G. Gordon Liddy, former FBI agent and White House staff member, has died at the age of 90, convicted of being among the organizers of Watergate, the spying case against the US Democratic Party that led to at the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Liddy died on Tuesday, March 30 at his daughter’s home in Mount Vernon, according to Bloomberg, which in turn cites the New York Times. According to his son Thomas, Gordon Liddy had been suffering from Parkinson’s for some time and his health has progressively worsened.
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Liddy had been a member of the Nixon re-election committee and the head of the so-called “plumbers” unit created by the Nixon administration to block news leaks to reporters. Gordon Liddy proposed and carried out a series of illegal actions – known as Operation Gemstone – aimed primarily at undermining the Democrats’ chances of electoral victory.
These activities also included wiretapping the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the “Watergate” complex in Washington. A plan that Liddy had discussed in 1972 with Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Advisor John Dean, and Nixon’s aide Jeb Magruder.
For that story Liddy was sentenced and spent 4 years and 4 months in prison, with a long period in solitary confinement. Released from prison, he built a “career” as a public figure and protagonist of talk shows where he basically claimed the opportunity of his actions.