Topic: NewsBusters
Jack Coleman complains in a June 6 NewsBusters post that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a radio interview, "gratuitously smeared Liddy as 'an admirer of Adolf Hitler.'"
Of course, it's not a smear if it's true, and indeed, Liddy was very much an admirer of Hitler, as documented by the British paper The Independent in 2004:
The Fuhrer was G Gordon Liddy's first political hero. Liddy was a sickly, asthmatic child when he grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the 1930s. The town was full of ethnic Germans who idolized Hitler. Liddy was made to salute the Stars and Stripes Nazi-style by the nuns at his school; even now, he admits, "at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm." His beloved German nanny taught him that Hitler had -- through sheer will-power -- "dragged Germany from weakness to strength."
This gave Liddy hope "for the first time in my life" that he too could overcome weakness. When he listened to Hitler on the radio, it "made me feel a strength inside I had never known before," he explains. "Hitler's sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body." He describes seeing the Nazis' doomed technological marvel the Hindenberg flying over New Jersey as an almost religious experience. "Ecstatic, I drank in its colossal power and felt myself grow. Fear evaporated and in its place came a sense of personal might and power."
While Coleman doesn't acknowledge this undisputed fact about Liddy -- remember, to him it's nothing but a gratuitous smear -- he does make sure you know that Kennedy's uncle, John F. Kennedy, was a "Nazi sympathizer." Well, no -- JFK wrote some contemporaneous praise of Germany after a 1937 visit and wrote in 1945 that Hitler was "the stuff of legends" (arguably true since he is the benchmark for genocide, warmongering and overall human depravity).
Coleman provides no evidence that JFK offered any such praise after 1937, a time when Nazi Germany still had a significant number of supporters in the U.S., and he certainly offers no evidence that JFK issued such gushing praise of Hitler on the level of Liddy's.
Coleman then gets really pissy after RFK Jr. reminded people of why Liddy is a convicted felon, wuch as "an alleged plot involving G. Gordon Liddy to kill columnist and longtime Nixon nemesis Jack Anderson." Coleman then sneers, "And just out of curiosity, did that conspiracy against Anderson involve drowning him in a car?"
Well, no. Liddy was looking to do it the old-fashioned way -- poison:
The Nixon operative knew exactly who to contact to get the job done. He began with his sidekick G. Gordon Liddy, who had just been transferred to the Nixon campaign's intelligence operation and was “forever volunteering to rub people out,” as Hunt put it. Liddy wasted little time before expounding on the obvious solution to his latest White House assignment: “They charged us with the task: ‘Come up with ways of stopping Anderson.' We examined all of the alternatives and very quickly came to the conclusion [that] the only way you're going to be able to stop him is to kill him.”
To lay the groundwork, Hunt and Liddy conducted physical surveillance of Anderson, tailing the columnist in Liddy's green Jeep as Anderson drove from a parking garage in downtown Washington to his residence in the Maryland suburbs. “The purpose was to locate Anderson’s home and examine it from the outside for vulnerabilities,” Hunt recalled. It turned out to be “just an ordinary house” with “no pits around it,” so “if housebreakers wanted to get in they would have very little difficulty.” Hunt concluded that he and Liddy could easily sneak into Anderson's home and “get rid of the pesky journalist” by putting “a drug- laden pill” in whatever medicine bottles Anderson used.
But what kind of poison should be slipped to the muckraker? This was a question beyond the expertise of the White House operatives. After all, while Hunt had plotted at the CIA to overthrow leftist leaders in Central America, he had no personal hands- on experience in murder; and while Liddy boasted that he “could kill a man with a pencil in a matter of seconds” by jamming it into a victim's neck, he was not an expert in the toxicology of poisons. So Hunt reached out to a former intelligence colleague who had been part of a CIA team that tried to poison Fidel Castro a decade earlier with botulism toxin—a plot, ironically, that had recently been exposed by Jack Anderson.
This is Coleman's hero, the one who "gratuitously smeared" about his love for Hitler.
