The FBI had an elegant term for G. Gordon Liddy, and that term was “super-klutz.” As with so many self-professed paragons of strategy and masculinity, the man who advertised himself routinely as “virile, vigorous and potent” was most famous for underperforming. He was brilliant at scheming but lousy at pulling off schemes. In the early 1970s Liddy, as an operative aligned with Richard Nixon, dreamed of a million-dollar plan code-named “Gemstone” that outlined, among other efforts, the assassination of a newspaper columnist and the entrapment of Democratic officials in a blackmail scheme, using prostitutes, a hidden photographer and a houseboat. That plan was pared down to a simple burglary and bugging of the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate complex. Under Liddy’s leadership, the plan was botched and traced to the White House.