Column: From plumbers to Proud Boys, justice is scarce

“I got something to show you,” said Barry. The short, jacked inmate tugged me toward the double doors opening onto the dark prison yard. “Something good.”

I wondered whether I should be afraid. The Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury (Conn.) was no supermax, but the grim rituals of our rock band’s arrival — vehicle searches, cadenced passage through fortified gates — had convinced me the place was no country club. Among the couple hundred guys we’d played for were a few white-collar criminals and a whole lot of haphazardly violent men.

“Don’t give or take anything,” the guards had warned us. “Don’t go anywhere with anyone.”

And that was before they’d seen our show.

The year was 1975. Bowie and Alice Cooper were all the ambisexual rage. Eighteen-year-old me took the prison rec room stage in skintights, eye paint and a silk kimono. Barry’s gang led the nonstop wolf-whistling.

When the show was over, those guys stuck around, trying to thank us for interrupting the monotony of prison time. “You guys were OK,” they said, “but mostly, you showed up.” They offered us sweaty bandannas and leather wrist bands, knotted-string necklaces, even the prison’s dented band instruments.

Remembering the guard’s warnings, we kept saying no, thanks. But that only seemed to increase their desire and frustration. We were on our way back to the real world. They wanted to escape, if only by proxy. We let them help us load amps and gear into our van, but Barry just couldn’t calm down.

“I know,” he’d cried, taking my kimonoed elbow in a weight room-stoked grip, yanking me out to a dark space between the bright gym behind us and the floodlit yard up ahead.

In 1973, I’d watched the Watergate hearings on our black-and-white, rabbit-ear portable TV. The Nixon impeachment hearings began in May 1974. Though some of Nixon’s criminal operatives had already gone to jail — including G. Gordon Liddy, the man who had named the gang the “White House Plumbers” — on Aug. 9, 1974, Americans watched a cornered Richard Nixon make his getaway by chopper. President Gerald Ford promptly granted Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon,” on the grounds that subjecting his predecessor to justice would be too “divisive.”

In the 1980s, Oliver North, John Poindexter, Caspar Weinberger and other officials helped the Reagan Administration conduct an unconstitutional war and arguably treasonous arms deals. North and Poindexter were tried and convicted, but none of the Iran-Contra conspirators served a day in prison. Congress never came close to impeaching Roland Reagan.

In the 2000s, Scooter Libby, who had been Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff and Assistant to President George W. Bush, was convicted of lying about his role in betraying CIA field agents who challenged the administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction. He did no time, and neither Cheney nor Bush were held accountable for tricking the nation into war.

On Monday, Donald Trump pardoned 1,600 of his foot soldiers in the Jan. 6 insurrection, including leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers jailed for sedition and criminals whose assaults led to the deaths of policemen. To Americans still interested in the rule of law, the prosecution of Trump’s minions had brought a little reassurance and a load of despair. Many were pathetic victims of the fear and fantasy peddled by right-wing news and social media, from Fox to NewsMax to Q-Anon. They were convicted for doing Trump’s dirty work, but Trump proved untouchable.

For that, we can rightly blame the moral cowardice of many Republican lawmakers and the MAGA madness of many others, blame Democratic Party timidity, Trump’s relentless lawfare and Republican judges’ obstruction. But all these parties to the extinction of accountability were only following a pattern set 50 years ago. Ford’s pardon of Nixon established our inability — or unwillingness — to defend our system against criminal abuse of executive power. That surrender led us straight to Jan. 6, 2021 and all but guarantees the success of Trump’s continuing assault on the Constitution.

As we stood in the shadows of the prison yard, Barry pointed toward the bright center, where men jogged or shuffled around a cinder track in the last minutes before curfew.

“There,” he said, lifting my arm to make me point, too. “You see that guy?“

“Who?“

“The big-mustache guy, other side of the track. In the trench coat.” My guide’s face was shining with sweaty glee. “See him?”

There was indeed a mustachioed man out there, slumping around the far curve in an epauletted raincoat. He looked, if anything, less distinguished and more dejected than all the others, but there was something familiar about his powerful nose and pugnacious jaw.

“Him?”

“Yeah! That guy!” Triumphant, Barry delivered his thank-you gift. “That’s G. Gordon Liddy!”

And so it was. The infamously incompetent Watergate burglar was slouching our way, head down, acknowledging no one.

“Liddy’s a snotty bastard,” Barry observed, the kind of guy whose fellow inmates enjoyed selling him out. Liddy never missed his evening constitutional. “G. Gordon’s regular as a clock, and wound twice as tight.”

Liddy passed us and trudged on. In little more than a year, Jimmy Carter would commute his sentence, citing “fairness” in relation to all the other Watergate criminals who served little or no time at all. Liddy did just four and a half years before taking his revenge behind a talk-show mike, pioneering a brand of sneering paranoia that is now more or less the Republican Party platform. He died in 2021, at the age of 90.

As we turned back to the gym, I shook Barry’s hand. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s cool, seeing justice done for once.”

“Yeah, sure,” Barry said, suddenly urgent again. “Listen, I think I could fit inside that bass drum.”

William Craig teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of “Yankee Come Home: On the Road from San Juan Hill to Guantanamo.” He lives in Thetford.