Passions over Watergate apparently still runs VERY HIGH: some former Nixon aides are now blasting former FBI deputy director Mark Felt who is now confirmed as being the Washington Post’s mysterious Watergate source “Deep Throat.”
Felt is being accused of, at best, not going through proper channels and, at worst, of being a “traitor.”
One former aide even accuses Nixon’s critics of losing two Southeast Asia countries and sparking genocide. (So much for claims that it was in the 90s when Americans lost their sense of owning up to personal responsibility and began to play up victim hood.)
Just look at these comments from former Nixon aides:
–Talk show host and Watergate break-in figure G. Gordon Liddy tells CNN Felt “violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession. If he possessed evidence of wrongdoing, he was honor-bound to take that to a grand jury and secure an indictment, not to selectively leak it to a single news source.” Liddy suggests Felt was driven by partisan politics and didn’t reveal information damaging to the Democrats.
–Former Nixon legal adviser Leonard Garment suggested Felt kept his role in Watergate secret for “because he felt that what he had done could well be considered dishonorable.” He too goes after Felt for as a whistle blower, saying the question is “when government persons, having private, secret, confidential information, are justified to become the whistle-blower and defy or ignore their sworn obligation to maintain security and go to the press with it.”
–Chuck Colson: “Mark Felt could have stopped Watergate…He was in a position of that kind of influence. Instead, he goes out and basically undermines the administration.”
So it was FELT’S RESPONSIBILITY to stop Watergate. Not the people within the administration (like Colson) who knew about or were involved in aspects of it.
–And the best for last, Pat Buchanan, who (predictably) labels felt “a traitor.”
The bottom line: many of the former Nixon aides are still furious and still making apologies for their boss (and therefore, seemingly, for themselves). But the award for apparent off-the-wall anger can be read in an angry, almost bitter piece in the American Spectator by actor, economist and former Nixon lawyer and speechwriter Ben Stein (who some had speculated was himself Deep Throat). Here are key parts:
Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW’s, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel’s life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?
Firstly, we agree. TMV was then a college student and also an intern on the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, India when the whole Watergate mess broke. He admired Nixon’s diplomatic shift on China. He admired many Nixon other policies and was a big fan of administration member Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who TMV dealt with in New Delhi, India when Moynihan was U.S. Ambassador to India).
But NONE of that means Watergate could be dismissed as unimportant. MORE:
Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protected his subordinates who were covering up ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.
That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying conniving seducer like Clinton — a lying conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon’s kharma.
In other words, to defend Nixon we have to attack and discredit all the Democrats — since that makes what Nixon did RIGHT. But all that does is discredit the others. It doesn’t negate at all Nixon’s behavior.
Do we sense a bit of the kind of thinking here that has led to the tit-for-tat (and the latter expression is not a description of an intern’s visit to the Clinton oval office) nyeah nyeah your-guy-did-it-too attitude in American politics that has stripped our political standards more than ever of ethical standards that are applied to everyone regardless of party?
Stein says that when Nixon’s enemies brought him down all they did was help defeat the South Vietnames government and allow Cambodia to fall under the power of the brutal Khmer Rouge. HUH? So we modestly wonder:
- When Nixon left office wasn’t his replacement the highly solid (and underrated in some ways) GOPer Gerald Ford whose Secretary of State remained Henry Kissinger? Is Stein suggesting that when Nixon left these two guys were negligent? There was a continuity of policy. Factors were in play that didn’t have to do with Democrats and people hating Nixon because he went after Alger Hiss.
- Didn’t Nixon himself in some later interviews note that if he hadn’t given his enemies the sword they couldn’t have used it against him?
One personal note. In the summer of 1973 TMV was a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism going for his masters. One of his teachers was John Bartlow Martin, the famous biographer of Adlai Stevenson. Martin often told the future TMV in his office that summer of his concern over the Watergater break in of a year earlier. He would fly back to Washington to work with Demcocrats on weekends. Martin also said then DNC Chair Larry O’Brian’s income tax records were being examined. He was very concerned about the scope of government abuse which he said was unprecedented and what he perceived as a threat to democracy because, he said, abuses went way beyond what had been seen under other presidencies.
That was Martin’s view. But history has proven him more correct then Stein (one of our favorites as an actor and as a highly blunt writer). Stein here sounds like someone who is angry about someone he admired greatly being forced out of a job and so he’s lashing out — particularly at the end of his piece:
So, this is the great boast of the enemies of Richard Nixon, including Mark Felt: they made the conditions necessary for the Cambodian genocide. If there is such a thing as kharma, if there is such a thing as justice in this life of the next, Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth. And Bob Woodward is right behind him, with Ben Bradlee bringing up the rear. Out of their smug arrogance and contempt, they hatched the worst nightmare imaginable: genocide. I hope they are happy now — because their future looks pretty bleak to me.
So now all the people who brought Nixon down are responsible for genocide. Actually, we would say Watergate contributed to some of the following:
- A woeful transformation in the press. Editors and reporters (TMV was in journalism school at the time, then over in India) idolized the Washington Post and its reporters. This was solidified by the glamorous movie version of All The President’s men. “Gotcha” journalism became not just the style but the goal. The problem: the Post did its investigation with painstaking care. After Watergate the press’s adversarial role became even stronger and — as we see now — painstaking care became weaker.
- More vigilance on the part of the press and public. The “…gate” is now applied to many scandals.
- A political payback mentality. Republicans were not about to give a pass to a Democrat if they too ran into big trouble. And that materialized with Bill Clinton. Now, of course, Democrats don’t want to give a pass to a Republican if it comes up…Then Republicans won’t…etc.
Yes, Nixon did great things. And people need to recognize it.
But he also had great flaws. The constitutional and legal processes recognized that.
And calling those who helped him face consquences “traitors” or blaming those who took him to task for genocide will never wipe that away.
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.