One chuckled while watching convicted Watergate felons G. Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson complain about former FBI bureaucrat W. Mark Felt’s ethics after the nonagerian revealed that he was, in fact, the celebrated “Deep Throat” of 1973-4, the man who provided and corroborated sensitive inside information that brought down the administration of Richard M. Nixon. The revelation ended three decades of speculation as to his identity.
Liddy and Colson, among many others, served time because Felt’s conscience, and his anger at being passed over for the top FBI job after J. Edgar Hoover’s death in 1972, led him to divulge the intelligence necessary to enable Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to write their sensational series of exposes for the Washington Post. That series, which later morphed into a sensational book and film, kept the world riveted. Each week between the summer and fall 1973, people looked for more and more of “Woodstein,” a pop reference to the two journalists who met secretly with Felt to “follow the money” and get the goods on the administration’s skullduggery.
Without that information, the Watergate conspiracy -- launched to cover-up the crimes of the Republican Party’s Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), the so-called “plumbers” who had broken into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., and into former CIA agent Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office -- may well have succeeded. As the frail Californian revealed, corroborated Wednesday night by former Post editor Ben Bradlee and by Woodward, he wrestled with this one before deciding to make the call that led the Post to take on the president.
The upper echelon in the Nixon administration -- the so-called “Berlin Wall” headed by Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, abetted by Attorney General John Mitchell, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and (before his own downfall for fraud) Vice President Spiro Agnew -- believed that an alien conspiracy was afoot, financing the campaign of Democratic candidate George McGovern. The Nixon loyalists worried about the Soviet Union, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Hollywood’s Jane Fonda, bad-boy football star Joe Willie Namath, and, of course, what remained of the Kennedy family. In his at times paranoid way, Nixon found it obligatory to join these, and many more enemies, in a list submitted to the FBI for special surveillance.
Ellsberg had earned Nixon’s special enmity for his role in the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971. The former CIA and RAND intelligence agent, working for the Department of Defense, leaked the 7,000 page, classified Defense Department history of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971 to the New York Times. That text confirmed those who believed that Lyndon Johnson had lied when he said in 1964 that the U.S. was not planning to go to war in Southeast Asia. The documents belied the quagmire thesis; the U.S. knew very well what it was getting into when it made deliberate steps to escalate the conflict a year later.
Five days after the Times began printing the expose, on June 11, 1971, the Washington Post followed suit. Nixon was infuriated: “People have got to be put to the torch for this sort of thing,” he told Kissinger, “let’s get the f----- in jail!” Ultimately, after the administration secured an injunction against both papers to cease publication, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, ruling by a 6-3 margin that the injunctions were unconstitutional prior restraints and that the government failed to meet its burden of proof that the Papers endangered national security.
At this juncture, believing Ellsberg a traitor who had sparked antiwar dissent and endangered both the war effort and national security, Nixon and his advisers took the step that led to the greatest American constitutional crisis since the Civil War.
In retrospect, Felt’s decision to share what he knew with journalists slowed a set of initiatives that showed that Nixon’s men would, if necessary, short-circuit democracy. The Post, for example, was aware of its position with an administration that already had declared war on the Fourth and Fifth Estates. Indeed, after the Supreme Court decision, the Nixon administration turned increasingly inward, defining politics as “us against them,” and determining to give no quarter in protecting itself.
Nixon long had been known for his inclination to employ anti-communist smear politics when he knew he could win. As early as 1950, he hammered Helen Gahagan Douglas in the U.S. senatorial race for California with the sobriquet, “the lady in pink right down to her underwear.” That phrase was mild when compared with some of the intrigues the president and his men undertook in the early 1970s.
These schemes constituted what political scientist Nelson Polby deemed “a profound challenge to the people’s sense of trust in their government.” Nixon harboured a deep hatred for the media, which he tried to punish, and he also appeared to distrust his own government, removing two trusted lieutenants, Secretaries George Schultz and Robert Finch, from daily departmental responsibility and bringing them physically into the White House. He also changed the name of the Budget Bureau and sought to augment its power over government departments. The president decelerated staffing replacements of low-priority departments, and he behaved increasingly as if he were an American Charles de Gaulle, seeking a plebiscitary relationship with the populace and ignoring what Nelson Polsby termed that “set of mutual restraints and accommodations” that balance government.
Nixon loyalists still around reacted petulantly against what they termed Felt’s treachery in violating the presidential office and speeding the chief executive’s fall. Pat Buchanan, a Nixon speechwriter, joined Liddy and Colson in suggesting that Felt had pecuniary motives when he decided to come clean, albeit one wonders at age 92 how much he’ll be able to enjoy whatever windfall transpires.
Such conservative sour grapes notwithstanding, despite his walker and physical frailty Felt stands tall today. For the choice he made nearly thirty-two years ago to talk to the Post was for a public servant both courageous and ethically correct. Given the Nixon administration’s innate inability to respect differences of opinion and opposing views, American democracy and its pluralistic system of checks upon power did hang in the balance.
There would be more political scandals in the coming decades, including Felt’s own violation of wiretap rules in pursuing the Weather Underground, and the Iran-Contra affair with Oliver North, the Contras, and Ronald Reagan. And, of course, who will forget Bill Clinton’s Whitewater and dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. But none of these episodes of ignominy came close to matching Watergate and its implications for free expression in a representative and responsible government.
Article appeared in the Kingston Whig-Standard June 4, 2005.|
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