Gagging on "Deep Throat"

Don't you love the sight of all these aging veterans of the Nixon administration trashing Mark Felt, the nonagenarian former FBI agent who, as we found out this week, was the anonymous source for the Washington Post known as "Deep Throat"? Bernard Barker, G. Gordon Liddy, Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson all laid into Felt on television. The minute he was named in the press they couldn't wait to call this 91-year-old man a traitor and a criminal for talking to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post about the Watergate scandal.

Now, considering that the majority of these men went to prison for their activities during this period (Buchanan being the lucky exception), you might think that this is just a case of a number of rusty old pots calling the elderly kettle black. But do they have a point? Did Felt, as Colson suggested, have other options besides leaking to the press? Was he a traitor?

Well, I suppose that he could have gone to the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement official in the land, except for the fact that John Mitchell was personally involved in the break-in and the cover-up and later went to prison for it. Not a good idea.

He could have gone to the White House directly, but at that point you couldn't have swung a cat in the West Wing without hitting someone en route to the slammer. Many of the men in the president's inner circle (Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Dean, to name just three) ended up getting "three hots and a cot" for a stretch in a federal penitentiary. No use going to the White House, either.

I suppose he could have gone to his boss at the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, but since Gray was in the process of chucking sensitive files into the Potomac River, I kinda doubt he would have been inclined to help see that justice was done. He was letting the White House dictate the terms of the investigation. So forget about going to the FBI.

What options did Mark Felt have? Basically two: he could sit on his hands and do nothing, and let a criminal administration get away with committing the kind of offenses that he was being paid to stop, or he could see to it that, one way or another, the criminals were exposed so that justice could be done. Towards that end he helped steer Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post in the right direction, and their investigative reporting, as well as the investigations of the U.S. Congress, helped drive a corrupt president from office.

Does this make Mark Felt a hero? I tend to think not, and I'm a little embarrassed to say that my opinion is pretty much in line with that of Henry Kissinger (now that's a sentence I never thought I'd write!). Heroes don't hide behind anonymity for three decades before declaring themselves when they have one foot in the grave. For Felt to have been genuinely heroic he should have come out and admitted his actions long ago, especially since those actions were, I believe, fundamentally moral and in accord with the best traditions of this country. He didn't do what he did for glory or fame or money. He did it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and he should have said exactly that decades ago.

So I don't believe that he's a hero. But neither is he a traitor, no matter what the former jailbirds of the Nixon Administration, fuming at Felt's last-minute brush with notoriety, might think.

Tom Moran