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Jewish World Review June 7, 2005 / 29 Iyar, 5765 Deep Throat: Dirty tricks, dirty hands By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan and liberal Rev. Jesse Jackson don't often agree on much politically, but each finds a lot to dislike about Deep Throat. So do I.
Like many folks over the last three decades, I was hoping that the mysterious Deep Throat of Watergate-era fame would turn out to be a pristine-clean Dudley Do-Right, motivated by patriotism, constitutional concerns and maybe a guilty conscience as he fed Watergate revelations to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.
Instead, he is Mark Felt, a top FBI official at the time, whose constitutional concerns did not prevent him from being convicted in 1980 for authorizing government agents to break into homes secretly, without search warrants, in a search for anti-Vietnam War bombing suspects from the radical Weather Underground in 1972 and 1973.
President Ronald Reagan pardoned Felt five months later on the grounds that he had "acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation." Former President Richard Nixon sent Felt his congratulations.
Today some right-wingers are castigating Felt as a turncoat and worse.
Was Felt a hero or, in Buchanan's view, a "snake"? Where you stand depends largely on where you sit—or sat.
Buchanan, a veteran of the Nixon White House, describes Felt in interviews as wielding the FBI with its massive files and investigative powers like a "secret police" force to find and feed material to "the Nixon-haters at The Washington Post."
In a telephone interview, Jackson, a veteran of the Rev. Martin Luther King's civil rights organization, described his reaction as "mixed." He was delighted that Nixon's reign ended but troubled that Deep Throat turned out to be a top lieutenant in the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's Constitution-trampling war against civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, Black Panther leaders and other left leaners.
Indeed, Felt was a top enforcer of burglaries, wiretaps, extortions and other "black-bag" jobs for Hoover during the time when then-Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy authorized the FBI to wiretap and otherwise spy on King, based on Hoover's unfounded suspicions that King was a communist.
The FBI's operation later expanded to the planting of agent provocateurs in King's movement and secretly wiretapping King and his family. Hoover's counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, resulted in the police-raid deaths of two Chicago Black Panther leaders in 1969. Their families later won a major financial settlement for the violation of the Panthers' civil rights.
"If the FBI can come to the press and use its own influence to decide who the press will or won't expose, that's a disturbing situation," Jackson said.
No, Felt was not a pristine clean "goo-goo," which is what the Democratic machine used to call "good-government" types when I was covering Chicago politics in the '70s. But few anonymous whistleblowers fit the image of Boy Scouts motivated only by their duty to do the right thing. In fact, many whistleblowers have mixed motives and that puts an extra burden on journalists to use anonymous sources cautiously and sparingly.
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you information," a prize-winning investigative reporter explained to me during the Watergate era. "But, it's OK to check their fingernails."
Felt appears to have had some dirt under his fingernails and his detractors are making the most of it. He resented being passed over by Nixon to succeed Hoover as FBI director. Judging by Woodward's account, and others, Felt also was engaged in an old-fashioned Washington turf battle to preserve the independence of Hoover's FBI against power grabs by Nixon's White House.
With that in mind, I am amused that many of the same people who called Felt a turncoat for betraying the Nixon White House praised Linda Tripp's similar betrayal of a confidence to expose President Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern.
For some people, the ethics of whistleblowing depend upon whom the whistle is being blown.
Unlike Clinton's affair, the Watergate scandal involved far-reaching burglaries, secret slush funds, cover-ups and other criminal activity and violations of the Constitution. As more than one comedian has put it, Clinton did to an intern what Nixon was trying to do to the whole country. With that in mind, I expect history will vindicate Felt's role in the Watergate story, based on what he was trying to expose and why it was worth exposing.
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
