Deep Throat

Mysteries and ghosts of Watergate

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

6/3/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/History/deepthroat.htm

Throw the old fart in prison for leaking secret information. He should be doing "deep throat" on a cellmate named Bubba.

– Anonymous right winger on Usenet on W. Mark Felt

For years, right wingers have been trying to bury Watergate. The scandal, which shook the nation to its core, very nearly destroyed the GOP, and was seen by many of the Nixon True Believers of the time as nothing more than a liberal conspiracy to get the President.

A lot of those same True Believers and their whelps cheerfully supported the persecution of President Clinton some 20 years later, not because they shared any interests with Richard Scaife and his band of poisonous loons, but out of a simple desire for vengeance. Henry Hyde, one of the more insufferably pompous members of the House committee to impeach Clinton (and a sterling hypocrite with his own storied history of sexual infidelities) came right out and said that vengeance was the main motivating factor in a farewell interview he held when he left the House last January.

The GOP hoped that they could manage the news and the history texts with a endless chorus of "liberal media bias" to any outfit that dared suggest that maybe Watergate was a serious scandal and Nixon should have been impeached. Basically, Watergate was the crazy uncle that the GOP wanted to white out of their family photo albums.

They really hadn’t been having much luck with that. For one thing, every once in a while a new revelation would come out that would remind people of just how crazy vicious the Nixon gang really was. A few years back the BBC did a six hour documentary on Watergate, revealing that Nixon, the President of the United States, and John Mitchell, the Attorney General, seriously discussed forcibly entering the judges’ chambers of Judge John Sirica and removing evidence against Nixon that the judge had stored there. More recently, Watergate kept cropping up in the news as some of the lead characters died. The most recent was the stately and calm Peter Rodino, who chaired the House Impeachment committee hearings in front of a large national television audience.

One of the most enduring mysteries of Watergate was the identity of "Deep Throat, the source who tipped Woodward and Bernstein to "follow the money." That a political secret of that magnitude could be successfully kept in a place like Washington for 32 years was nothing short of amazing. "All the President’s Men" featured a well-known character actor in the role, and to this day, whenever I think of Deep Throat, I think of Samuel Clemens.

There were pretty good reasons for the secrecy: the right wing had made it plain they would destroy the person who brought down the Nixon presidency. When it became clear they weren’t going to find out who it was, they tried claiming that he was entirely a figment of Woodward and Bernstein’s imaginations, hoping the scurrilous charge would anger the paper or its reporters into outing their source.

So when W. Mark Felt, former assistant director of the FBI, came out last week and announced he was the one whut done it, the right wing went nuts. Not just the "scream and throw feces around the cage" sort of nuts that we expect from the right wing, but a complete meltdown of all perspective on their part, leading to some of the most ludicrous bullshit yet – this from an ideology noted for its flagrant lying and over-the-top persiflage.

Part of it was that Felt had been something of a hero to the right wing. As assistant director of the FBI, he stamped pretty hard on the rights of dissenters and their families and friends, ordering (ironically) clandestine and unauthorized burglaries of their homes and offices in an effort to mine information. Right wingers love agents who trash the rights of liberals, and in Felt’s case, he got pardoned for his conviction of 4^th and 5^th amendment violations by Reagan during the appeals process, tantamount in the eyes of right wingers to having a dove with an olive branch in its beak alight on his head during Easter services.

And so the right – led by all the dirtbags who wound up in jail for Watergate crimes – has now begun trashing Felt. One of the more hilarious whines from the right is that Felt came out and revealed himself in order to get a book deal. The man is 92, in a walker, and by all account, in his dotage. Bernstein, writing for the Post today, said that he had tried to dissuade Felt from announcing his secret identity because Bernstein had concerns as to whether Felt was mentally competent to make the decision. A book deal would not seem to be a primary motivation here. Besides, the only people who hadn’t written a book about Watergate who had any involvement were Nixon, "Deep Throat" and the Mexicans they caught in the Watergate. It’s a little late to start whining about profiting off book deals.

The right has settled on portraying Felt as a embittered career bureaucrat who was furious that he was passed over for promotion to bureau chief in favor of an outsider, L. Patrick Grey III. (If I start calling myself B. Zepp Jamieson, can I get a job with the Effabeeye?) The charge might even be true.

But I find it unlikely. While I don’t buy into any theory that Felt was a starry-eyed idealist who was morally outraged at the Nixon White House shenanigans, I do think that he was in a fairly unique position to see just how far-reaching and pervasively the evil Nixon wrought had spread in the federal government, and realized that it was a serious threat to the country. He may well have tried to go through channels with his concerns, only to learn that the Justice Department and the higher echelons of the FBI were as corrupt and inimical to American freedom as Nixon himself was.

Like most people his motives were probably neither wholly base or unequivocally pure, but were, rather, a mixture of the two. And the exact nature of that mixture is known only to W. Mark Felt himself. In any event, he probably saved the country, keeping it free for about a generation longer.

The rich white trash at the Wall Street Journal are trying to equate Watergate with the so-called "Clinton scandals," of course. Fake equivalency is a speciality of the right. But there are a few differences. First, the "Clinton Scandals" were trivial. Second, the "Clinton Scandals" were mostly the product of bitter and vicious far-right crackpots such as Richard Mellon Scaife, Roger Aieles, and Sun Myung Moon, and never really existed, whereas the Watergate Scandals certainly did. And finally, Nixon and his cohorts were guilty. Many went to jail on multiple felony charges, including the vile Jeezus wheezer Chuck Colson, and right wing TV hairball G. Gordon Liddy. Clinton wasn’t guilty of anything other than fibbing about a blow job. There’s about 300 pages of other differences, but I won’t bore you. These first three cover the main parts of it.

I have to admit that finding out who Deep Throat was is a bit of a let down. Not because Felt is an unlikely candidate for National Hero. It’s just that sometimes, the mystery is more fun than the answer. Personally, I always liked the idea of John Mitchell as Deep Throat, simply because the sheer absurdity of it appealed to me.

But a great mystery has died. An old, old man, blinking and smiling vaguely as he leans on his walker, reminds us that we had the courage to fight the corruption and bullying tactics of the right in 1972-4. And the right is furious, because that death reminds Americans of who they once were, what they once stood for, and what they could be again.