G. Gordon Libby Looking for a Fight : Broadcasting: Watergate figure has gained celebrity status. Now he’s airing his provocative views on a Glendale radio station.

One by one, G. Gordon Liddy shot down targets of his outrage--Jane Fonda, Judge John Sirica, John Dean--like defenseless ducks at an amusement park booth. Liddy, the 1960s FBI agent-turned 1970s Watergate conspirator-turned 1980s celebrity, was on a roll.

Only technology could stop him, and it did.

“Mr. Liddy, my tape recorder just broke,” the reporter said. “I’m very sorry, but can we start over?”

“No problem,” Liddy said without hesitation. “I understand. I’ve had my own problems with tapes.” Watergate put him in prison. Watergate also made him a star.

Since his release in 1977, after serving 52 months for breaking into Democratic Party headquarters, Liddy, 60, has gone from Washington vices to “Miami Vice.” He has written several books and lectured across the country, often teaming with leftist Timothy Leary for debates that offered more pizazz than politics on college campuses.

And now, since Feb. 5, for one hour twice a week on Glendale’s KIEV-AM (870), he’s become a talk show host. Why not? Everyone else has.

But he’s no Oprah. Liddy hits hard and is unrelenting, like his opening attack last week against Jane Fonda.

“We have a pool going,” he told listeners. “You call in, and give what day you believe will be the first day Jane Fonda will appear on an antiaircraft battery in Baghdad cheering as Iraqi troops shoot an American airman. Please call in your number, you may win. The prize is a $100 bill from my wallet complete with an absolutely unbroadcastable comment on the behavior of Jane Fonda during the Vietnamese War.”

As for printable comments: “It just seems to me that if she’s going to be consistent, she’ll be over there on some aircraft. It’s just a matter of time.”

The Liddy agenda reads like a congressman’s--gun control, the Persian Gulf, the educational system. He hopes that the show, “Live With Liddy,” will serve as his weekly forum, an opportunity to do what most excites him. Talk. Or, more precisely, confront. The man has spied for Hoover, wiretapped for Nixon and acted with Johnson--Don, not LBJ. But his passion is the exchange of ideas. He says he never loses.

“It’s very nice for someone to say ‘I really like your show,’ but what can I do with that?” Liddy said. “Now, if I can get a ‘60s residue person to challenge me, that’s like Ted Williams getting a fastball. I’ll hit it out of the park.”

So far, Liddy hasn’t faced many pitches. In two shows, he has begun with a monologue and then answered questions. The phones, according to KIEV president Ron Beaton, have been ringing “pretty good, but we want them ringing off the hook.” Beaton said the idea for the talk show came after Liddy was interviewed recently while promoting his new novel, “The Monkey Handlers.”

“He was absolutely dynamic,” Beaton said. “He seemed very well-read, and has outstanding credentials.”

Beaton, who won’t say how much he pays Liddy, will review the show’s progress after two months. Liddy hopes to someday go national with it. KIEV, a 10,000-watt station, can be heard from Santa Barbara to San Diego. So far, the show has aired on a Monday from 6:45 to 7:45 p.m., and on a Saturday from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Beaton said he will stick with airing the show twice a week before deciding on a permanent once-a-week slot.

Liddy started in radio in the late 1940s for WFUV, the campus radio station at Fordham University in New York. He wrote, acted and announced. But broadcasting didn’t fit his ambitions. He served in the Army during the Korean War, enrolled in law school and then joined the FBI in 1957. As a special agent in Indiana and Colorado, he grew very fond of his boss. “He was a piece of work,” said Liddy about J. Edgar Hoover. “He’s the only person I’ve met who really was charismatic.”

Years later, his boss was Richard Nixon. To this day, Liddy maintains that he acted properly in the Watergate affair. His only crime was getting caught.

“It was an occupational hazard,” he said, referring to his jail term. “In combat, sometimes you get captured by the enemy.”

Liddy draws a clear distinction between his behavior and the conduct of other top Nixon aides such as John Dean and Jeb Stuart Magruder. While he was the dutiful captain, “going down with my ship” by keeping his mouth shut, the others, he claims, couldn’t wait to jump overboard. On the lecture circuit, one of his talks centers on integrity, instructing people how they can wind up like Gordon Liddy, and not John Dean.

“If we were on the Titanic,” Liddy said, “Jeb Stuart Magruder would get into the lifeboat of your mother and John Dean would get in ahead of his mother.”

What would Liddy do?

“I would put the women and children out first, and wave to them from the deck.”

Liddy, not surprisingly, prefers to focus on more contemporary issues.

On the Persian Gulf: “Bush has acted very prudently. He’s letting the military run the war, not letting a Robert McNamara, who gave us the Edsel, pick bombing targets.”

On the nation’s intelligence community: “It’s been totally gutted. We’ve got very good technical intelligence, but we’re lacking in human intelligence.”

And on the educational system: “There’s an awful lot of training going on, but the classical liberal arts education has gone by the wayside.”

Liddy knows his views would be unheard if he hadn’t participated in a national scandal. He said he’d probably be a Washington political hack moving in and out of power. Forget the acting and the writing, the fame.

“Things are very, very good for me,” he said. “I’m very appreciative. I was an accident of history.”

“Live With Liddy,” a talk show with G. Gordon Liddy, can be heard from 6:45 to 7:45 p.m. Mondays, and 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KIEV-AM (870) in Glendale.