Washington.- Gordon Liddy, a former adviser to Richard Nixon and considered one of the brains behind the Watergate robbery, died this Wednesday at the age of 90 in the United States, his family confirmed to local media.
Liddy died at the residence of one of his daughters, Alexandra, in the town of Mount Vernon (Virginia), outside of Washington.
Another of his sons, Thomas P., told The New York Times that his father, who suffered from Parkinson’s, had been in decline for a long time.
Liddy, who had been an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was one of the brains of Watergate, the espionage scandal that brought down Nixon, and of all those involved he was the one who spent the longest time in prison.
A lawyer by profession, in 1968 he excelled during the Nixon presidential campaign (1969-1974) and was rewarded with a job in the Treasury Department, which allowed him to reach the White House in 1971 as “legal adviser.”
In the White House, however, Liddy led by the hand of Howard Hunt, a former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a unit they called “plumbers” (“the plumbers”), dedicated to the dirty war against the opposition.
Once that unit was dismantled months later, Liddy and Hunt continued in similar functions but from the campaign to Nixon’s reelection.
Among several bizarre schemes to discredit election-year Democrats, Liddy devised theft of documents from the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate building.
Liddy and Hunt, who coordinated the Watergate operation from a hotel room, were arrested after police also instantly detained spies they had assigned to Democratic offices.
He was the only one involved who refused to testify during the process and was sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison, although he only served 52 months since former Democratic President Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence in 1977.
“I have lived as I think I should have lived,” Liddy said after leaving prison, declaring that he had no regrets and that he would act the same again.
Disabled from law, Liddy wrote several books, including his autobiography “Will” (1980), which became a band hit. He acted in several films and between 1992 and 2012 hosted the popular right-leaning radio show “The G. Gordon Liddy Show.”
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