After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  He approved, he said, of President Carter’s “resolve” in undertaking the Iranian desert rescue mission. He was not of course qualified to appraise its planning. He recognized its difficulty. “A helicopter,” he said, “was once defined as ten thousand nuts and bolts trying to fly off in the same direction.” At the same time, he worried about the “mind-set” of contingency plans for failure. For this audience, though, no mention of the wimp, the bad neighborhood, the wallet. First, the Founding Fathers. Now, Liddy spoke of the conquistadores, who had no contingency plans for failure. “They burned their ships behind them,” he said. “They didn’t start their mission ready to say abort, abort, abort.” He worried that the country, irresolute, was growing “weaker and weaker.” Then, he ended on a ringing, hortatory note, and took questions—of which there were very many. Toward the end, a tall black man got to his feet, and asked, “How do you see your own future?” Liddy said, “Well, let’s face it, I had my shot. And I missed.” Then, he told of a famous admiral, a man so abrasive that he fell into disfavor and obscurity, until World War I broke out and his country needed him. A correspondent had asked the admiral how he could account for his recall to a post of great importance. “When the shells start to fly,” the admiral replied, “they call on the sons of bitches.” Liddy paused a bit wistfully.

  The chairman of Smith-Greenland finally called the questions short, then made a few remarks about Liddy’s “forceful personality.” “As evidence,” he said, rather oddly, “he has five wonderful children.” Liddy said, “I was away during their formative years.” Several people gathered around him when he had finished speaking. Several others milled about, muttering to one another that he was “crazy” or “insane.”

  Some of his remarks this time about where America stood, however, had been so unremittingly bleak that I asked him, when we had left the breakfast, why he usually seemed, by temperament, so sanguine. “I see these problems recognized as problems by serious people in a position to do something about them,” he said. Then, he recalled that, after a lot of ineffectual bumbling, the country had pulled itself together for World War II. “Of course this time, the reaction time with missiles makes it unlike World War II. We have less time to protect ourselves from folly, and there is a steeper price. But I measure the price of failure against the great reward attendant to success.” He mentioned that we have, after all, a constitutional democracy. “Some might favor having a President answerable to Parliament,” he said. “And the White House press corps is a poor substitute.”

  In the car, a shiny new Mercedes, which had picked Liddy up at the Waldorf for the drive to lunch on Governor’s Island, the driver, a Coast Guard officer, described how eager and then how glad he had been to avoid service in Vietnam. “I didn’t wanna stop a bullet,” he said. “I didn’t even wanna slow one down.” On the drive downtown and during the fifteen-minute ferry ride, he and Liddy chatted amiably. The officer said his wife had just had a hysterectomy, but was feeling better. Liddy said he was glad she was feeling better. The ferry docked. “Guess you haven’t been here since the Korean conflict,” the officer said to Liddy. Then he took us on a quick tour of the island’s Coast Guard installations: its golf course; its housing; its view of the Statue of Liberty; its nursery school (the Hooligan Haven Day Care Center); its lot for the repair of damaged or rusting buoys. He parked in front of the Governor’s Island Officers Club. “Those who enter here,” said a sign in the hallway, “shall buy a round of cheer. Those who do not pay with verve, we shall refuse to serve.”

  During drinks on the terrace, Liddy was introduced to a lot of Coast Guard officers, several of whom asked him to sign copies of his book, and most of whom seemed to be drinking a quantity of Bloody Marys. At lunch, after all visitors, including Coast Guardsmen from other installations, had been introduced, and had acknowledged the introduction by rising slightly in their chairs, Liddy gave another stem-winder. There were no black Coast Guardsmen in the room, and only one Coast Guard woman. Someone at my table remarked that, last year, at the Coast Guard Academy in Groton, “the homecoming queen was a cadet.”

  Again, there were a lot of questions, most of them decidedly unmilitaristic. An early questioner referred to “your rather Spartan discipline, the Prisoner of Zenda-type stuff.” “Let me clear the record,” Liddy interrupted. “I have never done time in Zenda. Though I seem to have done time everywhere else.” “What level did you have reason to think approval or disapproval of your operations was bucked up to?” “At least to a level that had access to the Oval Office. But we had to leave the President in a position of plausible denial,” Liddy said. One questioner mentioned the anomalous appointment of General Alexander Haig to succeed H. R. Haldeman as chief of the White House staff. “Did you ever have reason to think we were in danger of a military takeover?” he asked. Liddy thought a moment. “Never,” he said. “Not the military, in their wildest fantasies, never. It’s just not in the institutional memory of the military, in this country, to think that way.”

  Someone asked how, if Liddy had received an order to kill an American civilian, he could ever have reconciled it with his conscience. Liddy said he recognized that any reasonable man might have a moral doubt about any order to kill. “It’s only, if you have these problems, get out of that line of work,” he said. General Gerard, a retired reserve officer in his middle eighties, got to his feet. “I wonder if this would be correct,” he said. “If someone, the President, were to call one of us and say, ‘Your country needs you to do something, above or outside the Constitution, to save your country,’ wouldn’t we do likewise? If you were called in such a situation, would you just say, ‘Forget it’?” Silence. Someone asked, “After they were caught, why didn’t everyone just say, ‘We did it,’ and get it over with? Is that simplistic?” Liddy said that, in Washington, cover-up at the highest level was an unvarying custom and an institutional reflex. “It’s all a cover-up, in Washington,” he said. “I mean, that’s what they do down there.” The questions continued for three hours.

  The next afternoon, Liddy taped his three interviews for the Dick Cavett Show. They began shortly after one o’clock. “Good evening,” Cavett said, as usual, at the beginning of the first half hour. The audience, which was aghast at almost every instant of the interview, seemed to find nothing at all odd in being greeted with “Good evening,” before two in the afternoon. They applauded dutifully, as studio audiences do applaud, when a sign reading “Applause” flashed. At the beginning of both of the next two half hours, Cavett would say, “Good evening. Tonight we’re continuing last night’s interview with Gordon Liddy.” The audience did not seem to find that peculiar, either. With something analogous, perhaps, to the press’ incapacity from time to time to formulate an issue, the studio audience, while it must have been perfectly aware that three nights could hardly have passed, literally, in a single afternoon, seemed unable to discern what was literal in the rather grotesque conversation before them, and what was not. Or perhaps they did know, exactly, and the gasps themselves were not to be taken literally. Or perhaps, again, they had suspended their disbelief so far, that three nights did pass for them early one afternoon.

  Later, in a cab on the way to Chelsea, I asked Liddy how negotiations were going for the purchase of the house on the Potomac. He said he had reason to hope that their offer would be accepted. He was not sure. Moreover, as a result of a cutback by the District of Columbia Board of Education, Frances Liddy had received notice that she had lost her teaching job. For the moment, apart from his book, the Liddys had no income. We were on our way to a tavern on Nineteenth Street for Liddy’s first conversation with Eric Norden, a writer who wanted to do an interview with him for Playboy. Norden had told him that Playboy interviews were done with tape recorders. Liddy, not surprisingly, had bought a tape recorder of his own. At the tavern, the bartender greeted Liddy with particular affection. A zealous supporter of the IRA, he had done time with Liddy, for smuggling and unauthorized possession of firearms.<
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  In July, Liddy was inducted, as an Honorary Member, into the Honor Legion of the Police Department of New York. “Composed of members of the police force of the City of New York, comprising all ranks, who, during the last sixty-eight years, have received departmental recognition . . . for deeds of valor performed at imminent risk of life, or who have been recommended for meritorious acts . . . . It holds in one great bond of comradeship the honored men of the department, the bravest of the brave. It recognizes no rank. It is a force within a force, a tower of strength to combat evil, an inspiration from within, a beacon of hope for the weak, a haven for good . . . . Its tenets: self-respect, courage, loyalty, and devotion to duty.” He had also become a member of the Association of Platform Speakers, which would book him for speeches all over the country, for a fee. The fees would be particularly welcome. Although Frances, as abruptly as she had been notified that she had lost her teaching job, had received notice that she was rehired, the Liddys had calculated that, with Sandy, Grace, and Jim at college, and Raymond and Tom in private schools, the cost of the children’s education alone for next year would be $31,000. Liddy had completed his interviews with Playboy. And he had accepted an invitation to speak, on August 22, to the annual convention of the Association of Independent Truckers of America, in Colorado Springs.

  Gordon and Frances Liddy arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport for their flight to Denver, just as the airborne mobile lounge for passengers was leaving the main building for the plane. Liddy told me that, last week, while Raymond was driving the Cadillac, which by now had 200,000 miles on it, “the steering went.” “And,” Liddy continued, “the fourth gear of the Volvo is no more.” The bid on the Alan Drury house had been accepted. The Liddys were now trying to sell their house in Oxon Hill. Frances said that the reason they had been so nearly late for the flight, however, was that she had left at the last possible moment from her zoo course. Zoo course? As soon as she was reinstated as a teacher, she had enrolled, at the Washington Zoo, in a cram workshop for twelve teachers “in teaching children how to appreciate the zoo.” She was pleased that zoos weren’t just zoos anymore, but were actively breeding endangered species and educating children. “It’s good for the kids, of course. And it’s good for me, working with people who are so enthralled.” She spoke of how glad she was to have been rehired, after “the shock of being rifted.” Rifted? “Reduction in force,” she said. “When you’re suddenly rifted, after ten years, you go through a lot of feelings. You’ve got to be dedicated to have stayed with it that long. Special programs for the difficult kids are virtually nonexistent. So you have to make a choice. Either I’m going to go crazy, or I’ll stay because I really like to teach. There are always one or two kids each year that you know you’ve helped, two out of twenty-five you really feel you save. About half of them are going to make it anyway. Only two or three are going to go down the drain. And you don’t need to put those down a well. They just need special education programs. Now everybody wants to save birds and fishes. Much as I love birds and fishes, they are not our most important natural resource.” I asked about her cats. There had not been a calico male, but the local veterinarian had a list of people wanting kittens from each litter. “It’s fun to have births,” Frances Liddy said. Jim, the Liddy’s third child, had been born in Denver, nineteen years ago, when Liddy was with the Denver office of the FBI. Frances had not been back since. “In the FBI, you get restationed so often,” she said, “but with seniority, you get a choice. And for a lot of agents, Denver is the office of preference. For their last years.” The Liddys were going to stay on a few days, after the truckers convention, “to see Colorado people that we knew.” “It says a lot about the kind of people they are,” she said, “that we would be friends after those nineteen years.”

  At the Denver airport, we were met by a policeman, a policewoman, and Bill Scheffer, vice president of Overdrive—an organization which, in addition to sponsoring annual conventions, publishes a magazine, runs a pension fund, gives legal assistance, lobbies in Washington, and performs other services for the Association of Independent Truckers of America. The Independent Truckers, who own and drive their own trucks, are not only distinct from the Teamsters—the Teamsters have tried for years, through legislation and by other, often violent, means to put them out of business. In fact, a combination of political and business interests has made it highly unlikely that Independents, many of whom are husband-and-wife teams, driving a single rig, will manage to survive. Like all drivers, they are particularly vulnerable to rising fuel costs. Like all truckers, they resent the “double nickel,” the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, which of course costs them driving time—and, Scheffer claims, in spite of government pronouncements to the contrary, fuel. Owing to regulations by the Interstate Commerce Commission, however, and pressures by the Teamsters, and the response of politicians to those pressures, the Independents are subject to special rules, and special costs and taxes. They are obliged by law, for instance, to pay 27 percent of the proceeds from most interstate hauls to interstate carriers which are already licensed by the ICC. Independents are unable to obtain such licenses. The so-called trucking deregulation bill, The Motor Carriers Act of 1980, which had just passed Congress, was designed to eliminate such inequities and abuses. Under election-year pressure from the Teamsters, Scheffer said, as he drove the Liddys and me from Denver to Colorado Springs, the Trucking Deregulation Act had become “just a cosmetic piece of nothing.”

  Earlier this year, when the Independents succeeded for a time in a protest, a truck blockade of Washington, some Teamsters tried to break it. A few Independents shot at them that time. Scheffer, who had come to Colorado from Washington, where he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, said the Independents were planning another such boycott for October 20. “Congress only reacts to a crisis,” he said. “So sometimes you have to create one.” He mentioned that, in addition to Liddy, the speakers at this convention were Congressman Philip Crane, who had run for the Republican nomination for President, and who was one of five candidates said to have been considered by Ronald Reagan for his running mate, and Congressman John Rousselot of California, one of the most powerful and respected House conservatives.

  Liddy inquired about the make of car we were in. Scheffer, with mild disgust, said it was “one of the most underpowered cars Ford ever made.” Liddy looked at the rather many dials on the dashboard, which resembled an instrument panel in a cockpit. Scheffer pointed to one which read Miles to Destination. “I don’t know how it can indicate that,” he said, reflectively, “since it doesn’t know what our destination is.” Then, he told us what we might have guessed, that this was not his car. He drove very fast and well. He spoke of Overdrive’s part in the three years of litigation which finally got rid of the kind of speed traps by which Justices of the Peace in small towns used to augment their incomes. “Three years,” he said, “to get that overturned.” Then he spoke of the present administration’s Department of Transportation, and its head, Joan Claybrook, who was once an assistant to Ralph Nader. “Joan Claybrook is against everything on wheels,” he said. “And Carter is probably the most antitrucking President we’ve ever had.” He mentioned a relatively minor matter, a new regulation by which the DOT was trying to force all truckers to change their rearview mirrors. “Such a goofy thing,” he said, “but a huge financial burden for our industry.” He pointed, silently but with obvious disapproval, to a state police car, blue lights flashing, and a trooper giving a summons for speeding to a driver at the side of an oncoming lane.

  The highway we were on was broad and uncrowded, four lanes separated by a wide green divider. Scheffer slowed down, just perceptibly, and eased from the left lane into the right. He did not point or even seem to look this time at a police car lurking beside our own lane. “There are a lot of good radar detectors you can buy now, on the market,” he said. Then, with considerable satisfaction, he described court cases and public exhibitions in
which he (Scheffer was once an engineer and later trained by the army as a radar specialist) and other representatives of the Independent Truckers Association had demonstrated the ineffectiveness of police radar in detecting speeders. “A trooper was going on about how effective and reliable it is, blah, blah, blah. Then we gave our demonstration. They were embarrassed. The L.A. Times caught a picture of a trooper, furious, beating on his dashboard. They used our caption: State Trooper Makes a Minor Adjustment to His Radar,” Scheffer said.