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Liddy wept when World War II ended, for he had missed it.
Eager for combat during the Korean War, Liddy, fresh from Fordham, was assigned instead as an Army lieutenant to antiaircraft batteries in New York City. After his discharge, he met "the woman I wanted to bear my children," Frances Ann Purcell: "A Teuton/Celt of high intelligence, a mathematical mind, physical size, strength and beauty, she had it all." Liddy finished Fordham law school, passed the New York bar exam in July 1957, and in September was sworn in as an FBI agent. "I submitted a memo on Frances [to the FBI] and had her checked," he writes. "She was clean." The two were married on Nov. 9, 1957, as Liddy was finishing training at the FBI Academy. At the wedding ceremony, Liddy wore a gun under his morning coat.
I enjoyed two kinds of training the most; firearms and "defensive tactics." I learned how to take a gun away from a man and to tear off his trigger finger into the bargain. I learned to kill a man with no more than a pencil; to maim; to blind.
But firearms training was my favorite. I wanted to be the best gunfighter in the world. During lunch break, I'd spend most of the time taking advantage of the unlimited supply of ammunition. Soon the inside flesh of my trigger finger was worn off, and I was wiping my blood from the trigger when I cleaned my revolver at the end of the day. I obtained a product called Nu-Skin, a quick-drying plastic coating that resembled clear glue, and coated my trigger finger with it, then fired until that, too, was worn off.
On to Watergate
Finding it difficult on his FBI salary to support his wife and a family that had grown to three (and later to five) children, Liddy joined his father's law firm in 1962. Liddy in 1968 campaigned hard for Richard Nixon's election to the presidency, leading to an appointment as a special assistant in the Treasury Department in 1969. In June 1971, he shifted to the White House and was assigned to a secret group that was to become known as the "plumbers." The group was headed by Egil ("Bud") Krogh, deputy assistant to the President, and David Young, a former assistant to Henry Kissinger. Howard Hunt, a former CIA agent, was Liddy's coworker. Their priority was to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon papers, a secret study of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, to the New York Times, had enraged Nixon. In a nighttime raid, they ransacked the files of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Los Angeles psychiatrist whom Ellsberg had consulted. But they found nothing.
In September of 1971 Howard Hunt approached me on the next Ellsberg neutralization proposal. Ellsberg was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner in Washington, and Chuck Colson [special counsel to the President] thought it an opportunity to discredit him. Could we drug Ellsberg enough to befuddle him, make him appear a near burnt-out drug case?
Hunt and I developed a plan to infiltrate enough waiters to