Deep Throat Comes Up for Air
The former second-in-command of the FBI during the Nixon years, W. Mark Felt, now claims that he was “Deep Throat” – the secret Watergate leaker who kept Woodward and Bernstein on the right track during their investigation of Nixon’s dirty tricks.
The two things favoring credibility in this case are that he was probably in a position to know what “Deep Throat” knew, and, of course, that he’d have to be a fool to make that claim falsely, since Woodward knows the truth. (Deep Throat was Woodward’s contact, but apparently Bernstein is now in on the secret.) On the other hand, he was never a top candidate in speculation about the matter, and he has denied the suggestion in the past. Interestingly, Woodward and Bernstein have refused to comment on Felt’s claim either positively or negatively, and are sticking to their announced policy of not revealing Deep Throat’s identity until after his death:
MSNBC read a statement attributed to Bernstein:
“We’ve said all along that when the source, known as Deep Throat, dies, we will reveal his identity. Beyond that, when there have been articles, books, speculations, classes of university journalism students, … we’ve always said the same thing. That we’re not going to say anything because we have an obligation to all our sources, to whom we gave our word that they will remain confidential, including Deep Throat, until their deaths.
“When the individual known as Deep Throat dies, we will reveal his identity, and explain at great length all of our dealings with that individual and context of that relationship.”
As far as it goes, Deep Throat’s identity is an interesting bit of political history. But the idea that it might have been the executive officer for the entire FBI raises interesting questions about loyalty and public duty.
Felt himself says he kept his secret in part because he thought it was shameful:
“I don’t think (being Deep Throat) was anything to be proud of,” Felt indicated to his son, Mark Jr., at one point, according to the article. “You (should) not leak information to anyone.”
It’s also strange that an FBI executive, possessing information about improprieties such as Watergate and the violation of Daniel Ellsberg’s medical records, would release it publicly, rather than seek a legal resolution. Yet no one disagrees that the release of this information, and the accounting it led to, were good things. (Some argue that it created a pattern of hostile journalism and cynicism about elected officials. I think those also are good things. But as for Nixon himself, no reasonable person argues we would have been better off not knowing about what he was doing, and letting him get away with it.)
There is an easy argument that public release was the only option under the circumstances for someone dedicated to the rule of law, because there was no hope of a legal accounting working within the system. In the Nixon years especially, that argument is particularly believable. (Recall Nixon fired two Attorneys General in succession because they refused to halt the Watergate investigation by firing the Special Prosecutor – until he finally found a thrid-level Justice Department hack unscrupulous enough to do the job. That hack, by the way, was named Robert Bork.) But it is hard to imagine that the #2 in the FBI couldn’t have found some way to bring legal pressure to bear if he had chosen to do so.
Deep Throat’s actions are more understandable as those of a civilian White House insider (as many have speculated he or she was). A person in that position would have had no legal clout, making leaking their only means of addressing the situation. But for a law-enforcement or military member (Alexander Haig was a top candidate for “Deep Throat”), disclosure conflicts with obligations of obedience (and confidentiality) of which we cannot lightly absolve such persons.
I am not inclined to believe that, if Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he should not have disclosed what he knew. I am inclined to believe that he should have done more to drag the Watergate investigation into the realm of criminal law, and push that investigation upward into the White House. But the public revelation was crucial to the final resolution of the situation. At the same time, we cannot have the FBI playing political games with its investigations, or engaging in selective revelations of confidential information motivated by political considerations. (For one thing, that is what Nixon was trying to do to Ellsberg, and it is ugly. For another, it is what the FBI itself tried to do to Martin Luther King, and it was even uglier. Not that I wouldn’t want to see Nixon on the receiving end of anything they could cook up.) We do need some controlling force that ensures our armed services will not follow an insane or megalomaniacal commander into the darkness of fascism like a Praetorian guard, but we cannot allow them to exercise that discretion arbitrarily. (We do have a mechanism for removing such a leader from power, but it can only be activated by that leader’s hand-picked aides, making it useless, as history has already shown.)
Uncharacteristically, I don’t have an answer here. This claim by Felt, however, if it is true, puts Deep Throat in a new light. There is no question that Deep Throat’s actions were a great service in returning the nation to the rule of law – were they also a threat to that rule?
UPDATE: The Washington Post and Woodward and Bernstein have now confirmed that Felt was “Deep Throat”. They say they hesitated over concern that Felt, 91, was not now mentally alert enough to release them from their earlier promise not to do so.
Felt, apparently, was a J. Edgar Hoover apprentice, and was angry when Nixon refused to give him the top job but went outside the FBI to break the Hoover chain. The Times notes:
Mr. Felt, . . . was convicted in 1980 on unrelated charges of authorizing government agents to break into homes secretly, without warrants, in a search for anti-Vietnam War bombing suspects from the radical Weather Underground in 1972 and 1973. Five months later, President Ronald Reagan pardoned him on the grounds that he had “acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.”
So Felt himself was doing exactly what Nixon was doing to the Democrats, and other FBI agents were doing to war resisters and, earlier, to Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights Activists. Ronald Reagan, of course, regarded that as “high principle”, which to him I imagine it was. But Felt also acted to stop Nixon, and reportedly spent a lifetime conflicted over whether a law-enforcement officer should take on that role. On that point, the Times reports that:
some old Nixon hands like Patrick J. Buchanan, the onetime presidential speechwriter, and G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted Watergate conspirator, reacted to the disclosure of his identity with derision that a top government official would pass word of possible crimes to Mr. Woodward rather than to a prosecutor.
At least now he’s pissing off the right bunch of yahoos. (Irony is truly dead – G. Gordon Liddy is complaining about an FBI agent not following the law by keeping his – Liddy’s – lawbreaking secret! He probably means it, too.) But all this complexity underscores the problems raised by cases in which the only hope against lawbreakers is for law enforcers to break the law.
Quick note: Felt was, from the beginning, one of the “top candidates,” or most likely suspects, to the extent that the Nixon White House even seemed convinced it was him. There has been as much speculation about Felt as there has been about anyone else since the 70s.
Just for clarification, though I am no great fan of Bork, the Saturday Night Massacre was hardly as simple as you put it. Far from being “a thrid-level Justice Department hack”, Bork was the Solicitor General, the third highest position in the Justice Department and the person responsible for representing the government in cases before the Supreme Court.
Bork was also prepared to resign that night, after AG Richardson and Deputy AG Ruckelshaus, but Richardson himself talked Bork out of it. Richardson and Ruckelshaus had already personally assured Congress that they would not fire Archibald Cox, so they were between a rock and a hard place; Bork hadn’t. Also, Richardson believed that if all three of the top Justice Department officials refused to obey the President, it would throw the Department (and perhaps the entire Executive branch) into anarchy. Whatever our later disagreements with Bork as a jurist, it hardly seems fair to lay the burden of Cox’s firing solely on him.
The direct result of this nightmare was the Independent Counsel Act of 1978, which eventually gave us Whitewater and Monica. Ah, how time flies when you’re having fun.
Regarding Bork: Philip Heymann, assistant to Archibald Cox (the first Watergate prosecutor, fired in the “Saturday Night Massacre”), tells the story slightly differently:
This says that Bork (a) supported Nixon, (b) was willing to fire the prosecutor to protect the criminal, and ( c) hesitated to do so only out of fear for his reputation – and that Richardson simply told him to act on his conscience (an idea that he apparently could not reach on his own).
Schmuck.
Thanks for the info, though; you are right that that is a part of the story I was not familiar with.
I read the link, and it’s a fascinating interview. I would be interested to know if Richardson or Ruckelshaus (or Bork, for that matter) ever confirmed that story. Heymann, as you point out, was Cox’s assistant, and therefore biased (legitimately so). It should be noted that, if Heymann’s story is accurate, Bork fires Cox because he honestly believes that the President has the legal authority to do so, not because he is some kind of flunky. (In fact, he’s afraid that by firing Cox he will look like an “apparatchik”.) Heymann also points out that a week later, Bork hired Leon Jaworski, who was just as aggressive as Cox and had the advantage of being politically bulletproof because of public sentiment over the Massacre.
Like I said, I don’t necessarily like Bork as a judge, but I dislike the way that we all — left, right and center — continue to impugn one another personally because we disagree with one another politically. That’s the kind of tit-for-tat hatred that leads to the present situation, where Congress looks like its ready to eat its own young. I don’t know about the rest of you, but out here in the Pacific Northwest we’re talking about our own ‘nuclear’ option — namely, nuking the District of Columbia and washing our hands of the whole mess (and if we could do it while Gregoire and Rossi are in town, that’d be great, too).
By the way, looks like Woodward is confirming that Felt was Deep Throat. Damn, first Fermat’s last theorem and now Deep Throat. All the mystery is going out of life…. *sigh*
Out of the shadows at last – Deep Throat
But Joan is quoted as saying that “Bob Woodward’s gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the kids’ education. Let’s do it for the family.” Now, that is heartwarm…