Watergate

With Mark Felt's self-revelation of himself as "Deep Throat" this past week, Watergate was back in the new.  Watergate, the low point of corruption and official misconduct in the US government prior to the time the Scalia Five first installed the current Bush regime.

By the way, if anyone doesn't know, Deep Throat was the name of a porno movie that was well-known at the time.

Various reporters, Watergate veterans and of course the Big Pundits have been offering their contributions to the memories of Nixonian corruption.

John Dean was Nixon's chief counsel who eventually spilled the beans to Congress on Tricky Dick.  He's also done all lot of research on Watergate and on Deep Throat.  He was surprised at Felt's admission, because he had ruled him out as a Deep Throat candidate in his book Unmasking Deep Throat (2002):  Why The Revelation of the Identity Of Deep Throat Has Only Created Another Mystery Findlaw.com 06/03/05.

Dean notes that the 91-year-old Felt's "memory for the details of his relationship with Woodward seems to be all but gone."  So he probably won't be able to contribute a lot to historians looking at the period.

Dean isn't ready to entirely give up the whodunnit.  He's convinced that Felt had one or more active collaborators in his role as the famous secret source.  Dean believes "others in the FBI must have know Felt was feeding The Washington Post."

He also points out, with some specifics and not just general accusations, some things that Felt told Bob Woodward of the Post at the time that were incorrect.  He notes, though, that Woodward seems not have used any of those items in the Post articles on the scandal.

Dean also harshes on the Bush Republicans a bit:

Because of my own involvement in Watergate, my knowledge of how those who sought to discredit my testimony (particularly before the Nixon tapes surfaced) operate, and my knowledge of the historical record, I know that Nixon apologists will attack Felt -- and Woodward.

These attacks will be senseless (but that has long been the operative word with Watergate). It is time to learn from what happened, not refight battles Nixon has, for good reason, lost. ...

To me, a true hero of Watergate is [then-editor of the Post] Ben Bradlee, who not only supported Woodward and Bernstein, but had the trust of the Post's owner, Katharine Graham. Initially, the rest of the national media and the nation ignored the story. Although The Washington Post never "cracked the case," their keeping the story in the news within the Beltway had a great influence on the Congress, making it an important story. Had Bradlee not done so, history might have been much different.

We still need to know much more about Mark Felt's activities, not to mention his accomplices, to understand the Byzantine workings of the FBI of that era. I hope Bob Woodward will answer these questions -- about which he has knowledge -- sooner rather than later, while there is still interest in the story. For it is information that is as uniquely relevant today -- with the current White House hell-bent on returning the presidency to the imperial status it occupied before Watergate.

There's been quite a bit of chatter about whether Felt should be considered a hero:  Felt should have history on his side by Jules Witcover Baltimore Sun 06/03/05

The disclosure has ignited a predictable debate between Nixon defenders casting Mr. Felt as a disloyal public servant and others who see him as a public hero who blew the whistle on a president who ran roughshod over the Constitution to preserve his political power.

Some Nixon diehards, such as former speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, White House enforcer Charles W. Colson and convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, have been quick to cast Mr. Felt as a turncoat. They say he betrayed his FBI oath by guiding the intrepid young reporters as they peeled back the White House cover-up of the 1972 Watergate break-in.

But the exhaustive and conclusive evidence of criminal behavior in the burglarizing of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and in the paying off of the burglars to take the fall puts history squarely on Mr. Felt's side.

Joe Conason, who has a great eye and ear for the demented edges of today's Halliburton Republicans, points out a weird twist from that quarter on the significance of Watergate: Nixon's revenge Salon 06/03/05.

The predominance of right-wing voices today represents a kind of vengeance for Nixon, who initiated the conservative crusade against the "liberal media" for both ideological and selfish reasons. (He once tried to persuade his ardent supporter, rightist billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to buy the Post from the Graham family.) And in the echo chambers of the right and on talk radio and cable television, the attempts to rewrite the sordid history of the Nixon regime will never cease.

The loudest barking and snarling emanates from the likes of Liddy, who served time for betraying his country and has since become a successful talk show host. It is a measure of morality among those who call themselves conservatives that a fascistic nutcase like Liddy became a movement icon (even after instructing his listeners on the finer points of shooting a federal law enforcement officer).

In his zeal to restore Nixon's reputation, Liddy stands with Patrick Buchanan, who scarcely requires further introduction. The ultra-right pundit and presidential loser has always insisted that the downfall of Nixon was in fact a "coup d'état" by liberals, who had supposedly committed all the same crimes that brought down their old enemy.

But now Buchanan, and Rush Limbaugh, have gone still further, claiming that those who forced Nixon to quit were directly responsible for the ensuing communist victory in Vietnam and the Cambodian genocide. That makes about as much sense as blaming those events on Buchanan and Limbaugh because they both dodged the draft.

To illustrate: Buchanan, Limbaugh, Stein blamed those who"brought down" Nixon for fall of Vietnam, Cambodian genocide, Media Matters for America 06/01/05

BUCHANAN: There's something deadly serious here. People that brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam, the death of hundreds of thousands of people. ... Nixon was brought down by people who were a hell of a lot worse than he was. [MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, 5/31/05]

LIMBAUGH: Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn't have lost Vietnam. Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 6/1/05]

Did I mention that President Bush calls the junkie bigot Limbaugh a "national treasure"?