Nixon's revenge, cont.: The highest stage of Nixonism?

Sid Blumenthal has an excellent piece explaining how the Bush administration has taken over some of the worst habits of the Nixon administration: Nixon's empire strikes back by Sidney Blumenthal Guardian (UK) 06/09/05.  The article also appears in Salon under the title What Deep Throat was up to 06/09/05.

The biggest problem with the Nixon administration was not that they were extreme conservatives. They weren't. In foreign policy, they were arguably more pragmatic and realsitic than any other post-Second World War Republican administration. Nixon's Vietnam policy was atrocious. But he wasn't as delusional as the Bush administration seems to be in the Iraq War.

The big problem with Nixon is that he had a dictatorial style of rule and a paranoid style in his approach to government. We might say he was a "middle of the road extremist."

I would encourage everyone to read Blumenthal's article. Here are a couple of key paragraphs:

Nixon's grand plan was to concentrate executive power in an imperial presidency, politicise the bureaucracy  and crush its independence, and invoke national security to wage partisan warfare. He intended to "reconstitute the Republican party", staging a "purge" to foster "a new majority", as his aide William Safire wrote in his memoir. Nixon himself declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends the "institutions" of government had to be "reformed, replaced or circumvented. In my second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of these three methods - or whichever combination of them - was necessary."

But now George Bush is building a leviathan beyond Nixon's imagining. The Bush presidency is the highest stage of Nixonism. The commander-in-chief has declared himself by executive order above international law, the CIA is being purged, the justice department deploying its resources to break down thewall of separation between church and state, the Environmental Protection Agency being ordered to suppress scientific studies and the Pentagon subsuming intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the US with blunt military force as its chief foreign policy.

The three main architects of Bush's imperial presidency gained their formative experience amid Nixon's downfall. Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's counsellor, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, one after the other, served as chief of staff to Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, both opposing congressional efforts for more transparency in the executive. (my emphasis)

The third "main architect" he mentions is Karl Rove.  Blumenthal opens the column referring to a story from the Albany Times Union claiming that Mark "Deep Throat" Felt was supported by a team of three FBI officials who helped him provide a stream of leaks to the Washington Post.

The story he refers is the basis of these stories: Deep Throat's tale revealed by Brendon Lyons Albany Times Union 06/06/05; and, Account adds intrigue to Deep Throat story by Brendan Lyons Albany Times Union 06/07/05.  These are quotes from the 06/06/05 article:

The revelation of that collaboration by a retired FBI agent in conversations in recent days with the Times Union casts W. Mark Felt -- who admitted last week to being the media source known as Deep Throat -- not as a disgruntled maverick, as some have suggested, but rather as the leader of a clandestine group that fought White House efforts to contain the sprawling investigation.

Paul V. Daly, 64, who joined the bureau in 1965 and went on to head field offices in Albany and North Carolina, told the Times Union last week that he learned in 1978 that Felt was Deep Throat and that he had not acted alone: At least three other FBI officials helped Felt secretly disclose information about the Watergate investigation to The Washington Post. ...

Daly, a Boston native, identified the others -- all deceased -- as Richard Long, who was chief of the FBI's white-collar crimes section during Watergate; Robert G. Kunkel, agent-in-charge of the Washington field office, which led the Watergate burglary investigation; and Charles Bates, who was assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division.

Lyons' story reinforces the suspicions that John Dean expressed last week. Lyons quotes Dean as saying the story sounded credible, though he doesn't quote Dean as specifically endorsing that version of events.

Some have speculated Felt chose toleak information because he was angry when Nixon passed him over and gave the director's job to Gray. But Daly said it had nothing to do with promotions.

"It was done, as I understood it, so that the investigation into Watergate wouldn't be contained, so that the news media that were recipients of the leaks would create an atmosphere that would allow the investigation to go forward," he said. "There was a sense that the White House was seeking to curtail the inquiry and make it very, very limited." ...

Lyons does quote the Robert Kunkel's son as strongly denying that his father would have played such a role. And the article includes a fairly long discussion of issues in determining the accuracy of "Deep Throat"-related claims. But this is no single-anonymous-source kind of story. It concludes with this:

Thomas Constantine, a former New York State Police superintendent and head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in the late 1990s, said no one should doubt Daly's account of Deep Throat. Constantine hired Daly as his intelligence director when he took over the DEA.

"I'll put my reputation on the line with this one," said Constantine, who guided policing reforms in Northern Ireland several years ago. "He told me this one time before ... he had connected the dots. He had figured who all the people were."

Daly said he chose to divulge his knowledge after Felt came forward publicly last week. In part, Daly said, he wanted the whole story to come out.

"I normally would never do this," he said. "I'm really not a leaker. I just felt that I'm probably the only one around who can say why those releases were made by Felt. The releases were made for the greater good."

Blumenthal takes the story to be credible and characterizes its meaning this way:

For more than 30 years the secrecy around Deep Throat diverted attention to who Deep Throat was rather than what Deep Throat was - a covert FBI operation in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was almost certainly an unwitting asset.