larvatus prodeo -­ the edge wounds, the point kills

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

October 5th, 200912:11 am

[Link]

the edge wounds, the point killsAccounting for the fighting arts that enabled his countrymen to dominate most of the known world, Roman strategist Publius

Flavius Vegetius Renatus explained that a sword stroke with the edges, though made with ever so much force, seldom kills, as the

vital parts of the body are defended both by the bones and armor. On the contrary, a stab, though it penetrates but two inches, is

generally fatal.[1]

POMPEII-­TYPE GLADIUS, TINNED BRONZE SCABBARD AND IRON SPEAR HEADTHE AXEL GUTTMANN COLLECTION

Roman swordsmanship doctrines took root among the erstwhile barbarians dedicated to besting their cultural laggards and social

inferiors. Thus the Nineteenth Century Gauls agreed with the Eighteenth Century Britons: “le tranchant blesse, la pointe tue,”[2]

—“the Edge Wounds, but the Point Kills.”[3] The sword lore of the day was rife with fears of the “stabber”, a.k.a. the “rusher”, an

uncouth but dangerous creature possessed but of the rudiments of sword-­play, who inflicted himself upon the most prominent

swordsman present, by drawing his sword-­hand as far back as he possibly could, putting his head down, rushing upon his

opponent, and stabbing at him with his foil as hard as he possibly could, regardless of aim or outcome.[4] Far beyond the bounds of

Christendom, Japanese ronin agreed with the lesson dealt by Renatus: their swords, fashioned for expert cutting, served the novice

best as stabbing implements:[5]

“…and that’s how you kill a man.”

0 1999larvatus Log out

Home Post to journal Friends Page Account FAQ

You are viewing your journal Search at larvatusView Recent Comments Manage Entries Calendar

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” gushed Cardinal Richelieu in the eponymous play penned by Edward Bulwer-­Lytton in1839. But could the same be said of the pencil with its ephemeral traces? Lord Coke, treating of a deed, wrote: “And here it is tobe understood, that it ought to be in parchment or in paper. For if a writing be made upon a peece of wood, or upon a peece oflinen, or in the barke of a tree, or on a stone, or the like, &c. and the same be sealed or delivered, yet it is no deed, for a deed mustbe written either in parchment or paper, as before is said, for the writing upon these is least subject to alteration or corruption.”[6]For the same reasons, argued his successors, a writing ought to be made with materials least subject to alteration or corruption. Yetthis presumption was rebutted when the Court of King’s Bench ruled on 6 February 1826, that “a bill or note may be drawn orindorsed in pencil as well as in ink.”[7] Thus the stage was set for the lowly pencil besting the noble sword.

***On 30 March 1858, U.S. Patent Office issued Patent Number 19,783 for the combination of the lead and india-­rubber or othererasing substance in the holder of a drawing-­pencil, to Hymen L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1862 Lipman sold his patent to Joseph Reckendorfer of New York City, New York, for $100,000. On 4 November 1862,Reckendoffer received another patent for an improvement upon the invention of Lipman.

He then sued the pencil manufacturer Faber for infringement.[8] In 1875 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against

Reckendorfer in Reckendorfer v. Faber, 92 U.S. 347 (1875) declaring the patent invalid because the invention was actually acombination of two already known things with no new use. As Justice Ward Hunt put it on behalf of the Court:

A combination, to be patentable, must produce a different force, effect, or result in the combined forces or processes

from that given by their separate parts. There must be a new result produced by their union;; otherwise it is only an

aggregation of separate elements.

A combination, therefore, which consists only of the application of a piece of rubber to one end of the same piece

of wood which makes a lead pencil is not patentable.

But contrary to this ruling of the highest court in our land, a conspicuous new result was indeed produced by the union of a piece

of rubber with the piece of wood that made a lead pencil. This novelty was to manifest itself in the wake of a case that came up

before the U.S. Supreme Court over eighty years later.

***It is said that early in the XXth century, when The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme “What’s

Wrong with the World?”, the contribution of Gilbert Keith Chesterton took the form of a letter:[9]

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,

G. K. Chesterton

Not satisfied with exhausting the subject matter by a pithy witticism, Chesterton followed up his missive with a book-­length

treatment that included a fantasy of “the Universal Stick”:

Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost

since his beginning;; which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that

you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one

speciality;; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing;; made to supply many

different needs;; and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is

that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut

throats;; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock

a man down;; partly to point with like a finger-­post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with

like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a giant;; it is a crutch and a cudgel;; an elongated finger and an extra leg.

The case is the same, of course, with the fire;; about which the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy

seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their

spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make

checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man’s house and that hearth

for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things;; and

these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette

instead of a stick;; he will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil-­sharpener instead of a knife;; and he will even

boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil-­sharpeners even for

sharpening pencils;; and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other requirements thatthese institutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in avision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-­sharpener;; where a man must learn single-­stick with acigarette;; where a man must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hotwater pipes.

—Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910, pp. 146-­148

In at least one of its respects, Chesterton’s adaptationist vision was not too long in coming. Not a half century later, in a case styledScales v. United States (1958-­1962), the U.S. Supreme Court considered the membership clause of the Smith Act, whichprohibited membership in organizations advocating the violent or forceful overthrow of the United States government. JuniusScales was criminally charged with membership in the Communist Party of the United States. The criminal charge arose becausethe Communist Party advocated the overthrow of the government “as speedily as circumstances would permit.” Challenging hisfelony charge, Scales claimed that the Internal Security Act of 1950 stated that membership in a Communist organization shall notconstitute a per se violation of any criminal statute. After failing in both a district and appellate court, Scales’ appeal to theSupreme Court was granted certiorari to consider the question of whether or not a Communist Party member’s conviction underthe Smith Act, which made a felony the knowing membership in organizations advocating the violent or forceful overthrow of theUnited States government, violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause in light of the apparent protections afforded to suchmembers under the Internal Security Act. In a 5-­to-­4 decision, the Supreme Court held that the Security Act protected “per se”members of an organization from criminal prosecution. By contrast, the Smith Act went beyond “per se” participation by targetingthose, whose membership in an organization entailed their knowing and deliberate participation in criminal activity. In light of thisdistinction, the Court noted, the two Acts were not conflicted. Since Scales, at the very least, knew, encouraged, and provokedillegal Party activities over the course of his eight year membership, he became the only American ever to be convicted under theSmith Act’s membership clause, of complicity in the commission of criminal activity.

Witnesses to Scales’ complicity in the commission of criminal activity included a certain Charles Childs, a paid informer of the FBIfrom the age of 18. Childs testified that he had been taught at a Party school how to kill a man with a sharpened pencil. In 1952,Childs attended a “Party Training School” of which Scales was a director. The school was given “for outstanding cadres in theNorth and South Carolina and Virginia Districts of the Communist Party.” It was held on a farm and strict security measures weretaken. The District Organizer of Virginia instructed at the school. He told the students that “the role of the Communist Party is tolead the working masses to the overthrow of the capitalist government.” With respect to the preliminary task of gaining the “broadcoalition” necessary to achieve this task, he stated that,

… the Communist Party has a program of industrial concentration in which they try to get people, that is, people whoare Communist Party members, into key shops or key industries which the Party has determined or designated to beindustrial concentration industries or plants. This is so that the Communist Party members in a particular plant will beable to have a cell, or a Communist Party group in which they will be able to more effectively plan for such things asattempting to control the union in that particular plant.

And, in a compulsory recreation period, this same instructor gave a demonstration of jujitsu and, explaining that the students“might be able to use this on a picket line,” how to kill a person with a pencil. According to Childs’ testimony,

what he showed us to do was to take our pencil, … just take the pencil and place it simply in the palm of your hand sothat the back will rest against the base of the thumb, and then we were to take it, and the person, and give a quick jabso that it would penetrate through here [demonstrating], and enter the heart, and then if we could not do that, we justtake it and grab it at the base of the throat.

Thus the Communist homicide technology repurposed and redeployed the lowly pencil after the fashion of Chesterton’s UniversalStick. Regrettably, the record of Childs’ testimony left the details of this deployment to the readers’ imagination. It took severalmore decades for detailed instructions to surface in the U.S. media. No one was better qualified to spell them out, than G. GordonLiddy.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal resulting in Liddy’s conviction and imprisonment, rumors of his martial prowesscirculated through various channels. Muckraking journalist J. Anthony Lukas recounted his demonstrations of how to kill someonewith a freshly sharpened pencil by bracing the eraser end in your palm and ramming the point into the victim’s neck.[10] Upon hisrelease, Liddy supplemented this rumor with a boast in an interview given to Playboy:

Playboy: What are the most effective ways to kill a man without employing a conventional weapon?Liddy: Well, they are innumerable, depending, of course, on the skill of the practitioner. For someone with no specialtraining, our old-­faithful pencil is very efficient, just your common garden-­variety standard wooden pencil with a goodsharp point and a strong, substantial eraser. The eraser’s quite important, actually. With those prerequisites, and if youcan reach your opponent, any novice could kill his enemy in one second or less. But I don’t want to go any furtherinto the details, lest we have a sudden rash of pencil killings in junior high schools across the country. Assuming, ofcourse, that adolescent males concentrate on Playboy’s Interviews.

—Eric Norden, “Playboy Interview: G. Gordon Liddy”, 1 October 1980

Enterprising adolescent males were served the details in Liddy’s contemporaneously issued autobiography, which disclosed hiscontemplation of killing star witness for prosecution John Dean by driving up a pencil through the underside of his jaw, throughthe soft-­palate and deep into his brain.[11] Another of his journalistic nemeses, Jack Anderson, eventually spelled out the last pieceof the puzzle by quoting Liddy’s warning: “Be sure the eraser is in good condition. It will protect the palm of your hand when youdrive the pencil into an attacker’s throat.”[12] Thus the patents of Lipman and Reckendorfer received their belated vindication.

***It bears notice that the Latin term for pencil, peniculus, is a diminutive of, and a euphemism for, penis. This derivation affords aninsight into wishful aggressive deployment of that modest writerly implement. Lasting cultural impact of notional penicular

homicide remains periodically attested in our day. Thus in his 2008 autobiography, William Shatner recounts his summer campmeetings with “kids who had survived the Holocaust, kids who had seen their parents slaughtered, kids who just as easily couldkill you with a pencil as become friends.”[13] More pointedly, Steve Geng, the brother of writer and editor Veronica Geng, writesin a memoir of his drug addiction, imprisonment, and bodily decay, intermingled with tributes to his sister, of his response to beingstabbed in the calf with a pencil in the course of resisting a jailhouse rape attempt:

I knew I’d have more trouble with Slim, so I carefully plotted my revenge. That night I would take a sharpenedpencil, now that I knew what an effective weapon it could be, creep up to Slim’s bunk while he slept, carefully placethe point of the pencil into Slim’s ear, and drive it into whatever tiny brain he had with a quick stroke of the flat of myhand. Along about two in the morning when everyone was asleep, I actually did tiptoe over to Slim’s bunk, pencil inhand, but discovered him sleeping with a blanket over his head and I couldn’t determine exactly where his ears oreyes were. It was one of the most fearful and rage-­ridden nights I ever spent, and my determination wavered as I put itoff until the next night. There was an off chance that I might actually kill him, but I’d read somewhere that such anattack, if done quickly and efficiently, would produce no outcry from the victim, leaving me to creep back to my bunkundetected. Fortunately, my new friends from the mess hall persuaded the assignment captain to move me to another dormbefore I got a chance to test that theory.

—Steve Geng, Thick as Thieves: A Brother, a Sister—a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives, Henry Holt and Co.,2007, p. 95

But the pride of place in imaginary penicular slaying belongs to Derek Raymond:

‘You’re not very good at it, are you?’ said Gust, ‘they ought to have sent heavies in.’ He thought the man very likelycould have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a wordwith a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn’t, Gust kicked him in the stomachas he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-­rail, then turned back to the other man. ‘You all right?’ he said. ‘How are you feeling now? Chipper?’ He took one of the man’s ears in his thumb andforefinger;; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktailstick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could;; when he pulled it out thestick was half-­way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: ‘I think I just broke yourfoot!’ but the man wasn’t making sense any more;; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head,swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn’t hear, or maybe the musicwas too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die. Dirtycocktail-­stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke;;although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed tosmash a glass and try putting it in Gust’s face. ‘This is just self-­defence after all,’ Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man’s feet again;; this time he definitelyfelt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail;; but instead of letting him fall Gust tookhim round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants till he found his testicles, which he yanked rightout into his hand. Their owner can’t have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from acanteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until theman was shrieking on the same D minor as the music. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Gust, ‘but I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn to fuck all over again.’ He wiped theblood off the man’s prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with hishead. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-­stool, leaving a lot ofblood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls.

—Derek Raymond, Not Till the Red Fog Rises, Time Warner Books UK, 1994, pp. 86–87

In the realm of homicidal devices of opportunity, there is no difference between G. Gordon Liddy’s common garden-­varietystandard wooden pencil with a good sharp point and a strong, substantial eraser, and Derek Raymond’s cocktail stick picked upout of a dirty glass on the bar. Indeed, both of these devices answer G.K. Chesterton’s vision of a world where a man gives uptrying to cut his throat with a pencil-­sharpener, to stab his neighbor’s throat with a freshly sharpened pencil. As Monty Python’scriminologist helpfully pointed out, after all a murderer is only an extroverted suicide.

And that’s all she wrote.

Footnotes:

[1] Thus Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus:

Praeterea non caesim sed punctim ferire discebant. Nam caesimpugnantes non solum facile uicere sed etiam derisere Romani.Caesa enim, quouis impetu ueniat, non frequenter interficit,cum et armis uitalia defendantur et ossibus;; at contra punctaduas uncias adacta mortalis est;; necesse est enim, ut uitaliapenetret quicquid inmergitur. Deinde, dum caesa infertur,brachium dextrum latusque nudatur;; puncta autem tectocorpore infertur et aduersarium sauciat, antequam uideat.Ideoque ad dimicandum hoc praecipue genere usos constat esseRomanos;; dupli autem ponderis illa cratis et claua ideodabantur, ut, cum uera et leuiora tiro arma sumpsisset, uelutgrauiore pondere liberatus securior alacriorque pugnaret.

―Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari, I.xii

They were likewise taught not to cut but to thrust with their swords. For theRomans not only made a jest of those who fought with the edge of that weapon,but always found them an easy conquest. A stroke with the edges, though madewith ever so much force, seldom kills, as the vital parts of the body are defendedboth by the bones and armor. On the contrary, a stab, though it penetrates but twoinches, is generally fatal. Besides in the attitude of striking, it is impossible toavoid exposing the right arm and side;; but on the other hand, the body is coveredwhile a thrust is given, and the adversary receives the point before he sees thesword. This was the method of fighting principally used by the Romans, and theirreason for exercising recruits with arms of such a weight at first was, that whenthey came to carry the common ones so much lighter, the greater difference mightenable them to act with greater security and alacrity in time of action.

―translated by Lieutenant John Clarke, 1767

[2] Thus uniformed braggarts in a novel by Paul and Victor Marguéritte: Le capitaine de Serres eut un rire joliment cruel : —Mon ordonnance affilait encore mon sabre ce matin. Je lui ai dit :Épointe plutôt. Le tranchant blesse, la pointe tue. Couehorte cria : —Le sabre ! Il n’y a que le sabre ! C’est la première des armes. Untemps de galop, une lame solidement fixée au poignet, on traverse sonhomme comme du beurre.

—Paul et Victor Marguéritte, Le Désastre, Plon, 1897, p. 92

Captain de Serres let out a cruel laugh: —My orderly was still sharpening my sword this morning. I said tohim: “The point in preference. The edge wounds, the point kills.” Couchorte exclaimed: —The sword! there is nothing but the sword! It is the very first of arms.When on the gallop, with a blade securely fixed to the wrist, one can gothrough one’s man as though he were butter.

―translated by MZ

[3] Observing then the difference in the very Nature of a Sword, which all pretend to be called Swords-­Men must know, theHighlanders can do nothing against our new Way of Fighting: the Reason is plain, they Fight with the Edge we with the Point;; theEdge is a Blow, but the Point is a Bullet, the one falls down and may be defended many ways, the other pushes on in a straightLine, and cannot by much be so easily defended;; the Edge Wounds, but the Point Kills;; a Man receives many Cuts and yet standsto his Work, but the first Thrust he receives is into his Vitals, and he drops immediately: The Strength of their Motion also differs,the Blow is made by the Arm only, the Thrust by the Weight and Strength of the whole Body;; the Blow is by the Sword only, theThrust is by the Sword at the end of a Musquet, strengthen’d by the Weight of the Piece;; the Blow is by the single Hand, theThrust by both Arms;; the Blow is slow and must be preceded by lifting up and falling down, the Thrust is swift and speedy;; theBlow cannot be redoubled or recovered without Time, the Thrust is recovered and redoubled in a Moment: In a Word, the Soldiercan make three Thrusts to one Blow. From all which I infer, that the antient Terror of these Highlanders is entirely vanish’d;; andthat unless the Earl of Mar who now leads this Rebellious and Barbarian Army can alter their way of Fighting, which he will findvery difficult to do, our new Way has so much the advantage of them, that the King’s Army will be able to Fight them, tho’ theywere three for one, and I refer my Opinion to the Event. Wherefore to encourage ourselves also, on a yet surer and strongerFoundation, I conclude this Part in the Word of the faithful Spies to the Children of Israel, when the wicked Spies terrified thePeople with the Multitude and Strength of their Enemies;; Fear ye not the People of the Land for they are but Bread for us, theirShield is departed from them, and the Lord is with us, FEAR THEM NOT.

—Daniel Defoe, A View of the Scots Rebellion. With some Enquiry into what we have to fear from the Rebels? and what is theproperest Method to take with them, London, R. Burleigh, 1715, pp. 25-­26

[4] Those who cultivate the “noble science of defence” know this dangerous animal very well indeed, and give it a remarkablywide berth;; but among our readers there may be one here and there who is not a votary of our honoured art, so to him we mustpresent this creature. It joins the school of arms of some professor, or, if it has sufficient influence, gets itself elected as a memberof some fencing club;; when there, it provides itself with all the impedimenta needful to the fencing man, and it proceeds to take adozen, or possibly two dozen, lessons from one of the professors (how we do feel for that poor professor!). It now finds itself, aftera fashion, able to lunge and recover, and it possesses a very archaic and terribly rough idea about how a thrust is to be parried. Itsobject is now achieved;; it requires no more lessons;; it is able to, as it euphoniously puts it, “get a sweat,” which it proceeds to do;; itdoes not wait to be invited to fence, but inflicts itself at once on the most prominent swordsman who has the bad luck to be present.Once engaged, its tactics are simple: it draws its sword-­hand as far back as it possibly can, it puts its head down, rushes like anangry billy-­goat upon its opponent, and stabs at him with its foil as hard as it possibly can, utterly regardless of where it may strikehim or what the result may be.

—Alfred Hutton, The Sword Through the Centuries, Dover Publications, 2002 (1901), p. 330Here again is emphasized the difference between foil and épée work. If a poor fencer is pitted against a good one in foil the expertwill not find the slightest difficulty in defeating him, for practically all of the awkward thrusts of the duffer will be easily parried sothat they will not endanger the proper and legitimate target—the body and upper arm. But the duffer will be very apt to hit thegood man foul time and time again, and the expert will not mind because he keeps his parries restricted to narrow movements inorder to conserve time and power. A hit on his leg or mask is merely a foul hit and does not count. Mark, however, what happensin épée under like circumstances. The good man cannot afford to let the poor one come within striking distance, because, thoughhe may hit him in better style, nevertheless some wild stab of his awkward opponent may reach him at the same time and thejudges will say that both are hit, for in épée (i.e., in a duel) a beautiful lunge that passes through the adversary’s shoulder does lessdamage than a wild stab that happens to go through the expert’s jugular vein! And the frantic rushes of an untrained man aredisconcerting even to the coolest of champions. Many a good fencer who gives a perfect account of himself so long as hisopponent employs the classic methods to which he is accustomed is utterly at sea when face to face with a “rusher” upon whosemovements no dependence can be placed. And if this is notoriously true in foil fencing, how much more must it obtain in épée?There is not a fencer of experience who cannot remember many instances of the poor man scoring. For example, if I rememberaright General Boulanger, though by no means an expert, was as an old soldier a much better fencer than his older antagonist,Floquet. Nevertheless the latter by merely thrusting out wildly on one of the General’s rather impetuous attacks ran his opponentthrough the neck, very nearly killing him. Therefore in épée you must be able to retreat ad libitum before a wild or awkwardantagonist, and for that you must have plenty of room behind you. A wag has suggested that the best form for a duelling-­ground ina light with such a rusher would be a circle, so that one could continually keep out of distance, and patiently await the properopportunity!

—Edward Breck, “Fencing in America”, The Outing Magazine, Volume 61, 1912-­1913, pp. 483-­484[5] Thus Genta, the pseudonymous protagonist of Kihachi Okamoto’s, Kill!, a light-­hearted 1968 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s1962 Tsubaki Sanjûrô.[6] See Edward Coke, Commentary upon Littleton 229, 1628.[7] In Geary v. Physic, 1826, 5 Barn. & C. 234, followed by numerous cases cited by Joseph Fitz Randolph in A Treatise on theLaw of Commercial Paper, Vol. 1, Frederick D. Linn & Co., 1888, p. 61.[9] See Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church, Doubleday, 2001, p. 58.[10] Liddy brought his gun collection and his macho style with him to Washington. Once he burned his hand badly when he held itover a candle flame to impress some friends. And he liked to demonstrate how you could kill someone with a pencil. This involvedbracing the eraser end in your palm and ramming the point into the victim’s neck. He recommended that the pencil be freshlysharpened.

Subrah Iyar Appreciation Society Powered by LiveJournal.com

—J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, Viking, 1976, p. 87[11] Thus Liddy on how to kill with a pencil:I learned to kill a man immediately with no more than a pencil;; to maim, to blind, and, generally, to employ my body’s “personalweapons,” against an opponent’s “vulnerable areas.”—G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1991, originally published in 1980,

p. 86While on the main floor I had made friends of other secretaries, showing some of them who worked late hours how to defendthemselves against attack, including how to kill a man with no more than a pencil. Some of the women had been shocked by that,but one had not. She was Jeanne Cress Mason, formerly of the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the code-­makers and -­breakers for whom the FBI had performed so many embassy break-­ins.

—Op. cit., p. 278I stood stock-­still, trying to figure out this development. Here was the perfect opportunity to kill Dean. A pencil was lying on thedesk. In a second I could drive it up through the underside of his jaw, through the soft-­palate and deep into his brain. Had someoneset it up? If so, why now? President Nixon was out of office. I had received no orders to kill Dean and certainly wouldn’t bepresumed so irresponsible as to do so on my own initiative;; his death might hurt, through reaction, the trial chances of Mitchell,Ehrlichman, Parkinson, and Mardian. I decided to consider that my being shut up alone in the room with Dean had just been anincredible error.

—Op. cit., p. 455[12] Liddy’s official title was legal counsel for the Committee to Reelect the President, but that didn’t come close to explaining hisunwritten job description—bag-­jobs, forgeries, frame-­ups, break-­ins, and buggings. An ex-­FBI agent, he had first joined the Nixonadministration at the Treasury Department where he worked on antidrug policies, but he was ill suited for a policy-­makingposition. As one of his co-­workers told me, “He’s much too, uh, inventive for that.” A glowering and cheerless man who thrived on conspiracy, Liddy worked hard to cultivate a macho image. Once, whenrecruiting some men to work for him at the Republican Convention, Liddy held his hand over a candle flame, without so much asa twitch of his heavy mustache, until his flesh burned. He wanted to illustrate for his recruits what kind of men he wanted them tobe. This bantam Groucho Marx in a three-­piece suit strolled through the Nixon circus with no apparent realization that he wasdifferent from other men. He once stopped to talk with the wife of Republican official Robert Odle outside GOP campaignheadquarters, and the conversation drifted toward the safety of women on the streets of Washington. Liddy advised her that sheshould carry a sharpened pencil to use as a stiletto. “Be sure the eraser is in good condition,” he warned. “It will protect the palm ofyour hand when you drive the pencil into an attacker’s throat.” A man of action, Liddy once leaped out of a taxi to rescue a pedestrian who was being mugged. Liddy was beaten senseless bythe mugger. It was a rare occasion when he was bested. Usually Liddy was prepared for battle. While casing Senator GeorgeMcGovern’s campaign headquarters for a possible burglary, Liddy whipped out a pistol in quick-­draw fashion and shot out a streetlight that he thought might illuminate the scene of the crime. During the 1972 presidential campaign, Nixon’s treasurer Hugh Sloan asked Liddy to escort him to the bank with $350,000 inSloan’s briefcase. Liddy had a surprise in his own briefcase—a gas-­operated pellet gun. After the bank, the two men stopped at arestaurant for lunch and Liddy began to worry that the gas pressure in his gun would build up and the weapon might accidentallydischarge. Sloan started to sweat, but Liddy was cool. He strode into the men’s room, walked into the first stall, and fired the guninto the toilet. The reaction of the man in the next stall was not recorded. My reporter Jack Cloherty made the rounds in Liddy’s neighborhood to find out more about him. The neighbors said Liddy senthis own children to bed before dark and could never understand why other parents didn’t do the same. Liddy became so annoyedby a group of neighborhood youngsters talking loudly after dark that he perched on a garage roof and waited for them. When theypassed within range, he leaped from the roof like Batman, grabbed the kids, and slapped one of them. A delegation of parentsdecided it was time to negotiate, but their resolve to soften Liddy weakened when they arrived at his house and saw his gunsprominently displayed on the dining room table. Nixon, in a conversation with Haldeman, admitted that he thought Liddy “must be a little nuts.” “He is,” Haldeman agreed. Butneither seemed to think Liddy was too nuts to be carrying out orders from the president of the United States. When the Watergate burglary was bungled and the intruders were arrested, Liddy felt personally responsible. In all seriousness,he invited John Dean to have someone shoot him down in the street, gangland style, as punishment. Dean said that wouldn’t benecessary.

—Jack Anderson with Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account, Forge Books, 2000, pp. 223-­224[13] See William Shatner with David Fisher, Up Till Now: The Autobiography, Thomas Dunne Books, 2008, p. 14.

Tags: communism, death, persiflage, violence, writing

(Leave a comment)