After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  The next morning, Liddy left his hotel to shop for suspenders. On account of his tooth, he had by now not eaten solid food in nearly a week. He could not further tighten his belt. A woman walked up to him and said, perfectly amiably, “Death to the CIA.” As he walked, with a newspaperman, outside the Commodities Exchange, a man, who identified himself as a commodities broker, shook Liddy’s hand and said he admired him. “You’re in a riskier business than mine ever was,” Liddy said. Suddenly, in a corridor, a young man emerged from an office and greeted Liddy with considerable affection. It was Dwight Chapin, the former White House appointments secretary, who went to prison for a Watergate-related felony. He is now editor of something called Success Magazine, which is published by the biggest public contributor to the Nixon campaign, R. Clement Stone. Stone had hoped to be ambassador to London. So had another large contributor, Russell Firestone. According to Ervin Committee records, Firestone had written to Chapin, after a meeting with President Nixon, “Thank you for permitting me to bask in the radiance of his presence.” Neither man became ambassador to London.

  Liddy’s stay in Los Angeles coincided with a Southern California balloon race. Steve Harvey, a young reporter who had for several days been covering the balloon race for the Los Angeles Times, was assigned for a day to cover Gordon Liddy. “I do off-beat features,” Harvey said, with a little shrug. At eight o’clock in the morning, Liddy and the young reporter set off from Liddy’s hotel, L’Ermitage, by limousine for an interview on the Mikael Jackson radio show. “I thought you’d be out there with the balloons,” Jackson said, when Liddy introduced him to Steve Harvey. “I had to interrupt the balloons,” Harvey said. They entered the studio, a small gray room, with a dartboard whose target was a large photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini, and with various signs (a picture of a cymbal, for instance, captioned “status cymbal”) and other objets strewn about. On Jackson’s desk, beside his microphone, was a book, How to Live With Your Teenager. The news was coming through a speaker: “Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has resigned . . . with a ‘heavy heart’ . . . says he will support the President on other issues.” A voice said, through the intercom, “I have that Vance resignation, if you want it on tape.” “Thanks,” Jackson said. “I’ve got it live.” Then, he turned to Liddy. “Welcome back,” he said. “Is it cold out there? Is it raining?” No. “So my forecast here is entirely wrong.” A red light flashed, airtime.

  “This is really gonna be a wildly busy morning,” Jackson said, in English-accented (he was born in England), staccato American slang. “We’ll have Dick Gregory calling in, from his fifteenth day of fasting in Teheran. Jack Nelson, calling in from Washington. Also, coming up, our food critic, Elma Dells.” Then, his interview with Liddy: “You were dangerous, brave. To what end?”; “Are they all childish games?”; “Was it all worth it? Did it serve any purpose?”; “This is better written than the first book”; “How do you feel about Carter now?” During a break, Jackson sang along with a commercial for Gallo Salami. “Is it going all right?” Liddy asked. “A little tight,” Jackson said. “We don’t have the rapport we had last time.”

  On the air again, in reply to a question about Secretary Vance, Liddy was saying, “He’s a lawyer.” “Liar?” Jackson asked. “Lawyer,” Liddy said. They discussed the failed mission in the Iranian desert. Liddy compared it to Dieppe, and other early failures of World War II. “What matters in life, sir?” Jackson asked, abruptly. “Doing one’s very best,” Liddy said, then recalled Winston Churchill’s advice to a class at Eton, “Never give up. Never. Never. Never. Never.” “I can see the mail now,” Jackson said, drumming his fingers on the desk during another break. “How come you didn’t attack G. Gordon Liddy?”

  On the air, more conversation. Many listener phone calls. Several hostile callers, attempting to spring their angry remarks after some innocuous opening sentences, gave their views away with the sarcastic tone of the first syllable. “He’s not much better than other people in government,” one caller said, after a fairly long and abstract meditation. “He’s nothing but a pansy.” Liddy called this a “declarative statement,” and asked, “What is your question?” “You could never have this on the BBC,” Jackson said during the next commercial break.

  In Liddy’s hotel room, the interviewer for Los Angeles NewsCenter 4 looked at Steve Harvey, and at me, with some suspicion. “You fancy yourself a hero,” she said to Liddy. “But a lot of people went to jail because you remained silent. What would you say to them, Mr. Liddy?” “Who?” Liddy said, genuinely bewildered. The interviewer changed the subject. What did Liddy think of ABSCAM? He said that, as a lawyer, he sensed entrapment in it. “What would you say to the many people who regard themselves as being had by Richard Nixon?” the interviewer asked. “Who?” Liddy said again. “Many people regard you as a morally bankrupt man,” she began again. Silence. “Do you see yourself as a morally bankrupt man?” “No,” he said. “I do not.” Whom did he support for President. Liddy declined to answer. “I might get myself into a position of a gratuitous endorsement, and that would be harmful to the candidate,” he said. “Come now, Mr. Liddy, isn’t that a cop-out?” she said. “When you’re peddling your book, when you’re doing a TV interview to sell your book, in effect don’t you think it’s a cop-out not to react?” “I have just reacted,” Liddy said. “I understand that I have not reacted in the way you want me to. I’m sorry.” “In all honesty, Mr. Liddy, why should anyone buy a book by a criminal?” Liddy gave his O’Henry, Villon, Defoe answer. The interviewer asked what he thought of “the world situation in the next few months.” He said it looked grim. War? “Not in the next few months, but sooner rather than later.” What kind of war? “War over natural resources in the Middle East.” The interviewer asked the cameraman to stop the camera.

  Liddy and the interviewer talked about military preparedness for a while. Liddy spoke of the bad neighborhood, the fat wallet, and the wimp. The interviewer at once asked that the camera be turned on again. “Mr. Liddy,” she said then, “do you think Cy Vance is a wimp?” “No,” he said. “I think Cyrus Vance did the honorable thing. When you disagree with a policy, you resign over it. A time came when he could not publicly support the President, he resigned.” “Is it more fun writing a book than conducting spy missions?” she asked. “It’s not fun at all,” Liddy said. “Both are hard work.” The interviewer asked, “Mr. Liddy, if Richard Nixon were still President, would the hostages still be in Teheran?” Liddy gave his “The Shah would still be in Teheran” reply. “Do you think the country’s attitudes are changing more in line with the Liddy view of how things should be done?” “I hope so,” he said. The interviewer gave up.

  As she and the cameraman were leaving, the cameraman turned to Liddy. “I have to agree with you,” he said. A friend of his, a reserve officer, had made a trip to inspect a military base, and had told the cameraman, “The equipment out there is all junk.” “The skies are black,” Liddy said, shaking his head, “with chickens coming home to roost.” The interviewer later called both Steve Harvey and me, to ask what sort of pieces we were doing. (“We’re keeping them honest,” Harvey said to me.) NewsCenter 4 that night simply reported that the book was out. Of the interview, there were just the lines about Nixon and the Shah.

  At noon on the first Friday in May, Gordon and Frances Liddy were due on the playing fields of the St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., where this year’s Track & Field Meet of the District of Columbia Special Olympics was being held. The Special Olympics, which have occurred annually all over the country since 1968, consist of sports events for retarded or otherwise damaged children. At 10 A.M., Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was one of the most enthusiastic founders of the national program, had administered the Special Olympics Oath. A runner had lighted a special torch. Races and games had begun all over the field. Gordon Liddy was to be one of the honorary judges or, more precisely, awarders of ribbons. The events are so organized that as many children as possible will receive ribbons of some
sort. The three top competitors in each of many simultaneous and successive events are encouraged to climb on pedestals in front of a reviewing stand, where an announcer calls out their names through a microphone. Judges, with handfuls of first-, second-, and third-prize ribbons, stand in front of the pedestals. The children naturally are of various heights and ages. Not all of them understand what the ribbons are for or that, given the height of the pedestals and the height of the judges, taller children must lean downward to have ribbons pinned on their T-shirts. Three judges, one of whom was an army colonel, were pinning ribbons somewhere on the clothing of a very rapid succession of winning children. Since the work of pinning and congratulating is a strenuous and not unathletic business, the adults worked in shifts. Liddy’s shift was in the afternoon.

  At one end of the field, at the finish line of one of the longer racetracks, Tom Liddy, wearing his army pants, sneakers, and a sports shirt, stood, with six other boys from St. Albans. Each was carrying a stopwatch and holding on to a section of an often-torn and re-knotted colored string, which served as the finishing tape. “Who’s got the guy with the green pants and white shirt?” Tom asked, as children lined up in their lanes at the starting line for the beginning of one race. “I’ve got the tall guy in blue,” one of his classmates said. “Let’s do it by numbers,” another boy said. They were each timing, and otherwise watching out for, a child in a single lane. The children had numbers pinned to the front of their shirts. A card, with name, age, and school, was pinned to the back. The timers decided to keep track by numbers. “Remember, if someone comes barrelin’ down and doesn’t want to stop at the finish line,” one of the older boys said, “let ’em come. Sometimes they don’t like to stop.”

  “ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” Tom bellowed, in the hearty way of athletes on playing fields and basketball courts. Then, as the race began, “Way to go. Way to go. Way to go.” An extraordinary number of people seemed to be cheering each child and then hugging each child as the races finished. It turned out that adults and St. Albans students in charge of the meet had been divided into timers, huggers, and runners. The runners accompanied each child, after every race, back to an area near the reviewing stand where there was the group from his own school. In every race at Tom’s track, there were stragglers, children who walked all the way, or turned back, or simply stopped running. The seven boys at the finish line would cheer, beckon, wave, smile, and advance slightly toward those children, until the last child had reached the finishing tape, and been given his hug. “Congratulations. Boy! You really moved. You flew,” the timers would say. “Is that all right? You pleased? Hey, c’mere, I’ve gotta get your name and everything.” Timers would read the child’s name on the back of his shirt and record the time. A hug. For the most part, the children hugged back, or slapped hands, or simply grinned. Some of the larger children came along the track with such force and speed that the seven holders of stopwatches would have to step back a bit, to avoid being bowled over. The finishing tape kept advancing toward small stragglers, retreating before large, pounding racers. “Watson, do you have a class?” a girl student asked one of the timers. He said he did. She took his place.

  Gordon and Frances Liddy arrived at the reviewing stand. A student immediately introduced herself to him and set him to awarding ribbons. Frances walked around the field toward where Tom was. She had wanted to talk to him about his grades, but, seeing how busy he was (all the timers, huggers, and runners, by this time, looked as though they had taken part in an athletic marathon themselves), she decided to raise the matter by letter instead. “In first place, Roulette Taylor!” a girl student’s voice shouted, with hoarse enthusiasm, over the loudspeaker; all the announcers’ voices were starting to go. “It’s very good for our kids, very important to them,” a St. Albans mother said to me. “It exposes them to a serious, important part of reality.” “I’m standing all by myself,” a very little girl said, standing next to her. “I’m all by myself. I’m all alone.” “Why, I’m all alone, too,” the St. Albans mother said at once, and lifted her up to watch a race.

  During a break, Eunice Shriver and Gordon Liddy had a brief conversation. A member of the student organizing committee told Frances that Tom would be in charge of the Special Olympics next year. Somebody was in a bulldog costume (Frances had for years been in charge of the washing of it), and she thought for a moment it was her son. “I almost hugged it,” she said, “but then I saw the legs were too thin.” The races began again. Tom was by now lifting up every child that came near him at the finish line. So was Ronald Brown, a black student and national champion in the 100 meters, who had been admitted to St. Albans under the same program as Tom Liddy. Music came over a loudspeaker. A white child, with a number on his T-shirt, stood in front of it, rapt in a kind of ritual dance. Only first-prize ribbons were left; most children in the final races got first-prize ribbons. “I’ve been sort of encouraging people along,” a girl student said, happily, to the Liddys as they were leaving, “and I’m just dead.”

  After being stranded in Kansas City by an Ozark Airlines strike, Liddy arrived one night in St. Louis, at the Marriott Hotel. He had been looking forward to his stay there, he said, because of the hotel chain’s “Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow ads.” “Is this your first experience with Marriott?” he said they asked him at the desk. He said it was. “Everybody’s saying ‘Hi,’ as in the ads,” he said, in telling the story the next morning. “All I’m asking for is shelter, and everybody’s saying ‘Hi.’ They call a boy named Charlie to the desk, and say, ‘Mr. Liddy, this is Charlie.’ Charlie says. ‘Hi.’ We take an elevator, and walk down a hall. Charlie throws open a door, and says, ‘Mr. Liddy, your room!’ Evidently, it isn’t. There’s a man in the bed. There’s an airline captain’s jacket hanging over a chair. Your first Marriott experience. Off Charlie runs. Only one elevator works, so there is a wait. I’m there, outside the room, standing on one foot and then the other. Alone with the baggage cart. Two women walk by. One says, ‘I think that’s Gordon Liddy.’ The other says, ‘I don’t think he’s got a room.’ Charlie comes back. We go to another room, on another floor. He throws open the door. ‘Mr. Liddy, your room!’ A man sleeping in the bed. Another pilot’s jacket. Even the rank is the same. You know, this is my first Marriott. It’s after midnight. Finally, I get a room.

  “When I’m in bed, I start to hear this little sirenlike whistle, in the air-conditioning. I think, I’ll endure this because Bill Arript [of Marriott] was so good to Sally Harmony.” (Ms. Harmony, who was Liddy’s secretary at the time of Watergate, is unforgettable to viewers of the Ervin Committee hearings, for at least one line: Asked whether, when she was typing from photocopies with the outline of gloved fingers at their edges, she had not guessed that the work in progress was clandestine, Ms. Harmony replied, “I knew it was clandestine. But to me, Senator, clandestine does not mean illegal. And I can keep a secret.” Later, Marriott gave Ms. Harmony a job.) “But I just can’t sleep. So I call downstairs. Up comes this maintenance fellow. He checks. Then he says, ‘It’s the air conditioner. There’s dirt in the cones. Sometimes, even when you turn them off, there will be this little whistle.’ I said, ‘I’m sure your analysis is correct. But can you fix it?’ He said, ‘Not before tomorrow.’ ”

  At the airport in Minneapolis-St. Paul, there was again no limousine—or rather, there was a mysterious locked and empty limousine. No driver. Liddy took a cab to his hotel. On the flight to Detroit, Republic Airlines lost Liddy’s luggage. A day later, they found it. An interviewer for the Detroit Free Press said to Liddy, “You are remembered as a second-rate burglar. How would you prefer to be remembered?” Liddy said, “More favorably.” When the interview was over, Liddy said, “I think that fellow believed we were having a tough-guy contest in there.”

  Back in New York for a brief visit, which included three appearances (a breakfast meeting of advertisers and businessmen, organized by the Smith-Greenland Agency; an address at lunch to the Coast Guard Officers
Club on Governor’s Island; and an afternoon taping of the three interviews with Dick Cavett), Liddy stood on a sidewalk, waiting for a taxi. Finding none, he looked repeatedly at his watch. An off-duty cab drew up. “I disagree with your views, but I like you. Get in,” the driver said. Liddy got in. The driver said he was already late. He was going to pick up his wife, in Queens. Then, describing himself as “a moderate Jewish liberal,” he began a long disquisition about himself, his background, his politics, his wife, Queens. At an intersection, he saw a man with a briefcase, trying to hail a cab. “Where are you going? LaGuardia?” he shouted. The man said, “LaGuardia Airport.” “I’d like to help this other fellow out,” the driver said, remarking that LaGuardia was near enough to Queens. Then, having introduced Liddy to the passenger, he resumed his discourse, about politics, his wife, Queens, the quality of city life, Mayor Koch. At a red light he turned, with an interrogatory inflection, to his new passenger for agreement. “Am I right? Or am I right?” “Well,” the man said, “I’m from Ohio.”

  During the cab ride Liddy told me that he and Frances had begun a negotiation, which he hoped would be successful. They had put in a bid for a house, on the Potomac, which had originally been built for Alan Drury, author of, among other Washington novels, Advise and Consent. They expected to have an answer within the week.

  At the businessmen’s breakfast, Liddy stood for a moment in silence at the microphone. Then, rather loudly and startlingly, he said, “Boo!” His audience laughed, a bit uncertainly. Previous speakers at these breakfasts had included Harrison Salisbury, Arthur Ashe, Theodore Kheel, Mayor Koch, Pete Rozelle, Martha Graham, George Gallup, William Safire, Jack Valenti. (“We were going to have Princess Ashraf last month,” a man told me, as he was putting on his name tag, “but the idea was shot down.”) The Smith-Greenland Agency had somehow created the impression, within St. Martin’s Press and also with Liddy, that audiences for these breakfasts were limited to members of the Fortune 500 (although actually the guests were mainly advertising people). After his “Boo!” and with a few other equivocal jokes and interjections, Liddy addressed what he had been led to believe were “movers and shakers” with a long, impassioned stem-winder about American politics, foreign policy, and morale. The Founding Fathers, he said, had been wise but tough men, and the world was still and would be a tough place, always. “It is that way, and it’s been that way since the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.” He was worried, he said, about the country’s “post-Vietnam War abhorrence of battle.” Not that he believed in battle, except when there was no other choice, but he believed in preparedness for it. He was concerned, he said, when a great democratic country chose to rely on an all-voluntary, and underpaid, professional army. Among peaceful nations with armed, trained citizenry, he mentioned Switzerland, then said, “I think Universal Military Training is the fairest way to go.”