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fervent antiCommunist. Upon graduation in 1952, Liddy immediately enlisted in the Army, with the aim
of becoming a paratrooper. An appendicitis attack, however, disqualified him from airborne training, and
instead he fought a more prosaic war in Korea as a lieutenant in the artillery. Discharged in 1954, he
returned to Fordham Law School, where he distinguished himself on Fordham Law Review and
graduated in 1957.
For the next five years Liddy realized a childhood ambition by serving in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.
After the gunpoint capture of one of the ten most wanted fugitives in 1959, Liddy became the youngest
supervisor in the entire FBI and was attached to J. Edgar Hoover's personal staff at FBI national
headquarters, in Washington. Combining a skill with words and a zeal for anticommunism, Liddy served
as Hoover's personal ghostwriter, writing law-and-order articles for various magazines and preparing
speeches for the director to give at public functions. He quickly became well versed in the use of
dramatic metaphors and symbolic code words in the rhetoric of law and order. From his vantage point on
the director's personal staff he also became familiar with the extralegal operations of the FBI, such as
break-ins and wiretaps. Despite his admiration for Hoover, he realized during these years of service that
the FBI was an inefficient and bureaucratic agency and was somewhat less than an effective national
police force. In a memorandum to President Nixon ten years later he analyzed the deficiencies of the FBI
and concluded that because it conformed too closely to rules and to congressional measures of
performance, it could not be counted on as a potent instrument of the presidency. Disappointed in the
FBI, Liddy resigned from Hoover's staff in 1962 and went into private law practice with his father,
Sylvester L. Liddy, in New York City. (The exact nature of his private practice during these years has
never been ascertained.)
Since his wife, Frances Purcell Liddy, came from a lawyer's family in Poughkeepsie, New York, he
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decided to move there in 1966 and apply for a job as an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County.
Raymond Baratta, then district attorney of Dutchess County, interviewed Liddy and found him "militant
but soft-spoken." Liddy carried with him sealed recommendations from the FBI, and Baratta, impressed
with his energy, decided to give him the position he sought. Liddy quickly became famous, if not
notorious, in Poughkeepsie as a gun-toting prosecutor. During one criminal trial he even fired off a gun
in the courtroom to dramatize a minor point in the case. He also proved himself a local crusader against
drugs. Joining forces with the chief of police in Wappingers Falls, he traveled from high school to high
school in the county, lecturing on the dangers of narcotics and employing the rich rhetoric of Captain
Hobson. The police chief, Robert Berberich, recalled in 1975 that Liddy carried with him samples of
"everything but heroin" for his lectures. In speeches before church groups and fraternal orders in 1966,
Liddy also warned, in a variation of Hobson's yellow-peril theme, that the addicts of New York City
would eventually make their way up the Hudson Valley and contaminate Poughkeepsie with their vice
and crime. As the "legal advisor" in 1966 to the Poughkeepsie police department he also went along on
every marijuana and narcotics raid that he could find or inspire, and his colleagues in the district
attorney's office found him brilliant in presenting what otherwise would be routine arrests to the local
newspapers. Despite his constant efforts to alarm the citizens of Dutchess County, Liddy found that "the
menace ... was still thought of as principally a threat to others."
On a cold midnight in March, 1966, Liddy finally found a way to shatter the illusions of Dutchess
County and gain national publicity for himself. The coup began with a raid on the home of Timothy
Leary, a former psychologist at Harvard who had gained some prominence (and notoriety) from his
experiments with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. After being dismissed from Harvard for distributing LSD
to students, he made the mistake of renting a large mansion in Liddy's bailiwick a, Millbrook, New York.
LSD was neither an addictive drug nor one associated with crime, but Leary's presence in Dutchess
County provided Liddy with a golden opportunity. "For some time, the major media had been covering
the activities of Dr. Timothy Leary," Liddy subsequently explained in Trite magazine. "Leary's ability to
influence the young made him feared by parents everywhere. His message ran directly contrary to
everything they believed in and sought to teach their children: 'tune in' (to my values; reject those of your
parents), 'turn on' (drug yourself); 'drop out' (deal with your problems and those of society by running
away from them)." In other words, Liddy realized that Leary could be portrayed as a Pied Piper, using
mysterious drugs to turn the young against their parents. He also noted, "Local boys and girls have been
seen entering and leaving the estate ... fleeting glimpses were reported of persons strolling the grounds in
the nude." He thus suggested that drugs were eroding the morality (and virginity) of Dutchess County
youths, or, as he put It, "to fears of drug induced dementia were added pot induced pregnancy." He even
foresaw that if citizens' fears about drugs were properly stimulated, "there would be reenacted at
Millbrook the classic motion picture scene in which enraged Transylvanian town folks storm Dr.
Frankenstein's castle." Even though Liddy was mixing his myths up a bit (Transylvania was the haunting
place of the vampire Dracula, not of Frankenstein's monster). He correctly perceived the connection in
the public imagination between the drug addict and the medieval legend of the living dead. And it was
this connection of fears that Liddy set out to exploit with his midnight raid.
In planning the night operation, Liddy explained, "We hoped to find not only a central supply of LSD
belonging to Leary, but also his guests' personal supplies of marijuana and hashish... it was necessary to
strike quickly, with benefit of surprise, if the inhabitants were to be caught in their rooms and any
contraband found in the rooms established as possessed by the tenants." To avoid the necessity of having
to depend on testimony of witnesses, Liddy planned to wait until Leary and his friends were all asleep in
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their rooms, then, to catch them red-handed, "We would perform a classic 'no knock' entry-that is, kick in
the front door." After that, Liddy himself was to lead "a quick charge upstairs by the bulk of the force of
deputies, who were then to fan out and hold the inhabitants in their rooms pending a systematic search."
All, however, did not go as Liddy planned. Instead of retiring at about eleven P.M., as Liddy presumed,
the residents of the estate gathered at about that time in the living room and began showing a film. Liddy
recounted in True magazine in 1974: "The deputies assumed that the movies were pornographic, and
there was some competition for the assignment to move into binocular range to obtain further
information ... [but] presently the lucky man returned to report in a tone of complete disgust, 'it ain't no
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