George Gordon Battle Liddy (30 November 1930-30 March 2021) was an American lawyer who served as the chief operative in the White House Plumbers unit in 1971; he organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC, leading to the Watergate scandal.
Biography[]
G. Gordon Liddy was born in Brooklyn, New York City on 30 November 1930, and he graduated from Fordham University in 1952. He served in the US Army for two years as an artillery officer in the Korean War, but he remained stateside for health reasons. Liddy joined the FBI in 1957, serving as a field agent in Indiana and Denver, Colorado. At age 29, he became the youngest Bureau Supervisor at FBI headquarters in Washington DC, and he became J. Edgar Hoover's ghostwriter. He resigned from the FBI in 1962 and worked as a lawyer until 1966, when he was hired as a Dutchess County prosecutor. In 1968, he lost election to the US House of Representatives after a close race, but he served in several posts during Richard Nixon's administration and joined CREEP in 1972. He was general counsel of the finance operation on paper, but he was also the chief operative of the "White House Plumbers" unit, which was responsible for bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC; this led to the Watergate scandal. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for this, but he was released in 1977. He worked as a radio talk show host from 1992 to 2012, and he became a media personality in the following years. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 2021 at the age of 90.