Washington Post columnist David Broder perfectly captures the meaning of Deep Throat, Watergate — and the recent effort by former Nixon administration members to discredit newly revealed source Mark Felt, the FBI’s second in command when Nixon was in power — in a blunt column that should be read, re-read, and then read again.
Read the whole thing but here are key highlights that are so perfectly stated, important and true that we’ll boldface them. First, Broder notes the not just unremorseful comments of Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson on Watergate, but how the former Nixon staffers have gone into attack mode:
In these comments, Americans born in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s can learn everything they need to know about the dangerous delusions of the Nixon era. The mind-set that created enemies lists, the blind loyalty to a deeply flawed individual, the twisting of historical fact to turn villains into heroes and heroes into villains — they are all there.
Such tendencies are not unique to one White House; they go with the territory. They must be consciously resisted by men and women of conscience working within an administration and checked by those on the outside — notably journalists — whose job it is to monitor the presidency.
That is why excessive official secrecy is always suspect and why the isolation of a president behind a closed circle of advisers can lead to abuse of power.
He reports on his interview with William Ruckelshaus, a deputy attorney general under Nixon who , he followed his boss the late Elliot Richardson in resigning rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. So if you are young enough not to know about Watergate remember: REPUBLICANS were opposed to what Nixon had done as well.
When I interviewed Ruckelshaus last week, he said there were obvious dangers when “somebody who is involved in an investigation,” as Felt was involved in the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in, “puts out information to the press. You can hurt innocent individuals and damage the investigative process.
“But if you see the White House and the head of the FBI [L. Patrick Gray] interfering with the investigation, what are you going to do? If you go public with the charges, who is going to believe you?”
Broder concludes:
Mark Felt did what whistle-blowers need to do. He took his information to reporters who diligently dug up the evidence to support his well-founded suspicions.
The republic was saved and the public well served. That Colson and Buchanan still don’t get it speaks volumes about them.
TMV says: Ditto…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.