It Felt like Deep Throat

     I suppose by now everybody has heard about the true identity of Deep Throat, the erstwhile anonymous imformant who helped bring Nixon's Watergate coverup to light 20 years ago. Frankly, the outing of W. Mark Felt, a top FBI official at the time, is anticlimactic. It would have been much more exciting had it been Gerald Ford or George Bush or Al Haig or Ben Stein. That would have added a lot of drama to the story. Diane Sawyer, Pat Buchanan, William Rehnquist, and Pope John Paul II were candidates, albeit unlikely ones. They all would have added a level of drama and intrigue to the case. With Felt, it's just your average disgruntled employee whistleblower case.
     Given that, I'm surprised by the the amount of vitriol being spewed in his direction by the Right. They call him a traitor and trash him for not being more loyal to his President. Besides, they say, it was only a little break-in and bugging of a rival Presidential candidate's party headquarters. It's not like Nixon got a BJ out of the deal. (Now that's an impeachable offense!) They also say that he doesn't deserve to be held up as a hero because he personally had issues with Nixon.
     Well, if the only whistleblowers that were allowed to tell the truth were ones that liked the people they were ratting out, no corruption would ever be uncovered. But I guess that's the point, huh? Felt was in line to replace J. Edgar Hoover as the FBI chief, but a Nixon loyalist was promoted instead. For all of Hoover's faults, (and there were many - Hoover was not a good man) he kept the FBI independent of the executive and legislative branches. It was the nation's police force, and it was not a private eye hired to the White House, even if it did have a corrupt sherrif. When Hoover died, Felt, like the rest of the FBI, feared that Nixon would politicize the agency. This plus his being passed over for promotion may have spurred him to reveal secrets to Woodward and Bernstein. Of couse, Felt wasn't exactly wrong about that - L. Patrick Gray, the Nixon loyalist in charge of the FBI, was leaking FBI info to the White House so they could avoid prosecution. He himself was implicated in Watergate.
     As to giving FBI secrets to the public, that's an echo of the Bushies primary complaint about Abu Ghraib. Forget the wrongdoing, they say, attack the messenger! Its a repeat of elementary schoo, where the biggest lesson we learned on the playground was that tattletales were the worst sort of evildoers and that bullies were just doing what bullies do. Felt worked for the FBI, true, but he also worked for the United States, and when the head of the FBI was engaging in not only illegal activity but activity coutnerproductive to the United States, where else was Felt to go? I have to note that Felt was not proud of being Deep Throat. In a 1999 interview, Felt revealed that he disliked what Deep Throat did even as he felt it necessary. Also keep in mind that Felt didn't singlehandedly "bring down the President." He just kept two reporters informed of the progress of the FBI investigation - progress that would never otherwise be reported because Nixon's buddy was running the show. Eventually, other sources proved more damaging, including Nixon's own tape recordings. Woodward and Bernstein, and by extension Felt, managed to keep the scandal in the spotlight long enough for the police to do their jobs. It's tempting to blame Felt for "bringing down a sitting President", but it's criminally negligent to ignore the complicity of his boss. Had Gray not supressed evidence and illegally fed information to the White House, the conspiracy would have been uncovered earlier.
     Interestingly, the day after Felt outed himself, a story appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about a Georgia prison guard whistleblowing about prison abuse. Tommy Cardell, a devout Christian in his own words, is risking alientation and personal harm to speak out against fellow law enforcement officers about criminal abuse.

"[The Code of Silence is] for street gangs and criminals," he said. "That's not something for the police officer to uphold." "If an officer makes a mistake and you can help him get back on the right road ? you don't run out and blow the whistle," he said. "But if you have a group of people and they're doing illegal stuff, and they're trying to involve you in it ? I wouldn't want to be part of a group of people who are breaking the law."

If it makes sense for a rural prison officer, doesn't it also make sense for our national police force? I'm not calling Felt a hero. But I'm not calling him a criminal, either. He did what he felt he had to do. And history has shown that he probably did the right thing, as unpopular as it was (and is). It's just a little disappointing that the mystery ends this way. At least we have the 18 1/2 minute gap on Nixon's tapes....