W. Mark Felt Was Deep Throat
Dean
Former FBI bigwig W. Mark Felt has come forward and identified himself as "Deep Throat," the anonymous source that helped Washington Post reporters Woodward & Bernstein bring down Richard Nixon. And now the Washington Post has confirmed that it was indeed Mark Felt.
Joe Gandelman has some pithy comments and amusing quotes.
It used to be fun to speculate as to who Deep Throat was--my favorite suspect was William Rehnquist, not because I had any real reason to believe it but just because that would be such a delicious irony. But now we know: it was an FBI chief who had a grudge against Nixon.
I find myself rather ambivalent about the whole affair. I have no great love for Nixon, and I do think he was right to resign. But in retrospect it's clear that nothing Nixon did was worse than what other Presidents had done. Indeed, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, his immediate predecessors, had done things every bit as bad involving wire taps and bareknuckle dirty tricks.
A bigger concern to me is that the entire Watergate affair kicked off an obsession with scandal by the press in Washington. It also started the long, nasty, and irresponsible trend toward greater and greater use of annonymous sources. Mind you, Woodward and Bernstein were very responsible in how they used their anonymous source, printing nothing that they could not get rock-solid confirmation on. Too bad our current press corps lacks their fundamental integrity.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Woodward, Bernstein Unethical?
- W. Mark Felt Was Deep Throat
If W Mark Felt, as one of the highest law enforcement officers of the United States, was in possession of evidence of a major felony involving other high officers of the government of the United States, and if, in his role as a major law enforcement officer, anticipated that he could not bring this evidence before a grand jury for fear of damage to his career, then he had an obligation to resign his position and then commit his evidence to a grand jury.
That is what he would have done if were indeed a man of honor and integrity.
I have lived a long time under a rigid set of standards, one of which is the standard of loyalty. In a time of national crisis, Mr Felt proved disloyal. So I store my thoughts about Mr Felt in the same pigeonhole into which I have long placed similar thoughts about Daniel Ellsberg, Jane Fonda and other disloyal and therefore dishonorable persons.
And there are a couple of side notes about Mr Felt that should be read and noted, especially those who were not quite up and around during the Watergate era and its aftermath:
1) According to an Associated Press story, Mr Felt was convicted in the 1970s for authorizing illegal home break-ins in attempts to dig up information on persons thought to have connections with the Weather Underground group of radical leftists of that era. In 1981, President Reagan pardoned Mr Felt for his role in this series of felonies.
2) Mr Felt's contribution to the Washington Post's series of news stories about the bungled Watergate burglary and later efforts by various White House aides to cover up possible connections to the burglars, was mostly high level gossip.
The evidence whose existence eventually broke the Nixon administration was brought to the attention of the US Senate committee investigating the Watergate break-in attempt, on July 13 and July 16, 1973.
On those two days, first before US Senate staffers and three days later before the full committee, Alexander Butterfield, a comparatively low-ranking White House aide, in response to a direct question about the White House voice taping system, told the senators and staffers that the taping system was always live and running whenever the president was present.
Nixon's insistence on executive privilege in regard to the contents of the White House presidential tapes was what led to the threat of impeachment that culminated in his resignation 13 months later.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI