All the President's Men Redux

I find myself utterly fascinated by the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat.  Watergate was the first major political event that I could approach with something like an adult understanding.  I associate the Nixon administration with the awakening of my political awareness.  I was not old enough to vote in the 1972 election, but I followed it, and I followed all the Watergate revelations (in my memory, it seems as if major things were happening every day, although I know that wasn't really the case.)  I remember consciously saying to myself as I watched Nixon's resignation -- "THIS is history."  I'd lived through major historical events before, of course (JFK, the moon landing, all sorts of stuff), but somehow, the Nixon thing really hit me, probably because I was older and could realize the importance for myself.

Anyway, even though I thought I was pretty knowledgable about Watergate, I evidently wasn't, because when I read that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, I didn't remember who he was.  But now reading about him and about the Watergate days really brings that time back to me -- when the dishonesty of an American president could still shock me, when I was just stretching my almost-grown-up wings, and when it really seemed to me as if my generation was going to make a difference despite Vietnam and criminal government corruption and all the rest of it.  To me, Nixon's resignation seemed to symbolize a genuine new start.  It wasn't, but I couldn't know that then.

If memory serves, I didn't know about Deep Throat until later, when All the President's Men came out (1976?)  But of course I still associate the name with those breathless days of summer 1974, when Nixon's downfall seemed both inevitable and yet always just out of reach.

I'm alternately amused and annoyed by some of the holier-than-thou criticisms of John Dean and Patrick Buchanan and others.  There's even Pat Buchanan's sister, demanding to know why Felt didn't take his concerns through "proper channels," such as the Attorney General.  Oh, right, the Attorney General.  That would have been Attorney General John Mitchell, you understand -- the same John Mitchell who went to prison because of the part he played in subverting the Constitution, obstructing justice, lying to the American people, etc., etc.

I saw Woodward and Bernstein on Larry King, and Bernstein noted that what is happening now is the same thing that happened then -- the people in the Nixon administration tried to turn the spotlight away from themselves and act as if the problem was not their own corruption and lies, but the behavior of the Washington Post and the press in general.  Now some of Felt's critics are doing the same thing -- villifying the source and conveniently ignoring the criminal behavior that gave Deep Throat something to talk about in the first place.  And Woodward pointed out that Felt didn't have the whole story -- it was up to the reporters to put it all together.  So even if he had gone to someone in the admin, Felt could have described only vague suspicions and pointed out a few mysteries and discrepancies; he didn't know how they all connected.

Watergate was a major threat to the power of the Constitution.  Today, when our Constitution is again facing serious threats, we can't afford to let anyone cover up the truth the way the president and all his men did during in the late 60s and early 70s.  Felt is not a traitor, although Nixon certainly was -- a traitor to the people, at least.

Of course, I don't know that I will go as far as Felt's family and claim him as a hero, either.  Maybe he was; maybe he wasn't.  I don't know his motives.  After all, Nixon passed him over as J. Edgar Hoover's replacement.  Perhaps he acted out of revenge as much as a desire to see truth triumph.  Probably, like most people who face complex decisions, he had several motives, even conflicting ones.  I'm sure it couldn't have been easy for him to go against his lifetime of training in the FBI and help reveal the truth.  But in the end, I'm glad he (and many others, including John Dean) did.