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Watergate "Deep Throat" Mark Felt Dead At 95
Hugh Pickens writes "W. Mark Felt Sr., 95, associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal, better known as 'Deep Throat,' the most famous anonymous source in American history, died at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Felt secretly guided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to pursue the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings, and later of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies. 'It's impossible to exaggerate how high the stakes were in Watergate,' wrote Felt in his 2006 book A G-Man's Life. 'We faced no simple burglary, but an assault on government institutions, an attack on the FBI's integrity, and unrelenting pressure to unravel one of the greatest political scandals in our nation's history.' No one knows exactly what prompted Felt to leak the information from the Watergate probe to the press. He was passed over for the post of FBI director after Hoover's death in 1972, a crushing career disappointment. 'People will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward. The bottom line is that we did get the whole truth out, and isn't that what the FBI is supposed to do?'"
The FBI is supposed to get the whole truth out. Unfortunately, there are people who want to bring politics into enforcing the law, so we need checks and balances on the entire government. That's where the media comes in. Mark Felt did do the right thing, even though it was incredibly difficult for him at the time. RIP, Mark. (now, whether we'd have the balls to do that today, or the attention span to see it through, is another question entirely. I don't think we do, quite honestly, judging by the multiple scandals that have gone seemingly unpunished during the Bush administration.)
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It's worth bearing in mind that Nixon's predecessor was objectively far worse than him, namely LBJ.
Starting and then fighting the Vietnam war badly, deliberately falsifying the Gulf of Tonkin incident (whatever about Bush, I think he genuinely believed his pretext, that Iraqi WMDs existed), ordering the USS Liberty to not be defended when it was under attack and then falsifying details of the attack later (probably the most spineless act in US military history).
Aside from that, there's the personal - forcing aides to talk to him while he was talking a dump, laughing at the dead body of JFK, etc..
A truly odious and terrible president.
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The Weather Underground wasn't an approved political party, the Democrats were and are.
There's an old saying...in Soviet Russia there was one party; in America there are two.
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Mark Felt disclosed to Woodward and Bernstein what he thought would hurt Nixon, because Nixon had passed over Felt (#2 at FBI when Hoover finally died) in favor of a Nixon crony, an "outsider", to run the FBI instead of promoting Felt.
I'm glad he did. But I don't admire or respect Felt for it. Because Felt could have disclosed any of that stuff (or more that he surely knew) to Woodward and Bernstein, or many other journalists, well before he had reasons of personal revenge. Which might have prevented Nixon from being reelected in 1972, instead of a landslide followed by an aborted impeachment that has left this country in Constitutional crisis through today, worse every time around the cycle.
I'm not glad he's dead, either. I wish he had spilled more, about other Nixon cronies (like Rumsfeld and Cheney), and he might have done so once the Bush era was finally safely over, and those other criminals were as "retired" as he was. But evidently there wasn't enough personal gain in that kind of disclosure, so Felt never gave it. And now he never will.
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I hate Hoover, but in a way he had a perverse logic that is tough to argue with. Shouldn't the FBI be able to be above even the president? Sure Felt was pissed and acted on his own interest to take down Nixon because he felt he was owed what Nixon took, but that doesn't mask the fact that the FBI had the power to do it. Today it has been politicized.
Wouldn't it be better to have a independent fiefdom that investigates terrorist, civil rights groups, and the president, rather than a group under the thumb of the executive branch that investigates just terrorist and civil rights groups?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/aug/09/martinkettle1
His motivation was nothing to do with protecting the Constitution or citizens of the US. He worked at the FBI and participated in operations that violated the Constitution and law far more egregiously than Nixon and his horde. Mark Felt took this action because the system did not believe he was competent enough to rise up the ladder. The promotion would have moved him up the food chain, satisfying his ego and Woodward would never have met Felt.
Woodward had connections in the intelligence community and was not the eager young reporter so often portrayed. Interestingly enough, whenever his record comes under analysis he has a swarm of lawyers on hand to silence his critics. Felt wasn't the only informant Woodward had, and it is pretty straight forward to figure out whom he knew that had access to the Whitehouse.
Watergate left us with a self-aggrandizing press, led to the Carter malaise and mainstreamed Reagan in the backlash. Hmmm, probably better off if Felt had accepted his own limitations rather than pretending he was outraged.