Some Thoughts On Deep Throat

I know I normally don't deal with politics much these days, but a lot of what I've seen and heard about W. Mark Felt's unmasking as "Deep Thraot" has left me more than a little bewildered (and that includes the front page love letter to Felt's daughter the Washington Post dropped on its front page this morning). After all, as former prosecutor John Nields pointed out today, when Felt had his hands on the controls, he was more than willing to trample the same laws that Nixon's henchmen rolled over:

In late 1972 and early 1973, during the same period when he was investigating the Watergate break-in, Felt authorized FBI agents in New York and New Jersey to break into and search the homes of friends or relatives of fugitives associated with the Weather Underground, a radical, violent antiwar organization. These friends and relatives were innocent of any wrongdoing. There was no probable cause to conduct the searches. There was no search warrant authorizing them. And they were clearly illegal.

Not that I'm a fan of the Weather Underground*, but it's important to point out that Felt authorized these break-ins years after his former superior, the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had concluded that such "black bag" operations were "clearly illegal". Not that I give Hoover much credit for what looks like a deathbed conversion, but it speaks volumes about Felt that he was willing to borrow that idea from the old playbook.

Given what we do know about Felt now, and the crimes he was convicted of, I have to wonder just what damage he would have done to our civil liberties if he had actually taken over as FBI Director upon Hoover's death as he had originally aspired.

But unlike both Ben Stein and Peggy Noonan, two writers that I admire and respect, I'm not inclined to pin the blame for the Fall of Southeast Asia and the Cambodian genocide on Felt and his role in Watergate. In fact, that line of thinking reminds me quite a bit of what I heard from plenty of Democratic partisans during the Clinton impeachment battle.

The fault for Watergate, and the other disasters that could be directly attributed to the fall of the Nixon presidency are the responsibility of President Nixon his staff alone. If the stakes were so high on the world stage, then they should have known better than to be underwriting two-bit burglaries. And perhaps the biggest joke of all is how unnecessary it all was. After all, they were spying on a Democratic party as it was blundering to the worst national electoral defeat in its history.

So while Watergate was certainly one of the greatest political power plays ever, it should be far past time for anyone to pretend that the players were acting in anything other than their own self-interest.

So forgive me if I pass on the applause.
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I guess it's nice that a Google search on the Weather Underground leads you to the weather service, not a history of those domestic terrorists.

Eric 09:27 PM

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Posted by: at June 13, 2005 11:14 AM

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