elementropy: Liddy on the Hookers

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Liddy on the Hookers

There's a theory of Watergate that the burglary was about the Nixon crew's desire to get the names of certain johns who were high-ranking Democrats.

I'm sure the burglars would have been delighted with any information they managed to steal along those lines, Gordon Liddy, in Will, notes (pre-Watergate) the flaw to this theory: that Republicans already knew that pursuing the hooker angle would mean mutually assured destruction:

I had had relatively few dealings with [John] Dean, most of the matters that concerned us mutually being handled through Jack Caulfield... Caulfield had let me know that he had obtained, for Dean, Xaviera (Happy Hooker) Hollander's appointment book and other materials, but said they were useless to either Democrats or Republicans because so many prominent members of both parties were represented in them they would cancel each other out in a political "balance of terror."

Now get a load of Liddy's description of John Dean whom he has a vendetta against to this day and indeed to whom he preposterously assigns the entire blame for Watergate:

Dean entered and sat down with a bare minimum of social pleasantries. His clothing was young lawyer conservative in contrast to the length of his hair, which he'd combed forward to cover a receding hairline. The rest was piled up on top of his ears and hanging shaggily down over the collar of his suit coat, its light blond color similar to that of a competitive swimmer who spends five hours a day in a pool full of heavily chlorinated water. No glasses adorned his youthful, ferretlike face.

Got it? Dean was a vain (comb-over), weasel-faced, pseudo-conservative, who wore the right clothes but whose hair gave away his foppish, treasonous ways (remember Liddy's remarks about his own children's crew cuts a few posts back: hair style is plainly for Liddy a major signifier of someone's ideological tilt). Subtle bit of foreshadowing there, Gordo.