconds. Quiet. Shh.” A stillness. “Good morning,” Hartman said to his viewers across the country. “It’s seven o’clock.” He introduced G. Gordon Liddy, “the best-known of the Watergate conspirators.” He mentioned Liddy’s book, “In it, he reveals that he had plans to kill Jack Anderson.” Then he said, “Good morning, Jack. And good morning, Mr. Liddy.” The program, and G. Gordon Liddy’s eight-week tour of America, were under way.

  “Perhaps more than any of the Watergate characters,” Time had said, in an obviously bewildered introduction to its excerpts, “Liddy embodied the principles underlying the scandal that destroyed a President.” It seemed clear, however, not just from the excerpts but from Liddy’s conduct in all the years since Watergate, that whatever the “principles” underlying the scandal may have been, no Watergate character embodied them less. Ever since the first reports, in 1972, of the events that became known as Watergate—throughout the trials, the Ervin Committee hearings, the impeachment inquiry, the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the United States, the various prison terms, acquittals, memoirs, commutations—the conduct of G. Gordon Liddy, and his alone, had seemed in two respects remarkable. While other participants talked, in truths, or lies, or half-truths, Gordon Liddy kept his silence. And, in the midst of a political scandal never completely understood but obviously in important ways and on an unprecedented scale financial, Liddy shredded cash. The second fact was less widely remarked on than the first. Destruction of cash, from Natasha’s burning of rubles in The Brothers Karamazov to American millionaires’ lighting their cigars with dollars in the tabloids, has always been an imaginatively powerful idea. Amid bribes, hush money, “contributions” foreign and domestic, private and corporate, voluntary and extorted, open and secret, Liddy’s first instinct, when the break-in was discovered, had been not to take or to hide dollars but to destroy them. And far from eliciting money for his silence—in a story that consisted so largely of paid silences alternating with testimony designed to exonerate a speaker, implicate others, get a lenient sentence—Liddy was left, after fifty-two months in various prisons, with debts, for fines and legal fees, of more than $300,000. People thought him crazy, or sinister, or honorable, or even heroic; but Liddy was known primarily for his refusals, and in these he was alone.

  Silence and, apparently, indifference to money. Apart from that, in a country that was reading, and watching, tales of espionage, detection, mysteries, thrillers, Liddy was known to have been at least twice, on June 17, 1972, in Democratic headquarters at the Watergate; on September 3, 1971, at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, a conspirator, a burglar, and a sort of secret agent. Before that, he had been a lawyer, a candidate for Congress, a prosecutor in Dutchess County, for five years an agent of the FBI. He seemed to combine, then, in his person several characters in contemporary fiction: the criminal, the policeman, the district attorney, and the spy. In the Ellsberg break-in, moreover, Liddy was a government employee, acting in his official capacity, on the authority of high officials of the government. In the Watergate burglary, he was a private citizen, employed by politicians to act in knowing violation of existing law. Though the personnel and even the objectives of the two events may have been similar, their implications were vastly different. Liddy somehow managed, with these two acts, to pose successively a Nuremberg or Eichmann question (When is a man obliged, in conscience, to disobey what he believes to be a lawful governmental order?) and the key question of civil disobedience (When does a man have the right, in conscience, to defy certain laws within a legal system on whose basic protection he relies?). One is the problem of a functionary, in a government’s abuse of power; the other, almost on the contrary, the problem of a rebel. Both acts occur within a system which the actor regards as, on the whole, legitimate and benign. Both questions were, of course, formulated most precisely and in the greatest depth by Hannah Arendt. But never together—that is, as the predicament of a single spirit. And never, certainly, for a man like Liddy, who took, as Ms. Arendt pointed out a civil disobedient is obliged to take, the legal consequences of his own acts (those years in prison); who never did obey an order at variance with his conscience; and who never, so far as is known or likely, did or
caused physical harm to anyone at all. Finally, Liddy had, in his own way and almost incidentally, played out a drama of ex-radicals in the fifties, refusing not just to name names or to extricate himself at the expense of former associates but to invoke any constitutional protection for his reticence.

  Throughout the years, and until the publication of Will, there was, inevitably, an impression that Liddy’s silence must conceal some vital secret, some great fact or explanation to complete the story of events in which he played a part. “You have played a vitally important role in a major historical development,” Stewart Alsop wrote to Liddy, in July 1973, “and it seems to me that by now you owe it to yourself, and indeed to history, to say more about that role.” Will has many qualities, and contains several kinds of information: but one thing clear from it is that Liddy knew nothing quite so broad, even about Watergate. During most of the cover-up, he was in prison. Before that, if one can trust his account of what he knew, and, on the basis of evidence in and outside the book, it is almost impossible not to trust it, Liddy’s own pieces of Watergate information, though not unimportant, were few. Liddy knew that he had told Richard Kleindienst, the Attorney General of the United States, in considerable detail about the Watergate break-in, within hours of its occurrence. Kleindienst rebuffed him, and did nothing to further the investigation until April 1973, when John Dean’s testimony to federal prosecutors led to Kleindienst’s resignation—along with H.R. Haldeman’s, John Ehrlichman’s, and Dean’s. Liddy knew that Robert Mardian, former assistant attorney general for internal security, had taken charge, as early as June 20, 1972, of the initial phases of the cover-up. And he knew that Gordon Strachan, Haldeman’s chief assistant at the White House, had known about the break-ins at the Watergate. None of these three men went to prison. The statute of limitations has, in any event, run out on all Watergate offenses, one reason for Liddy’s having postponed till now the writing of his book. Kleindienst was never indicted for obstruction of justice. Mardian was indicted and convicted of conspiracy, but acquitted on appeal. Strachan, who like Kleindienst and Mardian persistently and indignantly proclaimed his innocence, was never convicted of anything and was particularly commended for his candor at the Ervin Committee hearings by the chairman, Sam Ervin.