Playboy Interview: G. Gordon Liddy

The press had been gathering since three A.M., and by eight A.M., there were over 100 reporters, photographers and television cameramen camped on the steps of Connecticut's Danbury Federal Prison. When the door finally opened and a slim, wiry man with thinning black hair and a bristling mustache slipped out, he was almost swallowed up in the swirling, shouting crowd. As newsmen jostled one another for position, the newly released inmate embraced his attractive auburn-haired wife and stowed his prison gear in the trunk of their son's 1971 Ford Pinto. "How does it feel to be out of jail?" one TV newsman called over the din. The object of their attention snapped, "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker." There were blank stares from the crowd until a reporter who knew German translated: " 'What doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger.' It's from Nietzsche." The Pinto pulled out of the prison driveway, hotly pursued by five Ford Granada press cars, and a screeching 70-mile-an-hour chase ensued until the driver of the lead car finally shook off his pursuers after a series of nerve-shattering maneuvers that left his wife collapsed in tears in the front seat. "God," she snuffled finally. "After all these years, you haven't changed at all." She sighed, "I don't suppose you ever will."

Her husband smiled fondly at her. "Bet your ass, kid!"

It was September 7, 1977, and G. Gordon Liddy had just been released on parole after serving 52 months of a 20-year prison sentence for having masterminded the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington's Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

George Gordon Battle Liddy was born on November 30, 1930, in Hoboken, New Jersey. It was the Depression, but the Liddy family was well off, and there was always a maid in attendance. His father was an internationally respected lawyer. Gordon attended parochial and prep schools (where his I.Q. was measured at 137 to 142, in the genius range) and graduated from Fordham University, subsequently taking an R.O.T.C. commission during the Korean War. Much to his regret, he was not sent overseas with his fellow artillery officers, due to a ruptured appendix, and instead served out his time at an antiaircraft installation in Brooklyn. After the Army, Liddy graduated from Fordham Law School, winning election to the prestigious Law Review, and in November 1957, he married Frances Purcell. (They have five children, three boys and two girls.) Liddy joined the FBI in 1957, serving as a field agent and bureau supervisor until September 1962, when he resigned for financial reasons. He then worked at his father's prosperous Wall Street law firm until l966, when he accepted a post as assistant district attorney in Poughkeepsie, New York (in Dutchess County, which Liddy describes as "somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater").

Liddy quickly won considerable local attention for his unorthodox trial techniques, including discharging a gun into the ceiling of the courtroom during a dramatic plea to the jury. He became a local celebrity when he led a raid on the Millbrook, New York, headquarters of Dr. Timothy Leary, the psychedelic guru and LSD proselytizer.

In 1968, Liddy contested the Republican Congressional nomination in the 28th District, running on the campaign slogan, "Gordon Liddy doesn't bail them out; he puts them in." He lost narrowly (51 to 49 percent) to a moderate, Hamilton Fish, but won the admiration of local G.O.P. leaders. With the support of his sponsors, close friends of the new Attorney General, John Mitchell, Liddy was rewarded after the elections with a job as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury with special responsibility for narcotic and firearms control. He was forced out of the Treasury Department in 1971 after a speech against gun control before the National Rifle Association. But he was subsequently attached to the White House, where he organized a special counterintelligence squad that ultimately gained notoriety as the White House Plumbers' Unit. In December 1971, he moved from the White House to the Committee to Re-elect the President, which he served as counsel until the aftermath of the Watergate break-in, where five of his operatives were arrested, including CREEP's security director, James McCord. Liddy was subsequently charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of burglary, two of intercepting wire communications and one of intercepting oral communications. He refused to testify against his associates and Judge John Sirica imposed the stiffest sentence on him of any of the Watergate coconspirators: 20 years in prison and a $40,000 fine. President Carter commuted the sentence in mid-1977 and Liddy was freed on parole shortly afterward.

In 1979, Liddy published a novel, "Out of Control," a spy thriller that received decidedly mixed reviews. But when his autobiography, "Will," was published under conditions of strict secrecy and quickly climbed best-seller lists across the country, the reviews seemed to polarize even more sharply. Clarus Backes, book editor of The Sunday Denver Post, wrote with evident surprise, "Fully prepared to hate it, I carried the book home with me one evening and found myself completely enthralled.... It is one of the most engrossing and thoroughly honest self-revelations that I have ever read." Bob Woodward wrote in The Washington Post, "There is almost an embarrassment of riches in the book.... A hundred little facts and inferences convince me that he has been as honest as he could be." But literary hatchets were also being sharpened for Liddy. In the New Republic, Alan M. Dershowitz, while conceding that "Liddy is an excellent writer and a fascinating character," nevertheless condemned the book as "the 'Mein Kampf' of a failed Führer," while Christopher Osborne, writing in New Hampshire's Leisure, waxed practically apoplectic: "Liddy is a very sick man. His autobiography...makes no attempt to vindicate his sordid and despicable life. On the contrary, it seems to revel in calm disclosure of his insanity.... His time was in Germany during the Thirties and Forties."

To determine what had ignited this latest storm of national controversy over G. Gordon Liddy, Playboy sent novelist Eric Norden to interview him. Norden, who had spent considerable time with other Watergate figures such as James McCord (and whose previous interview credits include director Stanley Kubrick in September 1968 and former Nazi Albert Speer in June 1971), reports:

"The first thing that struck me about Liddy was his sense of humor. It was a discordant note in the image I had built of him as a steely-eyed fanatic, and it was to permeate a great deal of the interview. It's hard to believe that someone who jokes with you over the pom-ponettes de truffe surprise at New York's fashionable La Côte Basque, where we met for an initial exploratory lunch, could calmly blow you away over the soufflé and cognac. Liddy also was smaller than I'd expected, though obviously in excellent physical shape, as befits someone who does 100 push-ups every morning. We had a pleasant lunch, and as we parted, I had difficulty remembering I was in the presence of someone who had been described by Theodore White as 'a thoroughly dangerous man'--and dubbed by the press as 'the Darth Vader of the Nixon Administration' and, appropriately enough, 'The Sphinx.' But Liddy was talking now, and volubly.

"We spent the better part of ten days together, with tape sessions sandwiched between his nationwide speaking tour, and I soon found that taking the lid off Liddy was easier said than done. His genuine affability masks an inner core of reserve; but coupled with that reticence and reserve is also an almost painstaking honesty about himself and his character, reflected in his willingness to bare the excruciating details of his childhood struggle against a crippling tide of fears. Liddy wants to be understood, but he's too damned proud to ask for sympathy. He is an intelligent, complex man, far more likable now that his hands are no longer clutching the levers of power.

"Throughout the interview, I made an attempt to focus on what made Liddy tick rather than recycle the details of Watergate, which he deals with exhaustively in the book, and to probe only those aspects of the scandal that pertain to his own character. I began the interview by asking him why he had finally decided to tell his story."

[Q] Playboy: Throughout your trial and nearly five years' imprisonment, you maintained a stoical, name-rank-and-serial-number silence, and on your rare interviews after release, expressed contempt for your Watergate coconspirators who published books on the subject, vowing never to follow in their foot-steps. Why did you change your mind?

[A] Liddy: There were a number of reasons, both personal and legal. As early as July 1973, the late columnist Stewart Alsop wrote me a letter arguing very persuasively that I should tell my story because, in his words, "I had a debt to history." Alsop was a fine writer whom I regarded highly both for his war record--he was an outstanding veteran of the OSS--and because he had terminal cancer and was confronting his pain and imminent death with great bravery. I took the position then that he was probably right about my debt to history, but it wasn't a demand note due today. You've got to remember that at that time, our containment strategy, what the press dubbed "stonewalling," was unraveling pretty rapidly but still hadn't totally collapsed, and I continued to nourish the hope that the President could be insulated from the scandal. If that had happened, of course, I never would have written the book.

[Q] Playboy: But Nixon was forced out of office in 1974. Why did you wait until 1980 to publish your book?

[A] Liddy: Well, that pertains to the legal aspects. I had to wait until the statutes of limitations had expired before I could tell the full story without endangering the liberty of any of my former colleagues.

[Q] Playboy: And your own?

[A] Liddy: Yes, and my own as well. To take just one example, I reveal in the book how I wire-tapped the authorities at Danbury Prison while I was there as a guest of the Federal Government. Needless to say, I felt completely justified in that action, but it would be imprudent, to say the least, to publish it while the offense was still indictable. I never put myself in harm's way needlessly. But my primary concern was not to implicate anyone else, because I do not, as you may suspect, have a very elevated opinion of informers. Another factor in my decision to write the book was that I was getting sick of reading all the whining ghostwritten mea culpas and breast beating from the likes of John Dean and Jeb Magruder, much less the smug self-congratulation of John Sirica, who had the nerve to call his book To Set the Record Straight--when he had, in my own case, deliberately misquoted the judicial record and had also covered up a blatant legal error on his part. So I bided my time, knowing that my day would come. And I tried to write a completely honest book, obscuring nothing, even if it gave ammunition to my enemies. To write an autobiography in any other way would be intellectually dishonest.

[Q] Playboy: A "warts and all" portrait, as Cromwell instructed his court painter?

[A] Liddy: Warts and all. I've never been concerned with my "image," and I've always distinguished character, which I shape and control, from reputation, which is the opinion of others and out of my hands. Integrity, in writing as in life, demands candor. As I told my publisher in my initial proposal, I became what I wanted to be, and the book tells how and why.

[Q] Playboy: Some of your critics have speculated that, despite Will's disarming candor, you have not revealed some matters of grave import because the statutes of limitation on those particular illegal acts have not yet expired--or, as in the case of murder, never will.

[A] Liddy: Well, obviously, if I were concealing a homicide, I'd hardly reveal it to Playboy or anybody else. Of course, I am not.

[Q] Playboy: According to Magruder, your former White House superior, you are. Magruder wrote in his autobiography that you had confided to him that you once murdered a man while in the employ of the FBI.

[A] Liddy: That's absolute nonsense. And let me point out that Jeb Magruder, apart from being a thoroughly spineless wretch who always seemed on the verge of crying for his mommy, is a liar, a perjurer. No, I'm sorry to disappoint the romantic expectations of your readers, but I do not come to you red of tooth and claw, with a double row of notches on my six-gun. I would be prepared to kill--not murder--either in the Armed Forces of my country or in defense of her national security, but I have never been called upon to do so.

[Q] Playboy: And yet your book abounds with plots to murder opponents of and defectors from the Nixon Administration, ranging from Jack Anderson to E. Howard Hunt----

[A] Liddy: None of which came to fruition.

[Q] Playboy: Do we detect an unspoken "alas" at the end of that statement?

[A] Liddy: If you're a mind reader, you tell me.

[Q] Playboy: Why in God's name did you want to murder Jack Anderson in the first place?

[A] Liddy: I'd prefer to term it justifiable homicide, since murder is a legal term for a specific type of homicide that by its very definition is unjustifiable. But, in any case, let me stress that it had nothing to do with his political opinions or his policy differences with the Nixon Administration. I recognize that reasonable men can differ on such matters, and I have no trouble with the concept of a loyal opposition, in press or parliament. I will say, though, that I have very little respect for the type of advocacy journalism we've seen in the United States since the late Sixties, which in my view is an ideologically motivated corruption of traditional objective journalism, one that pretends to be reporting the news while it is subtly manipulating and slanting it.

Anderson is one of those mutant strains of columnist who are half legitimate, because he occasionally labels his own opinions as such, and half deceptive, because he also passes off biased interpretations and selective information as straight reportage. At one point, Anderson's systematic leaking of top-secret information rendered the effective conduct of American foreign policy virtually impossible: He blew one of our finest technical sources of information abroad by disclosing that we had found a way to intercept car-to-car conversations between Brezhnev and Kosygin and other top Soviet officials as they drove through Moscow in their Zil limousines. But no move was taken against him until E. Howard Hunt informed me that one of his columns had fatally--quite literally--compromised a vital U.S. human intelligence asset in the Middle East, a man who as a result of his disclosures was being tortured, or was possibly already dead, even as we spoke. Anderson had finally gone too far and he had to be stopped. Not for what he wrote but for what he did, and could be expected to continue to do.

[Q] Playboy: Casting Anderson as a villain who caused the death of a U.S. agent is an effective rationale for silencing him, but the fact remains that his removal would have spared Nixon considerable political embarrassment. Wasn't that the real motive?

[A] Liddy: No, it certainly was not, even though I recall George Bernard Shaw's observing that assassination is the extreme form of censorship. But, Jesus, man, if we'd tried to whack out every Washington reporter and columnist who had it in for Nixon, then the National Press Club would've held nothing but wall-to-wall memorial plaques. No, we moved against Anderson for no other reason than that he had exposed and destroyed a man who had put his life on the line for the United States, and there was no other way to stop him from continuing that kind of conduct.

[Q] Playboy: Anderson strenuously denies having done any such thing.

[A] Liddy: No, he doesn't. What he does do is say over and over--and I've been on two or three television and radio shows with him recently where he repeated the same line--that he never "revealed or identified a CIA officer." Now, the man in question was not a CIA officer, he was a CIA agent, an agent in place, as it's called, a foreign national in the agency's employ overseas. Anderson desperately sticks to that tortured formulation, because it's not a technical lie. Just like that other secular saint of the American liberal establishment, old Maximum John Sirica, he's scared of getting his halo tarnished.

[Q] Playboy: How did you two get along when you met on a television show?

[A] Liddy: Anderson appeared a bit nervous, but I shook his hand and told him, "La guerre est finie." It was something like those postwar reunions when Luftwaffe and R.A.F. pilots get together over a stein of beer and swap stories of dogfights during the Battle of Britain. At least, in my mind it was.

[Q] Playboy: Nice of you not to carry a grudge, since you only tried to murder the man.

[A] Liddy: No. never actually tried. It never got to that.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Liddy: We worked out a plan, but it was ultimately never approved by our principals. Hunt and I started the ball rolling by meeting a physician from the CIA, who was introduced euphemistically as a specialist in "the unorthodox application of chemical and medical knowledge."

[Q] Playboy: Meaning an expert in killing people.

[A] Liddy: Crude, but not inexact. Anyway, we had lunch over at the Hay-Adams across from the White House and discussed various methods of killing Anderson, including coating the steering wheel of his car with an LSD solution sufficiently potent to cause a crash, which we rejected as too chancy, and "aspirin roulette," which we also turned down.

[Q] Playboy: Dare we ask?

[A] Liddy: Aspirin roulette is intelligence jargon for a rather common assassination technique, which entails the substitution of an ordinary aspirin or other headache-remedy tablet in the target's medicine cabinet with a look-alike that is actually a deadly poison.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds lovely. Why was it rejected?

[A] Liddy: Too iffy again. It would be only one out of 50 or maybe even 100 tablets, and months could go by before the target swallowed it. But most important was the danger that an innocent member of his family might take the pill.

[Q] Playboy: Very scrupulous of you. What did you finally decide on?

[A] Liddy: A simple if un--James Bondish method, which I'd learned in the FBI. Let's say an FBI agent was penetrating a foreign embassy to crack a safe and steal a onetime cipher or some such for the National Security Agency, and suddenly an employee returned earlier than he was supposed to and was about to endanger the mission. Well, other agents would have been following everyone assigned to that embassy and they would have intercepted him before he reached the building and staged a common street mugging to divert him. In Anderson's case, we merely decided to make it a lethal mugging.

[Q] Playboy: Who would have done the job?

[A] Liddy: It was initially decided to assign it to some of our Cuban-exile assets, but then Hunt began to worry that our principals would deem it too sensitive a matter to be entrusted to them. So I volunteered to do it myself.

[Q] Playboy: Just like that?

[A] Liddy: No, not just like that. But I thought about the matter, considered the damage that Anderson was doing, for whatever motives, to the security of this country, and decided that, if the Cubans were ruled out, I was the best man for the job, considering my own FBI and martial-arts training. We didn't want to make it look like anything more than another Washington street-crime statistic, remember, so no sophisticated weaponry could be employed.

[Q] Playboy: How would you have killed him?

[A] Liddy: Oh, I would have knifed him or broken his neck, probably. One of us would have died, no doubt about it. But, as I say, we never received the final green light.

[Q] Playboy: Were you relieved or disappointed?

[A] Liddy: I was neither. I was acting on the instructions of my principals, and I was prepared to follow those instructions either way they went.

[Q] Playboy: You really see nothing anomalous, much less frightening, about two aides to the President of the United States cold-bloodedly plotting to assassinate one of the country's leading reporters?

[A] Liddy: I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded, but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you're violating.

[Q] Playboy: Including murder?

[A] Liddy: Drastic problems sometimes demand drastic solutions. Look, let me give you an example. Philip Agee, the CIA detector, has effectively exposed and compromised dozens of our intelligence agents around the world, and one of his revelations led directly to the assassination of the CIA station chief in Athens, Richard Welch. This one man has done untold damage to the worldwide security interests of the United States. And what have we done about it? Nothing. Fifty years ago, Henry Stimson scuttled an effective American intelligence effort in the grounds that gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail. The pendulum seems to have swung all the way back to that position, and the Russians couldn't be happier. They've tried to destroy the American intelligence capability for 35 years, and in five years we've done the job for them, with the help of a few posturing demagogs like Frank Church. I just wish someone would point out to the good Senator that the world is not run by the League of Women Voters.

[Q] Playboy: Returning to Philip Agee for a moment, how would you deal with him? Would you, in CIA parlance, "terminate him with extreme prejudice"?

[A] Liddy: You're damn right I would. If I were back serving in some capacity in the American intelligence community and I found Agee living comfortably abroad, outside the reach of our law and continuing his revelations, I would strongly recommend that he be assassinated. And were I given the task, I would undertake it, and feel completely justified in so doing. But let me stress that his killing would not be retributive but preventive, to forestall further disclosures that would damage the security of this country and endanger the lives of its intelligence agents. The same rationale I employed in the case of Mr. Anderson.

[Q] Playboy: You'd be willing to kill a man you've never met solely because he was on the opposite side of the political and ideological fence?

[A] Liddy: No, my friend, because he's on the opposite side of the trench, in a political-military war between the United States and the Soviet Union that is crucial to our survival as a free nation, and no less vicious because it's undeclared. I hope we don't have to wait until the skies over New York are black with missiles to understand that fact and act on it. And if we continue our current posture of head-in-the-sand appeasement, I'm afraid that may very well be the case.

[Q] Playboy: And you'd feel no qualms, much less remorse, about liquidating someone like Agee?

[A] Liddy: No more than swatting a fly. Of course, our Government has been so weakened we no longer have the will for such action, even though we retain the human and technological capability. And the Russians, who are thoroughly ruthless and realistic about the pursuit of their own national interests, know it. But there would be nothing intrinsically evil or immoral about such an act. Just the opposite. The French have a saying, "Cet animal est très méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend." Roughly translated, it means, "This animal is very wicked; when attacked, it defends itself." When the CIA and other intelligence agencies tried to defend us effectively against our external enemies, they were mercilessly pilloried by the press and Congressional committees, and their most seasoned agents prematurely forced into retirement. Now, after Ethiopia, Angola and Afghanistan, a few alarm bells are dimly ringing in Washington and there's even a halfhearted effort to refurbish the kennel. But it's too late. The animal is no longer wicked. It's just toothless.

[Q] Playboy: You also planned to murder one of your old buddies and fellow Waterbugger, E. Howard Hunt. Surely, Hunt was no enemy of this country.

[A] Liddy: At the risk of belaboring this point once again, I would personally never characterize it as murder, because murder by its very definition is unjustifiable homicide, and I never would have considered the act in the first place if I had not deemed it eminently justifiable. Hunt had become an informer, a betrayer of his friends and associates, and to me there is nothing lower on this earth. As Nietzsche put it, there is but one sin--cowardice. Hunt deserved to die.

[Q] Playboy: Here was a man who had once been your good friend, who was now broken in mind and body, grief-stricken over his wife's death and ground down by the rigors of prison life. And so he violated your code and turned state's witness. Couldn't you have forgiven him that and summoned up sufficient compassion to forget, if not forgive?

[A] Liddy: Forgiveness, as Mark Twain once said, is the fragrance a rose leaves on the boot that has crushed it. But I'm afraid you're being naïve as well as sentimental. It wasn't a question of my personal feelings about Hunt, though God knows if he'd stayed a man, I'd have done everything in my power to help him. It wasn't even a question of my detestation of informers, even though I'd point out that we all went into Watergate with our eyes open, were willing to benefit from success and should have been equally willing to face failure with fortitude. No, the stakes were much higher than that, my friend. Hunt knew too much, not only about Watergate but about other matters of state, including CIA secrets. It seemed perfectly plausible to me that my superiors might wish his elimination, and I was prepared to execute those orders without a moment's doubt or soul-searching.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps it is sentimental, at least in your book, but the question of friendship does seem an important consideration here, since none of your other "targets" were close to you personally, as Hunt had once been. E. M. Forster wrote, "If I had a choice between betraying my country or my friend, I hope I would have the courage to betray my country." Is such a concept totally alien to you?

[A] Liddy: Yes, but only because I do value friendship, like personal honor, so highly. I would find betraying a friend as unthinkable as betraying my country, and the conundrum would never arise, because the only time I would turn against a friend would be when he had forfeited that friendship by betraying our country. And that, of course, is precisely at the root of my feelings about Hunt.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon and the political fortunes of his Administration are not exactly synonymous with the national interests of the United States, are they?

[A] Liddy: Well, under the circumstances, and in the light of what's happened to this nation since--and because--Nixon was forced from office, I think you could make a very good case that the two were so inextricably linked that Hunt's betrayal constituted an act at least of regicide, if not of outright treason.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel the same way about Dean?

[A] Liddy: Yes, but even more strongly. For all of Hunt's weaknesses and failings, it would still be manifestly unfair to place him in the same category as Dean or Magruder. Next to them, Hunt is a giant. I wouldn't even talk of him in the same breath, much as I condemn his betrayal. The difference between Hunt and Dean is the difference between a POW who breaks under torture and aids the enemy and Judas Iscariot.

[Q] Playboy: You've been alone with Dean only once since he testified against the White House, and you've said that you contemplated killing him then. How close did you actually come?

[A] Liddy: Oh, it was just a fleeting thought, now one of those sweet memories that one loves to treasure. God knows, he would have been no loss. What happened, actually, was that in October of 1974, Federal marshals escorted me to the offices of Watergate special prosecutor James Neal for an interview and told me to wait in Neal's office, as he was expected shortly. I went in and shut the door behind me and, lo and behold, there was Dean sitting behind the desk. He looked up and I could have sworn he was about to wet himself. His eyes darted all around the room, but I was between him and the door and I could see that he was absolutely terror-stricken. My first thought was that here was the ideal opportunity to kill the bastard. I saw a pencil on the desk and all it would take was a quick thrust through the underside of his jaw, up through the soft palate and deep inside the brain. And simultaneously, I wondered if this were a setup, if someone had arranged for me to be alone with Dean, anticipating exactly such a denouement. But then, on more somber reflection, I ruled that out. Nixon had been out of office for two months, I had received no instructions from my old superiors and, in any case, his killing could only damage the chances of Mitchell, Mardian and others in their forthcoming trials. No, revenge might be a dish best supped cold, but this was positively stale. The whole thing had just been a weird, stupid error. So I exchanged a few inconsequential remarks with Dean, he stammered a reply and I stepped aside so he could gather his papers and scurry out the door. I think he aged considerably in those three or four minutes.

[Q] Playboy: Let's put Dean aside for a moment and consider the method you considered using to kill him----

[A] Liddy: Good idea. A pencil's always a more interesting topic of conversation than John Dean.

[Q] Playboy: If there weren't several pencils on the table between us right now, we might ask you not to interrupt. But seriously, you're a student of unarmed combat, and in your novel, Out of Control, you describe an attack by an Oriental master of the martial arts as follows: "Such was the power of T'ang Li's thrust that his fingers kept right on going through the wet pulp of the man's eyeballs and the shell-thin bone at the rear of the sockets to penetrate into the warm, moist, unresistant softness of the brain itself." Was that just poetic license, or could you kill a man with such a single blow? And we stress that it's a purely theoretical question; there's no need to demonstrate.

[A] Liddy: You cringe very nicely. No, it's true that I've trained in the martial arts for many years, initially at the FBI, where I first learned to kill a man with a pencil, incidentally, and was taught to blind and maim and in general employ my body's "personal weapons," as my instructors called it, against an opponent's "vulnerable areas." Later on, I studied under a red-belt master of the high T'ai Chi who could rip out your throat or disembowel you with a back-hand slash. A fascinating character. So that scene was based on fact, though I've never duplicated it in real life.

[Q] Playboy: What are the most effective ways to kill a man without employing a conventional weapon?

[A] Liddy: Well, they are innumerable, depending, of course, on the skill of the practitioner. For someone with no special training, our old-faithful pencil is very efficient, just your common garden-variety standard wooden pencil with a good sharp point and a strong, substantial eraser. The eraser's quite important, actually. With those prerequisites, and if you can reach your opponent, any novice could kill his enemy in one second or less. But I don't want to go any further into the details, lest we have a sudden rash of pencil killings in junior high schools across the country. Assuming, of course, that adolescent males concentrate on Playboy's Interviews.

[Q] Playboy: In Will, you describe an encounter in a California prison with a Mongolian master of the martial arts who instructed you only reluctantly, after warning that "You are a very violent man, I can see it in your eyes." Was he right?

[A] Liddy: Oh, yes. But I've learned to suppress my violence, and control it. And, remember, as any true master of the martial arts will tell you, the most powerful weapon I have is this. [Taps temple with index finger] The physical body is the vessel of the intellect, and the strongest muscles are useless without the guidance, the supercharger effect, of a trained and disciplined mind.

[Q] Playboy: As long as we're on such a murderous topic, is there any such thing as an untraceable poison?

[A] Liddy: Yes, there are a few, in the colloidal family, and they're known--and used by--the intelligence services of the superpowers. But they may not be untraceable for long, since there's recently been a considerable forensic breakthrough in that are'. But generally, you know, even traceable poisons are not traced, unless there's reason to suspect foul play. Most autopsies are pro forma, unless the forensic pathologist is on his toes and already suspicious; so if you use a poison that simulates the symptoms of heart failure, say, you're generally home safe and dry.

There's a wide range of poisons that can be manufactured simply at home, without complex laboratory technology. Give me several cigars, for example, and in a short while I'll have extracted enough pure nicotine to kill a man with a few drops in his food or coffee. That was how I was going to handle Hunt, in fact, if the signal had come down from on high. But, once again, I don't want to spell out the process in any detail, lest I put ideas into the heads of any impressionable adolescents in your audience.

[Q] Playboy: You have one hell of an opinion of the young people across this country.

[A] Liddy: Realism, my friend, realism. If people know how to do something, no matter how nasty, sooner or later somebody's going to do it. It's the nature of the beast.

[Q] Playboy: Moving from the martial arts and exotic poisons to more prosaic means of mayhem, you are not only proficient in the use of firearms but also an avid gun collector and outspoken opponent of all gun-control legislation. In fact, Peter Prescott of Newsweek went so far as to call you a "gun fanatic." Is that a fair description?

[A] Liddy: About as fair, I'd say, as my describing a writer like Peter Prescott as a "typewriter fanatic." As far as I'm concerned, to enjoy hunting or target-firing weapons, or to collect them, is no more unusual or unhealthy than admiring and enjoying the use of any beautiful piece of machinery, like a Daimler-Benz engine or a fine Leica camera. If that makes me a fanatic, then all I can tell you is that the gentleman's definition of fanaticism differs from the standard dictionary definition and is a reflection of his bias rather than his intellect. And there certainly is a bias against gun users and their rights on the part of the urban liberal intelligentsia, which is always lobbying to deny guns to law-abiding citizens, even though they would always remain available to the criminal on the flourishing black market or through theft. The proponents of such nostrums should contemplate the failure of Prohibition in the Twenties.

[Q] Playboy: You say you're not a gun nut, but didn't you wear a pistol to your own wedding?

[A] Liddy: Yes, a small, concealed .38 snub-nosed revolver. But I was an FBI agent at the time, and wearing a gun was second nature to me. In fact, shortly after our wedding, my wife gave me a beautifully gift-wrapped magnum revolver as a present.

[Q] Playboy: Are you carrying a gun right now?

[A] Liddy: Another admirable cringe. No, obviously I am not, as that would constitute a violation of my parole and jeopardize my freedom needlessly. I do have an air gun that I still practice with, a Walther LP 2 Olympic grade air pistol, which is highly accurate and practically recoilless. Using target sights, and employing a pointed projectile preferably coated with pure nicotine, I could shoot yon dead at a range of ten meters, or approximately 33 feet. It's as silent and lethal as a fine throwing knife.

[Q] Playboy: Sorry we asked. But speaking of knives, you wrote in Will that you carried a switchblade with you on the night your men broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. If the burglary had been interrupted by police or passers-by, would you have used that knife?

[A] Liddy: First of all, it was not a switch-blade, melodramatic as that sounds, but a Browning clasp knife. But I would have used it only as a last resort. I was in radio communication with our men inside the building, and if I'd seen a third party approaching, I would have instantly alerted them and then attempted to divert the intruder's attention.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Liddy: Nonviolently, if at all possible. Say we had some bad luck and a cop appeared on the scene. There was no outward evidence of the break-in to tip him off, but if for some reason he'd heard the breaking of glass and decided to check the building, I'd have made my presence known and diverted his attention from the men inside once I'd tipped them off. I'm a good runner, and I could have led him a merry chase.

[Q] Playboy: But let's say you had the bad luck to encounter the only cop on the Beverly Hills police force ever to qualify for the Olympic decathlon and he outran you. Would you have surrendered?

[A] Liddy: No, that would have placed the mission and my principals in jeopardy, not just me. I would have attempted to incapacitate him nonlethally, if at all possible. Remember, there's an awful lot of ways of taking somebody out without using deadly force. The knife was an absolute last resort, to be employed only after I'd exhausted all other options.

[Q] Playboy: And if you had?

[A] Liddy: I've already told you that I was prepared to take all necessary measures to protect my men and our mission. I did not arm myself gratuitously, but neither would I have used my weapon unless absolutely necessary to protect myself.

[Q] Playboy: But you were prepared to kill if absolutely necessary?

[A] Liddy: Yes, I've told you I was.

[Q] Playboy: It's precisely this kind of ruthlessness, which casually encompasses homicide as just another option, that has so alarmed your critics. For example, Herb Klein, who served as White House Director of Communications during the Nixon Administration and who hardly fits the stereotype of a bleeding-heart liberal, reviewed your book recently in the Los Angeles Times and charged that you had adopted "a Mafialike attitude placing Liddy above the law.... The book reads like gang-war fiction." How would you answer him?

[A] Liddy: Well, we were fighting a war, a civic war, in those days, a far more serious one than the typical gangland squabble over who controls numbers and drugs in this or that section of town, or who had intruded on somebody else's turf. The stakes, as we saw it, were the security and very survival of this nation, and we were ready to take strong measures in its defense. If that's Mafialike, so be it.

[Q] Playboy: You reveal in your autobiography that while in prison, you got on well with a number of actual Mafia leaders, including the unnamed one to whom you entrusted the contract on Hunt. Did they consider you a kindred spirit?

[A] Liddy: First of all, I'm not going to characterize anyone as Mafia. That's a label pinned by Federal and local prosecutors on people who may or may not be involved in organized crime, and I know from my own experiences that it's not always accurate. But it is true that I arrived in prison after defying all three branches of the United States Government, executive, judicial and legislative, and my refusal to become a rat had preceded me. Nothing is despised more in prison than an informer, remember, and, conversely, nothing is admired more than the so-called stand-up guy, in jailhouse parlance, who refuses to turn in his associates. So I did find that a number of people who had been accused of involvement in organized crime approached me and expressed a certain degree of respect for my behavior. And, as it turned out, we did get on very well, because we had some values in common.

[Q] Playboy: Considering the Mafia's obsession with omertà, the traditional Sicilian code of silence, their penchant for liquidating enemies, their ruthless pursuit of vendetta and their fanatic code of personal honor, wouldn't you have made a good mafioso, perhaps even a Godfather? And is it still too late?

[A] Liddy: It's nice of you to search out avenues of employment for me, since they tend to be somewhat limited to someone who has been in prison on a felony conviction. I'll be sure to refer your suggestion to my parole officer. Actually, there was one amusing incident in that vein that took place in prison in California, where I'd come to know Bill Bonanno, who'd been the protagonist of Gay Talese's best-selling book Honor Thy Father. One Christmas Eve, two of Bill's hulking friends showed up to escort me to midnight Mass in the prison chapel, even though I was no longer a practicing Catholic and had not planned to attend. I sang the hymns lustily, and at a small party Bill threw afterward, he gave me a hearty abbraccio and said, "I knew anyone whose mother's name was Abbaticchio hadda be OK; right, boys?" Everybody laughed and he went on: "What I like about this guy, it's the only kinda singing he knows!" So, yes, we certainly did have a bond on that level.

[Q] Playboy: Your critics would contend that you had far more in common with the Mafia than a mutual scorn for stool pigeons--i.e., a dedication to the principle that the ends justify the means.

[A] Liddy: Well, I've never denied that. When the issues are significant enough, the ends do justify the means. And, in fact, most people in this society operate on just that assumption, though a lot of them gloss it over with a shimmering veil of hypocrisy, like John Sirica. Didn't The New York Times believe that the end justified the means in the Pentagon papers case, when it published purloined top-secret Government documents? And didn't the civil rights and antiwar demonstrators believe that the ends justified the means when they broke the law by sit-ins at lunch counters or burning their draft cards? Sure they did, and at least in the civil rights movement, they were prepared to go to jail for their convictions. It was only when we countered the illegal actions of the antiwar movement with some of our own that they tore their hair and rent their raiments and screamed, "Police state!" and the whole thing turned into a morality play. All a question of whose political ox is getting gored, of course. When I'm in a war, I can respect my opponent, no matter how strongly I detest his convictions. What I cannot stand is hypocrisy.

[Q] Playboy: That's the second analogy you've made between your conduct and that of a soldier in wartime, and throughout your trial and imprisonment, you certainly conducted yourself as a POW trapped in enemy territory. If you were a soldier, weren't your only enemies fellow Americans of differing political views?

[A] Liddy: That's easy enough to believe if you conveniently distort the facts of recent history. Everybody today knows that in the late Sixties and early Seventies, we were involved in an exterior war in Vietnam, but they tend to forget that we were also embroiled in an undeclared civil war at home. And unless you can understand the nature of that struggle and the issues it posed for the Administration in Washington, you'll never be able to understand my motives or the motives of my associates in undertaking the actions and running the risks we did. We were up against a formidable constellation of forces in those days, an alliance of influential elements of the media with a so-called counterculture that represented a Weltanschauung and lifestyle that were utterly repugnant to me. It was as unthinkable to me to let the country succumb to those values as it would have been for a Japanese officer reared on the code of Bushido to contemplate surrender in 1945.

[Q] Playboy: And so you became a kamikaze, and ultimately self-destructed over Watergate?

[A] Liddy: No, I joined people who believed as I did in a well-justified counter-offensive against the forces of civil disorder that were sweeping the country in those days. And I have absolutely no regrets about my decision to do so. Ultimately, our side won out and crushed the revolutionaries, which is one salient reason why what's left of the left has never forgotten or forgiven Richard Nixon. But our very victory has to some extent obscured the gravity of the situation as it was seen in Washington in those days.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you drastically exaggerating the true dimensions of civil unrest in order to justify your own violations of the law? Sure, there were antiwar demonstrations and civil disobedience and some incidents of terrorism by crazies like the Weathermen; but can you seriously argue that the country was teetering on the brink of a revolutionary upheaval?

[A] Liddy: In my opinion, you're seriously underestimating the threat. We didn't have a crystal ball at our disposal in those days that would inform us that mass student opposition to the war would peter out after the end of the draft, or that the racial cauldron in the big cities would eventually simmer down. We had to act on our best intelligence assessment of the forces arrayed against us, and that assessment was far from encouraging, particularly when you consider the revolutionaries. Remember, we knew that those same forces had caused Lyndon Johnson to abdicate his office, and we were not prepared to see a similar scenario in the case of Richard Nixon. We drew the line and chose to fight back.

[Q] Playboy: You never had any doubts that the antiwar movement posed a serious threat to this country and its institutions?

[A] Liddy: Never for a moment. They were the shock troops of a movement and value system I despised, and as far as I was concerned, if they were going to succeed, they would have had to march over my dead body. And I always felt justified in taking any action necessary to thwart them. I remembered Cicero's dictum that laws are inoperative in war. And I knew we were at war.

[Q] Playboy: In the course of your crusade to save the Republic, was there any ethical line you would have drawn? And, as a "good soldier" in Nixon's army, what do you think of the so-called Nuremberg precept that the execution of an illegal and immoral order constitutes a crime under international law?

[A] Liddy: I do not believe in "blind obedience" to authority. On the contrary, I believe that the individual has a responsibility to pursue the dictates of his own conscience and own reason, even when they counter the interests of the state. Man, after all, has free will. A concentration-camp guard at Auschwitz or in the Gulag cannot absolve himself of responsibility for his acts simply on the grounds that he was "obeying orders." I've explained why I'd be willing to break the law under extraordinary circumstances, but there is a point beyond which I would not go.

[Q] Playboy: What is that point?

[A] Liddy: Well, anything that is malum in se, evil in itself, as opposed to something that is malum prohibitum, or wrong only because there is a law against it on the statute books.

[Q] Playboy: That appears to be a rather Jesuitical distinction.

[A] Liddy: Well, the Jesuits have had hundreds of years to ponder such questions, so I wouldn't dismiss them too lightly, but the distinction between malum in se and malum prohibitum is a very real and vital one when considering the role of man's conscience in relationship to the law.

[Q] Playboy: Would you give us an example?

[A] Liddy: OK. A classic example of malum in se, something that's evil in and of itself, would be the sexual abuse of a child. I don't need to refer to the statute books to know that is wrong, nor would the public at large. Now, to take another extreme for purposes of illustration, let's say I was driving through the Nevada desert one day, where I could see 100 miles in either direction, and suddenly I approach a red octagonal Stop sign. If I drove through it, as I would, I would clearly be committing an illegal act, I would be violating the law. But absent an 11th Commandment enjoining, "Thou shalt not go through an octagonal red sign with the word Stop on it," my action would be morally irrelevant. Of course, there's a wide range of gradations involved between such a harmless infraction and an ultimately heinous crime such as raping a child, but there are vital distinctions between the two kinds of violation that should and must be made.

[Q] Playboy: But wouldn't murder--which you've admitted plotting, if not executing--clearly fall under the category of malum in se?

[A] Liddy: Only if you refuse to accept the distinction I made earlier in our conversation between justifiable and unjustifiable homicide. And even if you resort to Judaeo-Christianity for ethical guidance, a similar distinction would have to be made. We're taught that the Commandment reads, "Thou shalt not kill," but, in fact, the literal translation from the Hebrew reads, "Thou shalt not do murder." To illustrate the point, let's carry this concept of malum in se over to the political area we've been discussing. I've said I would have been willing to kill Jack Anderson or Philip Agee. Now, let's say in 1972, before the New Hampshire primary, somebody had approached me and said, "Liddy, we want you to whack out Ed Muskie, he's gaining in the polls and he's a real threat to this Administration in November." Well, I wouldn't have touched that one with a ten-foot pole--no pun intended.I disagreed totally with Senator Muskie's domestic and foreign-policy positions at the time, and if he'd been nominated, I would have fought him politically every inch of the way. But he was and is a decent, patriotic American who was not out in any way to damage the interests of this country, and it would have been a pure case of malum in se for me to move against him. On the other hand, if he had won the nomination and somebody said, "Liddy, infiltrate an agent in Muskie's headquarters and find out what he's up to," I certainly would have considered it. That would have been traditional in American politics. It would, in fact, have been another case of malum prohibitum. So the difference between the two is very important to me, and I would always draw the line at malum in se.

[Q] Playboy: The problem is that you, G. Gordon Liddy, are arrogating to yourself the right to decide what laws should or should not be broken. Isn't that in a very profound sense subversive of the constitutional principle that this is a Government of laws and not of men, and no one, from the Chief Executive on down to the humblest citizen, is above the law?

[A] Liddy: No. Ultimately, each of us must be accountable to his own conscience. One must consider the facts and make a prudent judgment. Remember that the Constitution is just what the Supreme Court--a group of men--says it is. And that Court gave us, among other decisions, Dred Scott [a landmark pro-slavery decision]. I'll take my own conscience, thank you.

[Q] Playboy: You're a student of history, with particular interest in ancient Rome and Greece. Do you recall Juvenal's maxim, "Who is to guard the guards against themselves?" And doesn't that apply to G. Gordon Liddy?

[A] Liddy: Well, I'm no longer a guardian. But, in the final analysis, the people have to do that themselves, by participating in the political process and keeping a sharp eye on the men they elect to govern them. If the majority of the people feel their leaders are abusing that power, they have the option of turning that particular bunch of guardians out of office. They had the chance with us in 1972, and you remember the results.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned Muskie as the kind of man you would never have considered harming, for which dispensation he's doubtless grateful. But another picture of your relationship with Muskie is painted by former high-ranking CIA official Miles Copeland, who claims your agents spiked Muskie's punch with a particularly virulent dose of LSD shortly before he broke down and wept outside the offices of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader during the critical 1972 New Hampshire primary, an event that effectively ended his candidacy.

[A] Liddy: I'm afraid you're exploring the farther shores of political paranoia on that one. There's no truth to it what-soever.

[Q] Playboy: And yet you've been quoted as having said shortly before campaigning began in New Hampshire that your agents were prepared to pull some "rough stuff" in that contest.

[A] Liddy: I wasn't referring to that kind of rough stuff. I ended up with responsibility for Donald Segretti, you know, though I never recruited him, and he was up in New Hampshire with his bag of so-called dirty tricks, operating against the various candidates. But his stock in trade was nothing more serious than glorified fraternity-house pranks--disrupting campaign scheduling, canceling motel reservations, that kind of thing. Nobody connected with us would even have thought for a second about slipping LSD to the Senator. Of course, with all the post-Watergate paranoia that's still floating about, I'm surprised we haven't yet been blamed for the sinking of the Lusitania.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe it's "post-Watergate paranoia" and maybe it's not, but in the course of a CBS radio commentary at the height of the Watergate scandal titled Thinking the Unthinkable, newscaster Dan Rather commented that it was time to ask "some of the tough questions about such characters as Hunt and Liddy and their Cuban contacts and whether they had at any time any connection with Lee Harvey Oswald...." How do you feel about being accused of a possible role in the assassination of President Kennedy?

[A] Liddy: I initially would have assumed it was just one more example of the hysteria surrounding Watergate, but I subsequently learned why Rather asked that question. When I first appeared on 60 Minutes, in 1975, Mike Wallace told me offcamera that CBS News possessed a photograph of the crowd in Dealey Plaza taken contemporaneously with President Kennedy's assassination, and that one individual bore a striking resemblance to me when his features were magnified. Prior to my appearance on 60 Minutes, CBS had the photo and negative checked by the top experts in the country in an attempt to verify my presence at the time, presumably by comparing photographs of me with the shot from Dallas, and they couldn't do so. But apparently the story had been floating around the higher echelons of CBS News for some time, and that's where Rather picked it up. Why he threw in Hunt's name as well, I can't tell you.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you on November 22, 1963?

[A] Liddy: In my law offices in Manhattan, though I'd been in Dallas a number of times prior to that. I know you're disappointed, but I'm afraid I can't place myself in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, zeroing in on the motorcade through the sights of a Mannlicher-Carcano.

[Q] Playboy: While serving in the Nixon White House, didn't you participate in an effort to assassinate the character of the late President by forging cables in order to indicate that he had ordered the murder of President Diem of South Vietnam?

[A] Liddy: You're thinking of Howard Hunt. I forged no such cables. When we were under attack for our alleged immorality in Vietnam by Ted Kennedy and other Democrats, we did attempt to unearth cables from Defense Department files indicating what role President Kennedy played in that affair, since it's pretty generally known and accepted that his Administration supported the coup that overthrew Diem and led to his death and that of his brother. Unfortunately, and perhaps significantly, the cable traffic from the crucial period dropped off considerably, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to provide the relevant back-channel traffic, with the support of Secretary of Defense Mel Laird. So I never unearthed the "smoking gun" cable that would have linked J.F.K. to Diem's assassination--which, ironically, occurred only three weeks before his own.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still believe such a cable, or other similar evidence, exists?

[A] Liddy: I have no hard proof, but based on my own investigation, and the nature of the cable traffic I was able to examine, I'm convinced that President Kennedy either ordered Diem's assassination or at the very least knew that the military plotters intended to kill him and did nothing to stop it.

[Q] Playboy: The Nixon White House was interested in obtaining information on another Kennedy. Were you involved in the plumbers' investigation of Senator Ted Kennedy's behavior at Chappaquiddick?

[A] Liddy: No, but Hunt was. He investigated Chappaquiddick as part of a standard political counterintelligence operation, to unearth potentially damaging information on a possible opponent. But I'm afraid he came up with nothing new, nothing that wasn't published in that exhaustive article in The New York Times Magazine by Robert Sherrill. So the matter was more or less dropped, on the assumption that it would probably hurt Kennedy politically without our assistance.

[Q] Playboy: The White House campaign of "political counterintelligence" against Ted Kennedy was not conducted on a very elevated plane. Chuck Colson got a photograph of Kennedy leaving a night club in Paris with a beautiful woman, and H. R. Haldeman recalls being instructed by Nixon to place the Senator under 24-hour surveillance so the White House could "catch him in the sack with one of his babes." Did Nixon's men unearth any significant evidence of Kennedy's alleged drinking problems or marital infidelities--and, if so, how did the dirty-tricks department intend to use it politically?

[A] Liddy: It's possible they did engage in that kind of Mickey Mouse stuff, though I never saw the photograph you refer to. But if they'd asked my advice, I'd have told them to forget it. The whole extramarital-affairs bit has been played to death; that kind of thing isn't even good for political hardball anymore, if it ever really was. I mean, my God, if you're going to lock up every politician who ever slept in a bed with the wrong name on it, the streets of Washington at night would be bare, deserted! And I'm not sure the public really cares that much, either, as long as the guy's competent and doesn't have some really far-out quirk, like midgets or aardvarks. I think the only question is whether or not the man is sufficiently competent to be President of the United States, and I don't think who he goes to bed with has anything to do with it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Ted Kennedy is competent to be President of the United States?

[A] Liddy: Oh, he's competent, sure, but I wouldn't want to see him President, because I think he would move the country in entirely the wrong direction, in both domestic affairs and foreign policy. Kennedy has become the last standard-bearer of the New Deal, and because Carter has pre-empted the middle and Reagan has cornered the right, Ted's only constituency is the liberal left of the party. He's both their spokesman and their captive, and his only solution to our current problems is to throw more money at them and organize more programs and more bureaucracies, which is just a prescription for perpetuating the failures of the past 30 years. Tacitus, you know, perceived that "the more corrupt the government, the greater the number of laws." You could add to that: "and the greater the number of Federal agencies." But I've got to admit that despite my total ideological divergence from Kennedy, I've developed a certain grudging respect for the way he's comported himself under a series of staggering political reversals. No, I think Kennedy would be the wrong President at the wrong time for this country, but I've got to say that his behavior during the campaign conforms to Hemingway's classic definition of courage: grace under pressure.

[Q] Playboy: In 1977, your sentence was commuted by Carter. What do you think of him, both as a man and as President?

[A] Liddy: As a man, I think the popular conception of him as good and decent and sincere is probably correct, and personally, I'm grateful that he commuted my sentence. He'd certainly get my vote--for parson. But as a President, he's been an absolute, unmitigated disaster. You see, a moralizer like Jimmy Carter is fine at delivering orotund sermons, but he doesn't understand the (continued on page 166)G. Gordon Liddy(continued from page 84) way the world works and, just as bad, he doesn't understand the way the United States works. If you view the U.S. Government as one vast complex diesel engine, which I think is a pretty fair analogy, then Ted Kennedy at least knows how to operate the machinery, even though he might drive it in the wrong directions. But ol' Jimmy doesn't even know the ignition key from the exhaust pipe. Hell, he wasn't even that effective governing a state like Georgia, and he's totally lost trying to run Washington. Oh, he's great at spouting pious platitudes, but to be a President, you've first and foremost got to be a good mechanic. You've got to operate that goddamn machine or the whole thing's going to come apart. Now, to take a leaf from Jimmy's book, you could call in the Pope from Rome, the Chief Rabbi from Jerusalem, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church from Canterbury, the president of the Baptist World Alliance and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from Qum or wherever he's presently holed up, and they could all keep circling that huge diesel engine day after day, chanting their prayers over it, and the mother's still not going to turn over. Faith is fine, but it's no substitute for expertise and leadership. And Carter's got neither.

[Q] Playboy: That seems a rather harsh caricature. And why emphasize the President's private religious beliefs?

[A] Liddy: Because they aren't private anymore, damn it; they're at the root of his whole Easter Bunny approach to running this country. Jimmy Carter just doesn't understand the world as it is; he still believes you can look the other way and the problem will disappear. He's not prepared to face the harsh problems, whether inflation or recession at home or Soviet aggression and American military weakness abroad. I mean, if he were on a yacht for a summit conference with Maggie Thatcher of England, Giscard d'Estaing of France and Helmut Schmidt of Germany and that yacht capsized and they were all in the drink together, I can just picture what would happen when a dark fin started cutting through the water toward them. Thatcher, D'Estaing and Schmidt would all shout, "Jaws!" and do everything in their power to scramble up for safety on the inverted hull of the ship, while Jimmy would just continue paddling around, saying, "Gee, guys, it's Charlie the Tuna!" No, I'm sorry, but the requisites for leadership of a great power are brains, brawn and balls, and I'm afraid Carter is singularly lacking in all three departments.

[Q] Playboy: Some of your critics would contend that Carter's brand of morality is infinitely preferable to the kind of ruthless Realpolitik you preach and practice.

[A] Liddy: I'm sure they would, and I'd say they were deluding themselves. Look, let's face reality. Politics, and in this context I'd include the conduct of a superpower's foreign policy, has by its very nature to be amoral. Not immoral, amoral. It cannot be conducted by a man who wears his sainthood on his sleeve and who is superbly equipped to deal with the hereafter but emotionally totally unprepared to deal with the harsh realities of the present-day world. And I'm particularly alarmed when a man like Carter bases his foreign policy on the way he wishes other nations to be, rather than on the basis of how they actually behave in the world as it is. I don't mind Carter talking to God. It's when God answers back, and tells him something different each day, that I get really worried.

[Q] Playboy: For example?

[A] Liddy: Take a look at Carter's whole foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.He came into office convinced, as he put it, that we had more similarities than differences with the Russians, that, in his formulation, the areas of cooperation were greater than the areas of competition, and in general appeared convinced that the Soviet leadership shared his altruistic and pacific convictions. Probably the apotheosis of that attitude was his famous Notre Dame commencement address, where he assured the world that "we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism" that, presumably, had afflicted such benighted Presidential predecessors as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. We were, in the terms of the old black Southern spiritual, "free at last" to embark on a wonderful adventure of brotherly love with Moscow. So he let our military forces run down, adopted a misguided and selective "human rights policy" that pilloried dictators on our side but let the Soviets off with a flaccid slap on the wrist, betrayed our natural allies like the shah in favor of "progressive" Third World forces--and remember, it was Carter's UN Ambassador and spiritual clone, Andy Young, who called the Ayatollah a saint--and finally reaped the whirlwind with Iran and Afghanistan and God knows what other disasters still around the corner. And after Afghanistan, he professed to feel betrayed by the Russians, and said he'd learned more about them in the past week than in his preceding three years in office. My God, what a pathetic confession of geopolitical incompetence and historical ignorance! Somebody should finally tell the poor man, "No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus." And I'm convinced that the motivating force behind this crippling naïveté is a simple belief that all men must be good, all men must be brothers.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe in the brotherhood of man?

[A] Liddy: Sure, I do. Cain and Abel! Abel and Cain! No, come on, you know precisely what I mean. All of Jimmy's lovely idealistic pipe dreams are fine emanating from a pulpit, but they don't cut any ice in the serious international arena. The Russians would just contemptuously echo Stalin's derisive question in World War Two: "How many divisions has the Pope?" The Carter policy from the inception of his Presidency has been one of weakness--economic weakness, political weakness, military weakness. And he has been as much a disaster for this country as Neville Chamberlain and his appeasers were for England in the Thirties. The only difference with Carter is that he doesn't even know how much he's surrendered. He's a classic case of noble intentions gone berserk and reminds me of Emerson's description of the pious humanitarian liberal of his own day: "We mean well and do ill, and then justify our ill-doing by our well-meaning." And, you know, it's interesting to reflect, in a historic context, that Great Britain began to decline as a world power and ultimately lost her empire when her own people fell victim to a very similar blend of romantic humanitarianism and evangelical religion. But at least Britain held on to her empire for almost 200 years on the momentum of her former dynamism, like a red-giant star before it collapses into a white dwarf, and it was only the debilitating and bankrupting aftermath of World War Two that finally forced her to relinquish the last of her greatness. It's taken us less than 20 years of mismanagement and self-delusion to reach a comparable nadir of power.

[Q] Playboy: How would President G. Gordon Liddy handle things differently?

[A] Liddy: Well, I'd start with a general definition of our domestic and foreign goals, and then proceed from there to specific (continued on page 200)G. Gordon Liddy(continued from page 166) proposals and actions. I'd act above all on the assumptions encompassed by the ancient Roman maxim "Let him who desires peace prepare for war." I mean, Christ, you can see how disastrous our present policy is by translating it into street terms. How long do you think a well-dressed, well-fed guy with a fat wad of bills sticking out of his pocket would last in any tough neighborhood in this country? He wouldn't reach the end of the first block. But you can also recognize that if you're six feet, six and carry a submachine gun in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, you can make it safely. And the world is like that bad street, whether we like it or not. So I'd vastly beef up our military machine as a start, both the conventional forces and our nuclear capability, which has fallen dangerously behind the Russians'. The problem is that our leaders, like Carter, think day to day and week to week, jumping from crisis to crisis with no sense of over-all strategy and no continuity to our foreign policy. But the Russians think in terms of decades. Their equivalent of evangelical religion is the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which they are convinced will eventually cover the globe. They are not ideologs, however, they are realists in both their military and their political strategy. They put their faith in Panzers, not prayer. They won't be bought off by sweaty-palmed protestations of friendship or stalled long by concessions in the name of détente--concessions like SALT II, for example, which only further erodes our military capability vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. Lenin was historically correct when he said, "Treaties are like piecrust; they are made to be broken."?

[Q] Playboy: Do you think war with the Soviet Union is inevitable?

[A] Liddy: No, but it's a distinct possibility as long as we pursue our present policy of drift and decay. Where there's a power vacuum, as there exists in many areas of the globe today because of American weakness and retreat, the strong and dynamic force will naturally and inevitably make its move. That corresponds in nature to the concept of natural selection--the survival of the fittest. Right now, we're in the position of the old bull who's faltering, pulling in his horns, betraying his vulnerability. Well, there are hungry young bucks out there ready and willing to challenge us for leadership of the herd. As the poet Robert William Service wrote, "This is the law of the Yukon, that only the strong shall thrive; / That surely the weak shall perish, and only the fit survive." What is true of individuals also holds true for nations. You can only hold what you can successfully defend.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe that Ronald Reagan, who seems to share your view of the Russians, could provide that leadership?

[A] Liddy: Well, I'm sure he would surround himself with good and able men who do perceive the reality of the crisis we confront. And, of course, I'm anxious to see Carter retire to his peanut farm and take the gang of starry-eyed lotus-eaters he's placed in charge of foreign policy with him. But I'm not going to endorse any particular Presidential candidate. I'm just too damned controversial, and the guy I like the most I'd probably hurt the most, a kind of kiss-of-death effect.

[Q] Playboy: Returning to the question of national defense, are you in favor of the reintroduction of the draft?

[A] Liddy: Yes, I certainly am. What we've got now is a voluntary Army disproportionately staffed by the dregs of society, who are in turn driving out the seasoned professionals in disgust. And remember, Rome fell when the Roman legions were no longer manned by Romans but by mercenaries. And that, too, stemmed from a political failure of will. The emperors became more concerned with propitiating the mob by dispensing bread and circuses than defending their imperial borders--as ours have. But there was a day of reckoning, as there always will be. When Emperor Augustus learned that the crack 17th, 18th and 19th legions under Quintilius Varus had been wiped out by the German leader Arminius in the Teutoburger forest, he tore at his hair and wailed, "Varus, Varus, where are my legions?" One can almost imagine similar lamentations in the White House after the abortive Iranian rescue mission, with Jimmy Carter crying, "Beckwith, Beckwith, where are my helicopters?" It's a national tragedy that brave men must die to mask the incompetence and ignorance of third-rate politicians.

[Q] Playboy: To what degree is Pentagon waste and inefficiency responsible for our current state of military unpreparedness?

[A] Liddy: Oh, there's an element of that, sure, as there is in any bureaucracy, military or civilian. But by and large, the military does the best with what it has. We just haven't given it enough. For the past ten years, the proportion of the gross national product we spend on defense has steadily declined, while the proportion the Soviets spend has steadily increased. And today we're paying the price for that systematic neglect. Whether we like it or not, we are already in a state of strategic and conventional inferiority, and there's little likelihood the situation will improve appreciably in the near future. It's not just Carter's fault, either, though he has a lot to answer for. The fact is that a great many Americans, including significant opinion-molding elements of the media, have been living in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land as far as national defense goes. It's the Charlie the Tuna syndrome all over again--if we just ignore the bad news, it'll go away. As in Afghanistan, reality has an unpleasant habit of waking us up with a rifle butt hammering at the door in the middle of the night. The only question is if we'll learn our lesson in time, and if our national will is sufficient to face the challenges ahead. In the long run, you know, a nation's psychology is far more crucial than its military hardware. My Oriental instructor in the martial arts taught me that the outcome of a battle is decided in the minds of the opponents well before the first blow is struck. We certainly saw that in the France of 1940. The French had more troops, more tanks, more guns than the Germans, more of almost everything except the fanatic and disciplined esprit de corps of the German fighting man. Hitler's secret weapon wasn't the brilliant and imaginative coupling of Panzer and Stuka in concerted ground-air attack; it was the courage of the individual Wehrmacht soldier, each of whom carried blitzkrieg in his breast. Can you imagine what Rommel's Afrika Korps would do with today's volunteer Army, the Army that "wants to join you," as the recruiting posters said? Jesus, they'd chew us up and spit us out in no time flat. We couldn't fight our way out of a wet paper bag today.

[Q] Playboy: The admiration for the German fighting spirit you've just expressed, and your general fascination with all things German, is an underlying leitmotiv of Will, and has assumed sinister overtones in the eyes of some critics, who accuse you of being a closet Nazi sympathizer. Could they be right?

[A] Liddy: They couldn't be more wrong. It's true that I do admire the mentality of the northern Teutonic races, not only their fighting spirit but also, and equally important, their work ethic and sense of discipline. I find all those values admirable, and have always identified with them. But I have absolutely no sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Remember, German history spans thousands of years, and the 12 years of the Third Reich was no more than a historical aberration. One of the many tragic aspects of the holocaust is that the very German virtues I have enumerated--discipline, efficiency, the ability to subordinate emotion to duty--were perverted into the organized annihilation of millions of innocent civilians, not only Jews but gypsies and Slavs as well. To me, that is the antithesis of all the things I admire about the German martial spirit, and it is a stain on German honor from which the country will take many years to recover. But in fairness, I can also admire the sheer courage and military genius of German soldiers like Rommel who took no part in such atrocities, and maintained their and their country's honor intact. But for Adolf Hitler and the psychopathic scum in the concentration camps who butchered babies on an assembly line because they were born into the wrong race, I have nothing but contempt.

[Q] Playboy: Many reviewers of your autobiography have speculated, nonetheless, that if you had been born in Germany, you would have made one hell of a Nazi.

[A] Liddy: What can you really say to something like that? I mean, shit, I'm just as interested in the extraordinarily deep and rich culture of Japan, and equally fascinated by the traditional Bushido code of the samurai warrior. What're they going to say about that? "Oh, Liddy would have flown a Zero at Pearl Harbor"? Come on.

[Q] Playboy: If you had been born in Germany and been of fighting age in World War Two, would you have served in Hitler's armies?

[A] Liddy: Well, that's all extremely hypothetical, of course. Here you are slapping me down in another culture and another time and asking how I'd behave. Would I have been conditioned by my society into accepting Hitler as a savior, as our German maid did in the Thirties? I certainly hope not, and, in fact, I suspect just the opposite. I can accept and serve authority I respect, but against authority that I despise, I quickly turn to rebellion, as I did in the slammer when I fought the prison administration tooth and nail. In the case of Germany, you must remember that I'm a political conservative, and I respect tradition and the values of Western culture, and so I think it far more likely I would have joined those conservatives and Catholics who tried to overthrow Hitler. Like Carl Goerdeler, or Count von Stauffenberg, the heroic German officer who had lost an arm, hand and eye on the Eastern front but returned to almost blow Hitler to smithereens at Rastenburg during the July 20th plot in 1944. And who, needless to say, was executed by the Gestapo shortly afterward. But yes, like Stauffenberg as well, I'm sure I would have fought for my country, probably in the Luftwaffe or a Panzer division. But it's all sheer speculation, of course. Next you'll be asking where I keep my Iron Cross!

[Q] Playboy: If Hitler had abjured anti-Semitism and genocide, could you have supported him?

[A] Liddy: No. It would have made his regime less loathsome, of course, but he'd still have been a dictator, and Nazi Germany would still have been a totalitarian state. Again, as a conservative, I support the concept of a society that, whenever possible, is voluntary and noncoercive. As I explained when discussing the upheavals of the Sixties, there are times when the state, to preserve that very humane society, must intrude into the privacy and freedom of the individual, but it should be done as sparingly as possible, and only in response to a clear and present danger to the very stability and security of the society. A totalitarian state, by its very nature, permanently imposes itself as the master of the individual, and thus is inherently abhorrent to me. Some, like Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia, are bloodier than others, but all are ultimately destructive of the human spirit.

[Q] Playboy: Your abhorrence of Hitler's genocide certainly sounds sincere, but it only makes your own fascination with the Nazi era more perplexing. For example, if you really loathed everything Hitler stood for, why did you go out of your way to arrange a special screening of Leni Riefenstahl's classic Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, for a group of top White House aides?

[A] Liddy: Well, you've got to understand the background to that. John Ehrlichman and others who had run Nixon's 1968 campaign were always regaling people about what great advance men they'd been, and what giant rallies they'd organized, with balloons going up in the air by the hundreds, and on and on ad nauseam. I got so bored hearing about those "mammoth rallies" of theirs that finally I said, "Hey, you guys, you want to see a real rally?" They took the bait and I set up a private screening of Triumph of the Will at the National Archives for the entire White House staff. It really is an impressive film, you know, there's no doubt that Riefenstahl's a cinematic genius. Well, about 15 people attended, and they sat there watching hundreds of thousands of storm troopers marching in mass formations under Albert Speer's spectacular stage management, a vast field of people standing to sing the Horst Wessel Lied at night as giant antiaircraft spotlights beam pillars of light through the clouds overhead, creating a luminous, cathedral-of-stars effect. In short, a really overwhelming display. And finally, when the lights came on, there was a moment of awed silence, and then from the back of the room a voice breathed reverently, "Jesus! What an advance job!" My point, it seems, was taken.

[Q] Playboy: Forgetting for a moment the obvious negative connotations of the word fascism, and keeping in mind your professed detestation of Hitler's genocide, don't you, in fact, embody most of the traditional values of Italian and Spanish fascism, if not of Nazism--i.e., duty, honor, love of fatherland, military élan and semimystical exaltation of personal and national will and destiny, strong anticommunism, genetic determinism, contempt for the herd, etc.? And, thus, couldn't you fairly and objectively be termed a fascist in that sense?

[A] Liddy: No, because if you're going to be at all precise and objective in your evaluation of comparative political systems, then fascism refers to a specific political movement that evolved in Italy in the Twenties and was subsequently emulated in various countries in Europe and Latin America. It embodies the concept of blind obedience, the corporate state, dictatorial, centralized one-man rule and a host of other totalitarian mechanisms and concepts that are all anathema to me. And I certainly don't think that some of the qualities you enumerate, such as duty, honor, love of country and military strength, are exclusive attributes of fascism. Indeed, when I was growing up, they were much praised and universally aspired-to virtues in this country. I hope they will be again. But that certainly does not make me a fascist of any stripe.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you sing the Horst Wessel song at the top of your lungs to a black audience in prison?

[A] Liddy: Because I had become the subject of racial prejudice myself while in the Washington jail, shortly after my initial conviction. I ran a daily gauntlet of racial slurs from the predominantly black prisoners, and even though I told myself it shouldn't get under my skin, it finally did. I was in deadlock, so I couldn't even challenge to a fight the prisoners who hurled their taunts through the bars. I had my opportunity to strike back one morning when a guard escorted me to the showers. As I walked down the catwalk, a chorus of jeers greeted me: "Honkie!" "White movafuck!" I was mad at the racial epithets and I said to myself: "OK, baby, if you want racist, here's racist!" I knew the words to the Horst Wessel song by heart from childhood, when I'd first heard it from Germany on our family short-wave radio, and I have a fairly strong voice. So when I reached the showers, I burst into full and rousing song, my voice booming through the cell block: " 'Die Fahne hoch!' " I sang. "Raise the flag!" As I went on, screaming out my frustration through the echoing tiers of the prison, the jeers and catcalls began to fall off. " 'Die Reihen dicht geschlossen!...'" The din gradually silenced, and by the time I reached the second verse of the Horst Wessel song, my voice was the only one that could be heard in the cell block. It was almost eerie, because I'm sure there was not one other man in that prison who understood one word of what I was singing. But they all got the message.

[Q] Playboy: That initial hostility you encountered from blacks changed pretty rapidly as you began doing free legal work for black and white prisoners alike, and challenging prison administrators in the courts on questions of prisoners' rights. In fact, you ended up becoming something of a hero to inmates of both races. Did your experience in prison change any of your own racial attitudes?

[A] Liddy: Not really, because I had always abhorred racial prejudice and bigotry, even though I'm perfectly willing to answer back in kind when I'm on the receiving end, as the incident I just related indicates. But I think racism is one of the most stupid and ultimately wasteful of all human vices, because it denies a man's potential and worth for something as superficial and frivolous as the color of his skin. Throughout my life, I've had good and productive relationships with blacks. I also tend to particularly admire the virtues of the northern races, perhaps out of frustration with my own genetic composition. I have more Irish and Italian genes than German, and my hot Southern blood has always caused me serious problems with my temper, which it took me a long, hard struggle to govern. And I also happen to prefer the Nordic type of woman, as an aesthetic preference. I hardly think the song Gentlemen Prefer Blondes can be condemned as a racist pronunciamento! But I also think blacks should take pride in their African ancestry. My God, if I could demonstrate I had some Zulu blood, I sure as hell would be proud of it, because the Zulu warriors were some of the finest fighting men on the face of this earth.

[Q] Playboy: Leaving black-white issues aside, throughout your book you express a fascination with genetics and eugenics, even to the point of cold-bloodedly selecting your prospective bride according to the contribution she would make to your "family gene pool." How did she feel about that?

[A] Liddy: Well, it was not exactly an element I played up in our courtship. But even though it wasn't the most romantic of all considerations, I think it's a valid one, nonetheless. There's a good deal of truth to eugenics as long as you don't carry it to extremes, as we've done in the past with involuntary-sterilization plans and that kind of dangerous scheme, with all its potential for abuse. It had taken me a long time to build myself up from a puny, sickly child, so I wanted my own children to have a running start. That's why I determined that my smartest course was to marry a tall girl of Celtic-Teutonic ancestry who also had a terrific mind. And, as a result, I have five strong, athletic and bright children. Of course, all those considerations have to be coupled with a mutual emotional compatability, but they were definite factors in selecting my mate.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you also run a security check on your wife's background through the FBI's central computer before you married?

[A] Liddy: Purely a routine precautionary measure.

[Q] Playboy: Did your wife know of your security check on her, as well as your evaluation of her as potentially good breeding stock?

[A] Liddy: Oh, yes, we discussed it. But it never upset her. After all, it's probably the least of the problems she's had in our marriage. Next to being sent away for 20 years, what the hell is a little security check, right?

[Q] Playboy: Did your four and a half years in prison have any negative effects on your marriage?

[A] Liddy: Well, it certainly wasn't an easy period, but you'll remember I had selected my wife very carefully, and she came through the whole ordeal with flying colors. She was really tremendous, the way she brought up the kids and kept the family together. She went back to teaching, in the Washington, D.C., school system, and her salary managed to keep our leaky financial boat afloat. The kids all worked and chipped in their share, too.

[Q] Playboy: How badly were you hit by the legal fees for your several trials?

[A] Liddy: Oh, I was wiped out. When I got out of prison, I owed $300,000 in legal costs, plus the $40,000 fine our old pal John Sirica had imposed, which President Carter didn't waive when he commuted my sentence and made me eligible for parole. I had to swear out a pauper's oath and I lost my license to practice law, of course.

Fortunately, due to the two books I've written, I've managed to cut the debt down to $200,000, and royalties from the sale of Will should reduce it further. I'll be happy just to wake up one morning and say to Frances, "Eureka, honey, we're plain flat broke at last!"

[Q] Playboy: How did you handle prolonged sexual abstinences during your imprisonment?

[A] Liddy: With some variations, I took the old tried-and-tested ice-cold-shower route, I exercised a great deal, and I also severely restricted my caloric intake, which I discovered also reduced my sexual appetite. Again, it's a question of will power.

[Q] Playboy: What was the impact of your imprisonment on your relationship with your children?

[A] Liddy: Well, the single most important thing was that I was out of their lives during their formative period of adolescence, which, naturally, I regret. But there again, my wife did a marvelous job of bringing up the kids, even while she had to hold down her schoolteaching job. And without sounding like an indulgent father, all the kids have turned out great; they're all uniformly high achievers.

[Q] Playboy: Your children seem remarkably well adjusted, considering the pain and anxiety they must have experienced during your trial and imprisonment. Were they also spared the misery and insecurity you experienced as a child, and describe at length in Will?

[A] Liddy: Oh, yes, they had normal, healthy and happy childhoods. Nothing like the hell I went through. But then, they're all strong kids, mentally and physically.

[Q] Playboy: In the book, you dramatically recount that unhappy and terror-ridden childhood, and take apparent pride in your grueling campaign to conquer your "weaknesses" and overcome your morbid fears by turning yourself into a fearless machine trained to kill without emotions. But couldn't your critics equally well depict that entire process as profoundly neurotic, as well as an extirpation of those very values and emotions that produce a well-integrated and mature adult?

[A] Liddy: My critics are quite obviously free to do as they choose and to make what interpretations they wish. But I pay so much attention to this area in Will precisely because it's at the root of who I am, and how I became what I am. I am, in a very literal and non-economic sense, a self-made man. And therefore, if you wish to understand me, you must first try to understand the struggle I waged with myself as a child. It was a kind of psychic guerrilla war between the person I was, and despised, and the person I wanted to become. And it was a terrifically difficult period in my life, which I remember with no more nostalgia than I would a car crash. Fortunately, it was a battle that I ultimately won.

[Q] Playboy: What was at the root of that inner struggle?

[A] Liddy: Well, let me fill you in on the background. I was a sickly, puny and miserable little child. I suffered from a serious bronchial condition, which necessitated spending long hours under a tent breathing medicated steam, and I consistently flunked my tuberculosis patch test. I didn't have asthma, but there was something badly wrong with my lungs, and to this day X rays show scar tissue. For a while, I was so ill that my father, who was a very successful international lawyer, was afraid he might have to transplant the entire family to Arizona, which would have been disastrous for his practice. Now on top of all this, I was born into a family of very high achievers, as my mother used to make clear to me when discussing our relatives and our family history. But she never made invidious comparisons between them and the pathetic little invalid to whom she was spooning broth. She didn't have to. I made them myself. And to add further to my self-loathing, I was absolutely riddled with fear, obsessed and consumed with it. I literally lived in terror.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of fears?

[A] Liddy: You name it, I was afraid of it. I was paralyzed by thunder and lightning; I feared fire and electricity; the dirigibles that passed over our house on the way to Lakehurst made me shake and gibber; I was afraid of moths, ever since one cast a terrifying giant shadow on the wall of my room as I lay wheezing in my steam tent; I was deathly afraid of rats; I feared the leather harness my grandmother used to beat me with; I feared my own left hand, as my mother tried to force me uncomprehendingly into right-handedness; and most of all, I feared God, the God of my good nuns at parochial school, Whom I was taught was omnipotent and terrible in His punishment of sinners, and Whom I knew was sitting up there with a thunderbolt just waiting for the right minute to whack out this contemptible little cringing coward of a kid named Gordon Liddy. I was, in short, afraid of my own shadow, and I knew that I couldn't go on living like that. So at the age of six or seven, I decided to do something about it.

[Q] Playboy: What?

[A] Liddy: The thing I most dreaded: stand and confront my fears, and vanquish them. The problem was, I had so many goddamned fears that I knew there was no hope of taking them on all at once. So I realized that I'd have to face them one at a time. And to do this, I realized I'd need something called will power. I'd learned the importance of that from the priests at Sunday Mass, and also from listening to Adolf Hitler with our pro-Nazi German maid Teresa over the Emerson short-wave radio.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics contend that childhood flirtation with Hitler was the beginning of a lifelong infatuation.

[A] Liddy: No, not at all, it had nothing to do with Hitler's political message, which I was hardly competent to comprehend at the age of six or seven, though I'd picked up enough Deutsch from classmates in our predominantly German New Jersey neighborhood to get the gist. It was the combination of the stirring German martial music and the incredible self-confidence and power Hitler's voice radiated that had such an overwhelming effect on me. I mean, he is generally regarded as being the most effective orator of the 20th Century, and just as his words mesmerized the masses in Germany, so they influenced me. Here was the very antithesis of fear and cowardice, a towering figure of sheer primitive force and determination, quite literally an exemplar of the "triumph of the will." And after the broadcasts, Teresa explained to me that Adolf Hitler had resurrected his nation on earth and delivered it from fear! Those last words truly galvanized me and gave me hope for the first time. If Adolf Hitler could free Germany from fear, then I could free myself. What a great nation had accomplished, one seven-year-old boy could emulate. It would require pain, and suffering, but I now accepted the breath-taking idea that I could become anything I wanted to be.

[Q] Playboy: So you became the nicest storm trooper on the block.

[A] Liddy: Oh, come on, I didn't give a hoot for Hitler's politics. I didn't know what politics was. And I derived a similar psychic shot in the arm from the fireside chats of F.D.R., particularly his message that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." That really struck home. But those broadcasts were certainly catalysts in my decision to conquer my own terror, to metamorphose myself.

[Q] Playboy: How did you go about it?

[A] Liddy: Like a war, one campaign at a time. For example, to conquer my fear of thunder, I waited for a big storm and then sneaked out of the house and climbed up a 75-foot oak tree and lashed myself to the trunk with my belt. As the storm hit and chaos roared around me and the sky was rent with thunder and lightning, I shook my fist at the rolling black clouds and screamed, "Kill me! Go ahead and try! I don't care! I don't care!" As the storm subsided, I heard my father ordering me to come down. As I lowered myself to the ground, he shook his head and said, "I just don't understand you." "I know," I said.

I repeated this kind of confrontation over a period of years, mastering one fear after another. I was afraid of electricity, so I scraped off an electrical wire and let ten volts course through me; I feared heights, so I scaled high buildings with one of my friends; I overcame my fear of the dirigibles by visiting the palisades, where the great Hindenburg would have to pass just a few hundred feet above me, so close that the ground shook under my feet from the roar of its four huge 1100-horsepower Mercedes-Benz diesel engines. And I went on down the line of my fears, testing myself against them over and over again until finally they were vanquished. And all this time I was also building myself up physically, exercising, bicycling, running, and finally, by my teens, I ended up being on the state championship cross-country team. By the time I graduated from prep school at the age of 17, I was physically in excellent shape and psychologically self-assured to the point of cockiness. It hadn't been easy, but I had won. Like a plastic surgeon operating on himself. I had grafted on successive layers of strength and courage until I was at last able to face the world.

[Q] Playboy: Probably the most dramatic, and certainly the most celebrated, example of the lengths to which you were willing to go to overcome your fears was the incident in which you ate a rat. Would you describe that for us?

[A] Liddy: Well, I didn't eat the entire rat, just the hindquarters. Of course, the genesis of that repast was my inordinate terror of rats, which abounded on the Jersey wharves along the Hudson River near my home in West Caldwell, some of them as big as cats. Then one day when I was 11 years old. our pet cat caught and killed a rat and deposited it proudly on our back doorstep as a trophy. Well, I'd been reading about how some American Indian tribes ate the hearts of the bravest of their enemies in order to ingest their valor, and suddenly the idea came to me, why not do something similar with my old rodent nemesis? I assembled a makeshift barbecue out of some bricks, cooked the dead rat for about an hour, then skinned and ate the roasted haunches. Alter I buried the remains, I saw our cat and smiled to myself, thinking that henceforth rats would have to fear me as much as cats.

[Q] Playboy: Now to the most profound and far-reaching question of this interview. What does rat meat taste like?

[A] Liddy: Stringy and rather tasteless, as I recall. I certainly never acquired the taste, though the Washington Star polled the top French chefs in Washington after my book came out and the consensus of culinary opinion was that while I might be competent in other areas, I was a distinct flop at preparing rat. I really felt very chagrined. One chef, as I recall, was quite indignant that I had broiled the beast, contending that the only proper way to serve rat is roasted. Everyone had his own recipe, but they were all down on mine. Ah, well, I've never pretended to be Julia Child. Chacun à son goÛt.

[Q] Playboy: Over the years, you've not only broiled rat to test your will power, you've broiled yourself, toasting your hand and forearm over an open flame to prove your powers of endurance and immunity to pain. Isn't that carrying the whole business pretty far?

[A] Liddy: Well, that began as an effort to overcome my fear of fire as well as pain, so I started burning myself with cigarettes and candles to see if I could stand it, initially just searing myself and then enduring more serious burns. Actually, this is a form of self-testing well known and understood in the East but largely unknown to Western civilization. As I built my will, I subjected my body to doses of pain much as a weight lifter builds his muscles by lifting progressively heavier weights. After severely burning the tendon in my left hand, however, almost to the point of incapacitating myself, I realized I would have to be more careful. And, of course, I would never burn my gun hand.

[Q] Playboy: Of course. But incidents such as your mortification of the flesh by fire have led some of your more psychiatrically oriented critics to suggest that you feel a compulsion to demonstrate a "super-macho" image in order to overcome deep-rooted sources of personal insecurity, perhaps even lingering subconscious doubts about your own masculinity. How would you respond to them?

[A] Liddy: Well, those anonymous critics of yours might do well to ponder Adlai Stevenson's observation that he who throws mud generally loses ground. No, this was a means of testing and perfecting my will, and in my case, it proved eminently successful. And I stress, in my case. I'm not advocating anyone else emulate me, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that everybody go out and toast his hand over open flame like a marshmallow. I'm only saying that for me it was a useful tool. As for this whole business of being macho or super-macho, of which I've been accused frequently, it's just not true. Of course, macho was originally a perfectly respectable Spanish term for a manly man, a designation I'd feel perfectly comfortable with, but in recent years it's been expropriated as a code word by the women's liberation movement and twisted into a pejorative Archie Bunkerish caricature of the loutish, leering male who believes that the only natural position for women in this world is horizontal. A kind of Kinder, Kirche, Küche attitude, which I certainly have never subscribed to. In fact, the type of woman I appreciate and respect is not only physically attractive but strong-willed and intelligent, certainly not the submissive dumb-blonde type, or "airheads," as my kids would call them. I believe that such women are every bit as capable of intelligence, strength, discipline and perception as a man.

[Q] Playboy: For better or worse, your public image is still that of a nut case, and it's doubtful that the success of your autobiography will alter it appreciably. Does it bother you that millions of people think you're rowing with one oar?

[A] Liddy: Not in the least. As I said earlier, I've never been concerned with image or reputation, only character. I've tried to be ruthlessly honest about my life and my values and my motivations in Will, and that's all I can do. From there on, it's up to the reader to make his own judgments, and if he concludes that I'm loosely wrapped, so be it. I would not be displeased, of course, if after reading the book and this interview, people will understand me a bit better, even if they disagree totally with my politics and my actions.

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, a number of critics have made a Freudian analysis of your book and concluded that not only your hand burning but also your willingness to be a human sacrifice on the altar of the disintegrating Nixon Administration is evidence of a strong streak of masochism in your character. How would you respond?

[A] Liddy: I'd respond with the words Joseph Stalin addressed to Leon Trotsky at a Communist Party Congress in Moscow at the height of their struggle for power in the Twenties: Everybody has a right to be stupid, but some people abuse the privilege. And just let me add a serious note here. For any of your readers who think that my childhood struggles with myself or my later attempts to build my will and endurance were just eccentricities, harmless or otherwise, I'd suggest that they put themselves in my place in a filthy and sweltering prison cell, stripped naked under solitary confinement and at the mercy of dumb and often brutal captors. I did not succumb to that pressure-cooker atmosphere, because I had spent my youth, however unwittingly, preparing for just such an eventuality, as it I had been in training for a battle I never knew would be fought. Prison held no terrors for me, because I had already conquered my own weaknesses. Watergate and its aftermath only tempered steel that had been forged in the furnace of my inner struggle 40 years before.

[Q] Playboy: We've deliberately avoided recapitulating the minutiae of Watergate, because you've covered it in such depth in your book and in radio and television interviews around the country. But there are a few areas of interest that you have not touched on, including H. R. Haldeman's contention that "the overwhelming evidence leads to the conclusion that the break-in was deliberately sabotaged." Could Watergate have been a setup?

[A] Liddy: No, I don't believe so. I don't think there was anything more sinister involved than bad luck and bad timing. Of course, the conspiracy buffs will maintain that the break-in was deliberately bungled as part of some massive conspiracy of agents and double agents and quadruple agents to topple Nixon, but I just don't believe it.

[Q] Playboy: Not only conspiracy buffs maintain there was more involved at Watergate than meets the eye. Again, H. R. Haldeman suspects that "the CIA was an agency hostile to Nixon, who returned the hostility with fervor," and adds that throughout the Watergate investigation, "the multiple levels of deception by the CIA are astounding." Haldeman tends to support the thesis that Watergate was, in fact, a highly sophisticated CIA plot to destroy Nixon--in effect, the CIA's first domestic coup d'état. Could he be right?

[A] Liddy: It's very, very unlikely. First of all, there was friction between Helms and Nixon, but it wasn't the deadly, bitter type of feud that this CIA-conspiracy scenario presupposes. It was more of a question of bad chemistry between Helms and Nixon, and, in fact, general bad chemistry between the CIA and the Administration. Traditionally, you know, the CIA has been a very WASPish, Ivy League, old-school-tie-type organization, and Richard Nixon's entire background was very different. He didn't feel comfortable with them, and vice versa. But to extrapolate from that to a full-fledged conspiracy theory verges on paranoia.

[Q] Playboy: Proponents of the theory that the CIA manipulated the Watergate break-in and cover-up for its own ends suggest that Jim McCord, a former CIA security chief who was intensely loyal to the agency, deliberately sabotaged the Watergate break-in in order to cripple the Nixon White House and frustrate its attempts to centralize control of the intelligence community.

[A] Liddy: Yes, and I think they're dead wrong. McCord may have bungled the taping of the internal doors, all right, but remember Hanlon's Razor, which is a maxim that states: "Never blame on malice that which can be fully explained by stupidity." It's true McCord was very loyal to the CIA, but I just can't accept the concept that he deliberately set out to be caught, and I don't believe he was a double agent who cold-bloodedly betrayed his colleagues. I do condemn his decision to break ranks with the containment strategy. But I think he was at the point of cracking from the strain of imprisonment, and his actions were those of a desperate and obsessed man. He even felt that the CIA had abandoned him, and as a deeply religious man, he wanted to get back on the side of the angels. But I don't believe for one moment that he deliberately sold us out.

[Q] Playboy: Haldeman implies that Hunt was a serving CIA agent throughout the period he was involved in Watergate. Is he correct?

[A] Liddy: Hunt might have been, yes.

[Q] Playboy: And Charles Colson was equally convinced that Hunt was spying on the White House for the CIA.

[A] Liddy: Spying is a somewhat loaded word. He might have relayed information back to Langley if he was still on the CIA payroll, which I do not know to be a fact, but I doubt there was anything sinister or conspiratorial about it.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that exactly what you would be saying if you were, in fact, a secret CIA agent?

[A] Liddy: Yes, I suppose it is. It just happens to be the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Haldeman wrote in his book The Ends of Power that you and Hunt were "getting directions...on behalf of the CIA and the CIA's silent partner, Howard Hughes." He adds that "we didn't know that a CIA employee was, in effect, running a White House team." Were you and Hunt, as Haldeman implies, serving as stalking-horses for the CIA? Or, even more seriously, and as some Watergate investigators suspected, were you really a secret CIA agent yourself, a kind of agency Trojan horse within the White House, rather than the Nixon loyalist you professed to be? And isn't it conceivable that you "stonewalled" your way through court and into prison not to protect Nixon but your actual superiors in the covert-operations arm of the CIA?

[A] Liddy: That's absolute nonsense. I've never been a CIA officer of any sort, and I resent the accusation that 1 was operating against the interests of my President. I believed then and I believe now that he was a splendid leader of this country, and I think the extraordinarily disastrous last three and a half years under Jimmy Carter has only served to demonstrate by contrast how superb was the Presidency of Richard Nixon. I think I'm more of a Nixon loyalist than Haldeman not only is but ever was.

[Q] Playboy: Throughout the course of this interview, you've been relaxed and cooperative, even under occasionally harsh questioning, and you seem genuinely pleased by the success of your best-selling autobiography. In fact, all the time we've been together, you haven't issued a single assassination threat or gouged out one eyeball. Is it possible that the Gordon Liddy so many liberals love to hate is finally mellowing?

[A] Liddy: [Chuckling] If you really think that, then why did you hide all the pencils? Anyway, the Liddy family crest is, or at least should be, Nil illegitimis carborundum--"Don't let the bastards get you down." But no, seriously, this has been a most pleasant and enjoyable discussion, and you have offered me no offense and I, of course, have responded in kind. I am no danger whatsoever to anyone who does not wish me ill. Had you behaved differently, of course, I might have responded in kind, and more in keeping with the somewhat sensational image you suggest I have. But I don't think I'm mellowing. I've lived on the razor's edge all my life and don't intend to jettison my beliefs or values now. I've paid too heavy a price for them. In any case, I find life a tremendously exciting, perpetually renewing adventure. I'm never bored, thank God, and I'm always searching for one big dragon to slay. Of course, the lesson you learn is that dragons are Hydra-headed, and as soon as you kill one, another springs up. Which, of course, is what makes the game worth the playing. God, wouldn't it be a drag if all that came along was a pussycat?

[Q] Playboy: Nietzsche, whom you admire, wrote that "he who fights the dragon becomes the dragon."

[A] Liddy: Tell that to Saint George. All I can do is pledge to make it a fair and honorable fight. That's all anyone can do in life.

[Q] Playboy: Gordon Liddy, were you born in the wrong century? Are you an anachronism?

[A] Liddy: No, I don't think so. I'm not saying I wouldn't have enjoyed living in ancient Sparta, and I would certainly be right at home as a condottiere in Renaissance Italy, hopefully in the day of Machiavelli, whom 1 consider the greatest political philosopher of all time. But I'm quite content in this century, not that I have much choice in the matter. I know a great many people do consider me a throwback and an anachronism, but if the virtues and values that I respect and to which I adhere are outdated, then I suspect that there are millions of anachronisms in America who share the same value system and, if put to the test, will demonstrate it. I really have a tremendous amount of faith in the people of this country, and I think that once they shed the scales of illusion that currently afflict them and see the world as it really is, we will once again be capable of a remarkable national cohesion and dynamism, such as we saw in the course of the Second World War. And I'm glad we have that potential, because I believe another war is imminent.

[Q] Playboy: Will you be in the front ranks?

[A] Liddy: Well, let's put it this way. Shortly after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, a new Chief of Naval Operations was appointed, Admiral King, who up to that time had enjoyed a reputation as the meanest son of a bitch in the Service, and for that reason had been sent out recruiting in Iowa, as the saying goes. Now, all of a sudden, he was the new Chief of Naval Operations, and the Washington press corps rushed to his office and asked, "Admiral, how do you explain this phenomenon of your sudden ascendancy, passing over so many senior officers?" And King said, "When the bullets start to fly, they come looking for the sons of bitches." And perhaps, when the bullets start to fly again, they'll come looking for me. When and if they do, I'll be there.

[Q] Playboy: When the French Foreign Legion, which you admire, was marched out of their headquarters at Sidi bel Abbès in Algeria under guard for their role in an abortive military coup against De Gaulle, the men defiantly sang one of Edith Piaf's famous songs, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien--I Regret Nothing. Would you agree with their sentiments?

[A] Liddy: Agree? It's my goddamn theme song!

"If we'd tried to whack out every Washington reporter who had it in for Nixon, the National Press Club would've held nothing but wall-to-wall memorial plaques."

"I would have knifed Jack Anderson or broken his neck, probably. One of us would have died, no doubt about it."

"With all the post-Watergate paranoia that's still floating about, I'm surprised we haven't yet been blamed for the sinking of the Lusitania."

"I know you're disappointed, but I can't place myself in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository."

"Carter's religious beliefs aren't private anymore, damn it; they're at the root of his whole Easter Bunny approach to running this country."

"Lenin was historically correct when he said, 'Treaties are like piecrust; they are made to be broken.' "