Watergate began with sex: Liddy

NEW YORK - One of the distinctions that Bill Clinton's friends drew between the 1998 impeachment battle and Watergate was that the recently departed President's troubles were only about sex.

That was not entirely true at the time and may soon be even further removed from the facts after a Baltimore jury failed to reach a verdict this week in a case that has pushed two of Richard Nixon's aged henchmen back into the spotlight.

At centre-stage, fuming beneath the shiny dome of his shaved and polished head, is none other than G. Gordon Liddy, then and now the most fanatical of all the President's men.

Alone among the Watergate conspirators, Liddy refused to testify about what the burglars he was supervising were up to when a security guard stumbled upon them late at night inside the Democratic Party's headquarters. His fellow phoney plumbers from the White House cut deals, implicated their friends and, eventually, provided the testimony that brought down the President they had served in so many nefarious ways.

But from Liddy, not a word - which is why, while former comrades were sent away for a year or two, the former FBI agent scored 20 years of hard labour.

"My father didn't raise a snitch or a rat," the defiant Liddy proclaimed before being led away to begin paying his debt to society. Thanks to Jimmy Carter, who commuted the sentence after 52 months, Liddy was back on the street in time to revel in Republican joys of the Reagan years.

Broke, barred for life from practising law, Liddy had every reason to end his silence and dish dirt for dollars. Watergate was still in the realm of current events rather than the historical curio it has become with the passage of time, and publishers were prepared to pay big for the answers to so many unanswered questions.

What did Nixon know? What were the burglars looking for? How many other break-ins did they stage?

Yet Nixon's last soldier uttered not a word.Until this week, that is, when he took the stand in Baltimore and testified about Watergate for the first time. Like everything else about his life, Liddy's perspective was anything but orthodox.

On the other side, though not the plaintiff of record in the latest libel trial, was Nixon's nemesis, John Dean, the White House aide who ran the dirty tricks department and later told Watergate investigators everything they wanted to know about what he memorably described as a cancer on the presidency.

Although more than a quarter of a century has passed, the mutual hatred that continues to bind Liddy and Dean remains as strong as ever.

At issue was Liddy's claim that Watergate, like Clinton's more recent troubles, was all about sex. The burglars were not after political intelligence, Liddy said, so much as an album of Washington call-girls whom he claimed were supplied to visiting Democratic dignitaries upon request.

According to Liddy, Dean ordered the break-in because his future wife, Maureen, was one of those party girls and he needed the photos to blackmail the Democrats - and stop them blackmailing him. This was a John Dean op, Liddy told the court in a voice that rang with steel-willed certainty.

It was a typical Liddy performance, one that connoisseurs of his antics had been anticipating with something like the excitement felt by children awaiting Christmas. Not only would the testimony represent Liddy's first sworn words about Watergate, it was also a chance to catch what has now become a very polished routine of self-promotion.

Liddy began building the image not long after his release from prison, when he responded to publishers' requests for a Watergate tell-all by instead penning Will, the biography in which he hailed Hitler as an inspiration and recalled overcoming his fear of rats by eating one. To master pain, he held his hand over a candle flame until the flesh blackened and bubbled.

The best-seller relaunched Liddy's life and career. Offers poured in from Hollywood to play TV villains, including one pitch from the producers of Miami Vice, who insisted that he shave his head for the part. Liddy liked the look so much, he has sported a bald pate ever since, setting off the shiny dome with a dyed-black moustache that bristles like a toxic fungus atop his letterbox lips.

Then came the speaking engagements at $US10,000 ($22,260) an appearance, followed by a radio show that is now beamed daily across America by a network of more than 200 stations.

It all added up, so much so that the unrepentant "plumber" could afford a 1939 Rolls-Royce with customised H2O-GATE licence plates, a riverfront estate outside Washington, and a gun collection that fills three large rooms.

"As a convicted felon, I cannot own a weapon," he joked last year. "But Mrs Liddy can have as many as she likes, and she chooses to keep them oiled and loaded on my side of the bed."

If Liddy had his way, the arsenal would get quite a workout. Over the past two years, he has told his radio audience how much he would enjoy shooting Attorney-General Janet Reno, tax agents, various foreign leaders, assorted congressmen and members of FBI Swat squads. There are so many potential targets, nobody takes him too seriously any more.

And perhaps that is a mistake, because even though he is now a senior citizen of 70 years, he has always been keen on the idea of taking out enemies. Liddy once staggered even the hard men of Nixon's inner circle by suggesting that the best way to handle troublesome columnist Jack Anderson was to have him shot.

In court this week, Liddy was somewhat less trigger-happy. While his old enemy Dean would make the planet a better place by leaving it, Liddy insisted he could not be bothered doing the deed. Dean was not worth the 25c it would cost for the bullet to kill him, Liddy sniffed.

While that drew a nervous titter from the gallery, the original hard nut was deadly serious about defending his call-girl allegations. Dragged into court by Ida Wells, the former secretary in whose desk Liddy claims the dossier of hot babes was kept, he defended himself by citing some of Watergate's lingering riddles.

The burglars could not have been planting bugs, he said in court papers, because the technology of the day only permitted line-of-sight transmissions, and the office in which they were found was on the wrong side of the building from the listening post established in a nearby motel.

More to the point, he asked, why was one burglar carrying the key to 23-year-old Wells' desk? If not the call-girl dossier, what could the burglars have ever hoped to find?

While Wells' attorneys scoffed at Liddy's theories, others took them seriously - most notably fellow Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who found God behind bars and now ministers to convicts across the country. While despairing of Liddy's shoot-em-all philosophy, Colson opined that the call-girl angle "sounds credible to me."

Just how the jury viewed the question remained to be seen as they began their second day of deliberations. But court watchers were glum about Liddy's chance of prevailing in the $US4.5 million suit, pointing out that one of his theory's chief sources is a disbarred Washington lawyer, Phillip Bailey, whose credibility is in serious doubt.

While both sides agree that Bailey once represented the call-girls' alleged madam, Wells' lawyers also brought out the fact that he is a diagnosed schizophrenic who once told police that he was the alien king of Alpha Centauri.

Liddy showed no emotion as his star witness crumbled in the stand. And why should he? Win or lose, the one sure bet in this bizarre case is that G. Gordon Liddy will not be going away.

Nor for that matter will his allegations about call-girls. Late yesterday, the Baltimore jury declared that it was unable to reach a verdict and the judge declared a mistrial.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT