Conservatives Without Conscience

As a hard news story Silent Coup was now for certain dead and would undoubtedly have been headed for the remainder table, but St. Martin’s had a lot of money tied up in it, and was determined to make it a best seller. Their plan was to sell the book to Nixon apologists and right-wingers, giving them a new history of Nixon’s downfall in which Bob Woodward, Al Haig, and John Dean were the villains, and randy Democrats had all but invited surveillance. Who better to peddle this tale than uber-conservative Gordon Liddy? Although we did not know it at the time, Liddy had been a behind-the-scenes collaborator with Colodny in developing, sourcing, and writing Silent Coup ’s version of the Deans’ involvement in Watergate. In fact, without Liddy’s support St. Martin’s might well have abandoned the project, for neither Colodny nor Gettlin had actually written it. St. Martin’s had hired a freelancer, Tom Shachtman, to assemble a story based on material that Liddy and other right-wingers had helped Colodny assemble. Schactman himself was contractually immunized from any legal liability, and shortly before Silent Coup ’s publication, St. Martin’s had doubled its insurance coverage for defamation and worked out a plan for Liddy, who was already a St. Martin’s author, to lead a charge to the bestseller list. To compensate Liddy for his efforts, and to give him an excuse to be out promoting, St. Martin’s reissued a paperback edition of his autobiography, Will, with a new postscript that embraced Silent Coup as the definitive account on Watergate. In that material Liddy claimed, without any explanation, that I had duped him in “an exercise in sleight-of-hand worthy of The Amazing Randi himself,” and that he had not truly understood Watergate until Colodny explained to him what had purportedly transpired, by telling him of Phillip Bailley’s story. According to this revised accounting of history, Liddy’s former partner-in-crime Howard Hunt was merely my pawn, working secretly for me unbeknownst to Liddy. (And unbeknownst to Howard Hunt as well, for he, too, denied the Silent Coup account.)

Liddy’s involvement in this specious attack did not surprise me. He had once planned to kill both Howard Hunt and me, he had said in Will, but his orders to do so had never come—although he did not say who he expected would send them. “Howard Hunt had become an informer,” he wrote, and when Hunt agreed to testify he became “a betrayer of his friends, and to me there is nothing lower on earth…. Hunt deserved to die.” About me, Liddy wrote that the “difference between Hunt and Dean is the difference between a POW who breaks under torture and aids the enemy, and Judas Iscariot.”[2] The subtext of Liddy’s statement is that the U.S. government had become his enemy and that Richard Nixon had become something of a Christ figure for him. Attacking Howard Hunt and me was consistent with both his conservative politics and his personality. He sought to resurrect Nixon for conservatives and blame others for his destroyed presidency. His attacks on Mo, however, were inexplicable. It did not strike me as consistent with his macho perception of himself to attack a noncombatant woman, yet he traveled the country repeating the false story that Phillip Bailley had told him. Clearly, Silent Coup had come at a perfect time for Liddy. Since the first publication of Will in 1980 he had made a living by putting his dysfunctional personality on display. By the early nineties speaking engagements were becoming less frequent for him, and his business ventures, including several novels, were unsuccessful. Silent Coup put him back in the spotlight, where he loved to be—publicly misbehaving.