Thank-you, Deep Throat
Toolbox
By A.C. Hutchison - Published: June 5, 2005
When it comes to television my only consistent interest, except during college football season, is the evening news and "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart on the Comedy Channel. I've never seen "American Idol" or "Everyone Loves Raymond" and have no opinion regarding their merits.
Michael Jackson's fate holds no interest for me. But every now and then, there's absolutely no way to ignore the "idiot lantern," as one English diarist of my acquaintance calls it. In recent times, like everyone else, I was glued to the set for CNN's coverage of the Columbine High School massacre and the events we now sum up with the term "9/11." And, although I'm no baseball fan, I even watched some of last year's historic World Series.
Last week, another one of those irresistible TV occasions came along when 91-year-old Mark Felt, who had been the No. 2 official at the FBI back in the early 1970s, acknowledged that he was the mysterious "Deep Throat" who systematically fed critical information to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward during that newspaper's lonely and courageous investigation of the events we now call Watergate. Felt was the greatest anonymous source we've ever seen.
Because it led to Richard Nixon's resignation as president, Watergate was the biggest political story of the 20th century in these United States. Given Deep Throat's critical role in helping a single newspaper unravel the sordid tale of corruption, intrigue and deceit that was leading inexorably to Nixon's impeachment, the tipster's identity was a compelling mystery.
As soon as the mystery was solved, the debate about the rectitude of the nation's most famous whistle-blower began. David Gergen, an aide to four presidents, stated his views on at least four different programs within hours of Felt's admission. Gergen, painfully reluctant to applaud Felt, was more moderate and responsible than most; others with similar ties to the Republican Party were downright snide about Felt and practically branded him a traitor.
The most offensive, I thought, was Chuck Colson, who found religion while serving a term in prison for misdeeds he committed while serving as the president's special counsel during the Watergate scandal. Now a man of God, he gave CNN's Aaron Brown no sign that the word "forgiveness" is part of his language. Mark Felt, he insisted, should have reported his misgivings to his superiors rather than spill the beans to the (ugh) press.
But look who Felt's superiors were: John Mitchell, the attorney general, and L. Patrick Gray III, the acting head of the FBI. We now know what Felt knew – that Mitchell was deeply involved in Watergate, at least the cover-up, which is what finally brought Nixon down. And Gray, a former assistant attorney general with no FBI experience, was loyal to the president who had appointed him to succeed the late J. Edgar Hoover, who was a greatly flawed character whom Nixon knew he could never control.
And of course we also know that Nixon himself was at the very center of the scandal. Colson apparently would have us believe Mitchell and Gray would have done something noble and good with Felt's reports. So, why can't we believe him?
The infamous Nixon tapes revealed that when the president was told that Felt might be the Post's source, he wondered aloud if Felt was a Catholic. No, he was told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, he's a Jew. And Nixon replied: "[Expletive], [the bureau] put a Jew in there?" And Haldeman responded "Well, that could explain it." Incidentally, Felt is not Jewish.
The day that Felt's admission became news, one of my sons asked his mother: "So, what's the big deal?" His question floored us until we realized that during the Watergate scandal he was in grade school. (We were both immediately reminded of the time a youngster at Berlin Elementary School asked me to name the biggest story of my journalism career, and I said it was the assassination of President Kennedy … to which the clearly astonished boy responded "you were alive back then?")
To those of us who were journalists in the 70s, Watergate without a doubt rivaled the killing of JFK for the dubious honor of being the biggest story of our careers. I wasn't involved in the investigation, of course, but at the time I was the editor and a columnist at The Clearwater Sun in Florida, and I frequently wrote about it. And, frankly, I often caught flak from my readers for daring to suggest that Richard Nixon's response to the unfolding scandal was inadequate.
On one unforgettable occasion, a pro-Nixon subscriber ripped my column from the newspaper, used it as toilet paper and mailed it to me. Other protests weren't quite so tasteless, but what they lacked in vulgarity they more than made up for with unbridled bitterness. More than once I was told to go back to my native Scotland (where, incidentally, I was born an American citizen) because I didn't deserve to live in the United States.
When I wrote that Lowell Weicker, the Connecticut Republican who was on the Senate Watergate committee, deserved praise for upholding his party's most noble ideals even as he was being roundly condemned as a turncoat by the pro-Nixon crowd, the GOP faithful in my community really got angry. But I did receive a very nice letter from Weicker thanking me for my kind words.
When the Watergate movie "All the President's Men" was released, a local theater held a special preview for journalists and nearly everyone on my staff went to see it. I remember wondering aloud why the Washington Post newsroom, as depicted on the screen, was cluttered with bicycle wheels. A day or two later, I discovered that my own newsroom had suddenly and hilariously sprouted its own healthy crop of bike wheels.
(In case you're wondering, as I did back then, it turns out that lots of Washington Post staffers rode bikes to work but took the front wheels with them to their desks to discourage theft.)
Our son's question probably shouldn't have surprised us. Recently, Americans were asked by some organization to select the 100 most important people in their nation's history, and all but a handful of those who made the list were still alive or had died within the past five years. John Adams wasn't mentioned. Albert Einstein was shunned, too. Has anyone under 50 ever heard of Richard Feynman? History has too few celebrities, it seems.
To those of us of a certain age, Watergate remains a watershed event. To those who came along later, it may seem as irrelevant and uninteresting as the exploits of Napoleon and Catherine the Great.
But, as my wife remarked the other day, she's sure glad she lived long enough to learn who "Deep Throat" really was. His identity – and the cover-up he helped expose – is much more important to us than the outcome of the Michael Jackson trial, but maybe we're in a minority.
A.C. Hutchison is the former editor of The Times Argus.
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