6-1-05
It has been one of Washington’s best kept secrets for more than thirty years, no small feat in a town where rumors and news leaks seem to be cottage industries.
For reporters, it was the Holy Grail, a source so tied to the conduits of power that he could single handedly bring down a president simply by directing a determined reporter at key points of an investigation.
This week the family members of 91-year old Mark Felt confirmed a Vanity Fair story that names the former number two man in the FBI as Deep Throat, the most famous news source in the history of American politics.
Deep Throat, jokingly nicknamed after a popular porn movie of the time, was a man deeply torn between the loyalty he felt to his country and the disgust he felt in watching investigations of the Nixon administration disappear into the ether of the political machine.
When newspaper reporter Bob Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein started poking around the seemingly low level dirty trick of breaking into the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, it was Deep Throat who urged Woodward to keep going, with the now-famous advice, “Follow the money.�
When the Nixon administration started a campaign of “plausible deniability� by assuring the public that the investigation had ended with this or that low level flunky, it was Deep Throat who reminded the team that Richard Nixon ruled his organization with an iron fist and that it was implausible that mid-level operatives would make such a bold move without authorization from the White House.
Felt, now feeble and living quietly, apparently spent many of the years since considering himself a criminal, still convinced that no one in the FBI brotherhood has the right to go outside the chain-of-command to bring down a lawfully elected president.
But today, of course, he is considered a hero, a man who would not subjugate his values in the face of awesome power, someone who would risk it all to fix a system that had been corrupted.
Former Nixon loyalists have painted Felt as a bum, as someone who would hide in parking garages instead of talking to superiors about his concerns.
The problem, of course, is that it was some of those very same foxes who were watching the chicken coop, and when the system has been corrupted, sometimes you have to break the rules of the system in order to fix it.
Today, the relationship between journalists and those in power has changed.
Today, the public separates a blind loyalty for America with a blind loyalty to those who run America.
If Felt is indeed Deep Throat, then he taught us that even a checked and balanced power can still corrupt, and like freedom, our leaders demand eternal vigilance to ensure we remain free.
The guilt over his actions helps prove Felt a literal man of conscience, and history has already judged his actions just in the face of an administration willing to turn the awesome force of a superpower against political instead of international enemies.
Hero, indeed.