G. Gordon Liddy, unrepentant Watergate burglar who became talk show host, dies at 90

G. Gordon Liddy, the tough-guy Watergate operative who went to prison rather than testify and later turned his Nixon-era infamy into a successful television and talk show career, has died at age 90.

Liddy died Tuesday at his daugher’s house in Virginia, his son Thomas P. Liddy told The Washington Post. He did not give a cause of death.

While others swept up in the Watergate scandal offered contrition or squirmed in the glare of televised congressional hearings, Liddy seemed to wear the crime like a badge of courage, saying he only regretted that the mission to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters had been a failure.

He drove around Washington in a Volvo with license plates reading H2OGATE, openly discussed the botched burglary on talk radio and late-night TV, took villainous television roles that seemed to trade on his soiled reputation and mocked his fellow Watergate operatives as bumblers.

“I was serving the president of the United States and I would do a Watergate again — but with a much better crew,”