Intellectual “Safe Spaces,” the Scariest Spaces of All: Lessons Learned From G. Gordon Liddy

When I was in college in the 1980s G. Gordon Liddy was booked at our campus lecture hall . Liddy had just spent nearly fifty-two months in federal prison for conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role as chief architect of the Watergate break-in; and for refusing to testify before the Senate committee investigating Watergate back in the halcyon days when government officials actually went to jail for breaking the law. By the Reagan era of the eighties he’d done his time and was out and about trying to re-establish himself as a public speaker and an authority of sorts — I really don’t know on what — but there he was at my school, the former FBI operative and New York State prosecutor, the guy who planned the Watergate break-in, ostensibly to protect Richard Nixon’s political ambitions, and he had gotten caught.

My political science professor at this very conservative, private institution of higher learning, deep in the heart of Texas, had strongly recommended we attend the lecture and write about it. So I went with a few fellow theater majors. The college had a good theater program; the most promising of us in the department there on a scholarship. There was no way we could have…