Even if you are sick of Deep Throat

Don't miss this ABC article on L. Patrick Gray. It is rewarding on three counts.

First, it sets the record straight about L. Patrick Gray. Deep Throat/Felt's virtue is heavily dependent on making Gray a Watergate conspirator. It is surprising, then, to read that Gray was not indicted for any Watergate-related matters. This undercuts the DT/F camp's argument that Felt was "forced" to go to Woodward because his boss was part of the Watergate conspiracy.

In fact, Gray's legal problems were exactly Felt's problems: illegal break-ins during the investigations of the Weather Underground. There was one key difference: Charges were dropped against Gray, but Felt was convicted.

Second, see how Bradlee and Bernstein got their facts wrong about Gray. They are desperate to defend their sources and methods and could not be bothered with little things like accuracy.

Third, Terry Lenzner makes an appearance. I did not realize that Bill Clinton's dirt collector was an investigator for the Watergate Committee.

A little offline digging suggests that Lenzner did not change his stripes. With Clinton, he worked to discredit those who might reveal embarrassing information about the Big He. With the Ervin Committee, he attacked those witnesses who undercut John Dean's politically useful but self-serving testimony.

Here is how William Safire described him in July 1973:

Terry Lenzner, born of wealth, captain of the Harvard football team, protégé of Ramsey Clark, and lawyer for the Reverend Philip Berrigan, is the essence of radical chic. He is a man on the make who strikes the pose of a stern guardian of civil liberties, but who has shown he has not the most rudimentary understanding of fairness and civility in human relationships.

Isn't this a little like

a bunch of American automotive engineers giving Cadillac it's overall excellence award the year they brought out the Cimarron ?

I can't think of a better example of the compound mentality in action.

Google traffic puzzle

The last couple of days i've gotten a steady stream of visits from people searching for "schrafft" and "ice cream". No idea why.

Carnival

The latest roundup of econ and business blogging is over at Byrne's MarketView.

Deep Throat; No choice but to leak?


Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder

When President Nixon ordered his White House staff-- Messrs. Halderman, Ehrlichman, and Dean-- to direct me (via General Walters) to supply bail for the Watergate burglars, and to deflect the FBI's investigation of the crime, I instructed Walters to refuse their demands. Rather than force my resignation, and presumably face the likely intense public curiosity about the reasons for my leaving, President Nixon backed away.

Helms's actions show that the Nixon crowd were easily cowed by officials willing to do their duty. Felt, obviously, had the same power to focus "intense public scrutiny" on the White House by airing his concerns and resigning. (Or better yet, bringing them to Congress). His motives for leaking are clearly more ambiguous and less honorable than his rabid apologists will admit.

A plea from Steve Sailer

An Open Letter to the Women of the World: I know there's something about dangerous wackos like this fellow that sets your hearts to going pitty-pat, but, really ... Have you ever thought about how much better this world would be if, when meeting a potential homicidal maniac, you didn't always act upon that urge to have his baby?

backstory here

Deep Throat's silence

Some confirmation for the theory i floated here about Felt's refusal to take a victory lap in the years after Nixon left the White House.

In Crazy Rhythm (1997), Leonard Garment relates some inside dope from Woodward himself:

One Bob Woodward told me that Deep Throat 's public role and public persona had changed radically since Watergate days; it was no so discordant with his former garage skulking behavior that Deep Throat would never come forward to identify himself.

Through the looking glass

Go read Patterico on illegal immigrants and consular rights

You can’t have it both ways, L.A. Times. You can’t make it hard for police to ask whether people are Mexican nationals, and then punish law enforcement because they failed to do that.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The floodgates are open

Mark Felt: The Inevitable Sequel

"Defining wealth"

Shannon Love has a must read post over at Chicago Boyz.

Watergate

Mark Steyn

But ''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Jay Rosen

As everyone knows, there is a priesthood in journalism. Whether it has authority is another matter. The team of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and Woodward himself as author and investigator, are comparable to cardinals in the church. (Although Bernstein is seen as an under-achiever after Watergate, Woodward heads the college.) A chain of belief connects them and their deeds to the rookie reporter, to the J-schooler sweating a Masters degree, even to the kid taking liberal arts who joins the college newspaper. (Me, class of '79.)

Carnival of the Capitalists

The latest collection of econ and business blogging is over at Gala Time.

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I doubt most modern journalists would agree with the newspaperman in John Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. The modern reporter is on a quest to strip away myth and legend to get at THE TRUTH.

Or at least that is what they tell us. But when it comes to the sacred myths of their profession (Vietnam and Watergate), they go to great lengths to shore up the legend.

I've already noted some of the flaws in the Vietnam myths: how professional ambition tempts reporters to become unduly pessimistic, how the historical record often undercuts the idea that the ignorant brass squelched honest truth-tellers in the ranks but brave reporters got the word out, how the press misread the Tet Offensive.

The key thing is that despite these facts, the legend remains. Old bulls like Halberstam and Rather still pat themselves on the back for the great job they did in Vietnam.

The same thing is now happening with Watergate and Deep Throat.

We are now told that Deep Throat's motives either do not matter or were purely noble. An ambitious bureaucrat with scores to settle has replaced the heroic source played by Hal Holbrook in the movie. Does not matter. Does not change the storyline. The only people who care, say Bernstein and Bradlee, are die-hard Nixon propagandists like Pat Buchanan and felons like G. Gordon Liddy.

That charge is revisionist/denial tripe of the worst sort. Long before Felt's outing, thoughtful writers worried that the motives and bureaucratic agendas of Woodstein's sources mattered a great deal. There was a black hole in the record and that left us with an incomplete understanding of Watergate.

Edward Jay Epstein wrote this in 1974:

Perhaps the most perplexing mystery in Bernstein and Woodward's book is why they fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks. This blind spot, endemic to journalists, proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself. If the government is considered monolithic, journalists can report its activities, in simply comprehended and coherent terms, as an adversary out of touch with popular sentiments. On the other hand, if governmental activity is viewed as the product of diverse and competing agencies, all with different bases of power and interests, journalism becomes a much more difficult affair.

Liberal historian Max Lerner reviewed The Final Days in 1975 and worried that Woodward and Bernstein paid too little attention to the "self-interest of the sources" and denied the reader enough information to "make his own assessment of them."

In 1982 Ron Rosenbaum wrote:

In defense of the non-dottiness of Deep Throat speculation, let me point out that Watergate and its aftermath was a subterranean war of leaks, of attempts by one faction or another to divert press and prosecutorial attention to rival power centers. Several significant civil wars within the White house and within the bureaucracies and agencies acted themselves out in deep background attacks. Deep Throat might have been a conscience-stricken lone seeking absolution in underground garage confessionals. But he might have been a cynical game-player trying to use the Washington Post for some factional gain. Without knowing his identity, our understanding of Watergate history will be incomplete.

For three decades we have waited for an important piece of the Watergate puzzle. We now have it. Suddenly, Woodward, Bernstein, and their cheering section insist that the identity of Deep Throat is irrelevant, that Deep Throat was not THAT important to the Watergate stories (poor Hal Holbrooke).

At the same time, we are supposed to see Deep Throat as a hero because he helped bring down Nixon and helped the Washington Post save the republic. Of course, the whole threat to the Republic thing relies heavily on the stuff Deep Throat told Woodward. The actual crimes of Watergate (those proven in court) are pretty prosaic. The drama in ATPM-the need for clandestine signals and secret meetings, flowerpots and typed messages-all that rests on Woodward's and Felt's veracity.

That drama also depends on convenient omissions. To set up the heroic struggle between the Nixon White House and two young reporters, the Standard Version leaves out the real battlefield. To make Deep Throat central to Watergate, the journalistic mythmakers ignore what was happening in Judge Sirica's courtroom. Nixon was doomed when James McCord broke his silence to get a lighter sentence. The men around Nixon were brought down the way most criminal conspiracies are: prosecutors pressured the small fry into implicating their bosses. Deep Throat had no role in that. Neither did Woodward and Bernstein.

Some have tried to justify Felt's leaks by pretending that the Nixon-beast was so powerful that he had no place to turn. Bill O'Reily maintains that he would have been "destroyed" had he blown the whistle publicly.

This is laughably wrong. Democrats controlled the Congress. They would have gladly given him a hearing. Powerful figures like Jack Brooks were champing at the bit to impeach Nixon. What they needed was solid evidence. Surely Felt could have given them that.

The sad thing is that the facts never could support the Watergate narrative that Woodward, Bernstein, and Robert Redford cooked up. Here's Epstein from 1974:

In any event, the fact remains that it was not the press, which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institutions of government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath.

So it turns out that the MSM is not all that different from John Ford's movie scribbler. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." At least when the legend makes your profession look heroic and serves a political purpose.

UPDATE: See also:

Leaks, Journalsim, and the Right to Know

On leaks, bias and truth

It's only a game

The rotten heart of investigative journalism

One more eternal mystery about Deep Throat

Even if Felt is Deep Throat, we will never know much about his motives. He can't tell us anymore (time and age distort everything). More importantly, he can't tell us much about his dealings with Woodward. We have only one version of interaction-- W&B's myth-making in ATPM.

A couple of days before Vanity Fair released it's story I quoted Joan Didion's warning that "writers are always selling somebody out."

Investigative reporters often wheedle, cajole, flatter and threaten their sources to pry lose useful information. Here's a reporter looking at Sy Hersh's methods:

In those years, much attention was focused on Hersh's personality and reporting techniques. One of his editors at the Washington bureau, Robert Phelps, recently recalled, with wry disbelief, the kinds of messages that Hersh would leave. "He would call people and he'd say 'I'm Seymour Hersh, I'm doing a story on this . . . If he doesn't call me, I will get his ass.' They'd call back."

So it is possible that Felt dropped a few bites of information to Woodward out of spite and disappointment, and then found that he was hooked by the reporter. It is also possible that Felt (who was convicted of crimes for his actions at the FBI) was caught between revealing dirt on Nixon or seeing the dirt from the Bureau show up in the post.

Would Woodward or Bernstein play that game? Who knows? They certainly won't tell us, and their compromised sources won't tell us. An uncompromised sources (one who is not trying to swap information to protect his own secrets) or a resolute non-source would have no idea about the sinister side of the investigation.

Another bit of Deep Throat history and motivation

In the immediate post-Watergate period, conservatives believed that the press and liberals in Congress were targeting our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with an aim to gut them. Pike committee, Church Committee, Sy Hersh, Philip Agee, etc. etc.

The prosecution of Felt and Miller was seen as a part of that effort. As i recall, Human Events and National Review defended the FBI guys. I think some efforts were made to raise money for their defense. In addition, a lot of former and current FBI agents rallied to their side.

How would they have reacted if Felt had come forward as Deep Throat?

Felt was in a tough position. Liberals and the media loved Deep Throat but hated Hoover loyalist FBI agents. His only friends and supporters hated reporters like Woodward, the liberal papers who sponsored them, and their unnamed sources.

Side point: I really would like to know who pushed for Felt's pardon in the Reagan White House.

Yes, exactly

Why do people think that the secret to marketing is to pay someone to do it for you? Great marketing isn't something you can buy. You have to do it.

Steve Yastrow over at the Tom Peters Blog.

One Deep Throat question that can never be answered

How did Felt feel as he watched RN appear as a defense witness at his trial? Was there any twinge of guilt or second thoughts about helping Woodward?

Nixon Spoke on Behalf of Felt in Court

In a strange footnote to history, Richard M. Nixon unwittingly testified on behalf of Deep Throat in a federal court trial in October 1980 -- six years after Nixon was forced to resign as president because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Maybe that was part of the reason he was reluctant to claim credit in later years.

Wow, how the mighty have fallen

Bad Business for Magazines About Business

When the Meredith Corporation announced its purchase of Gruner & Jahr's women's magazines last Tuesday, Meredith said that Gruner's business magazines, Fast Company and Inc., were not "material" to the sale. What that means is that two magazines that sold for more than half a billion dollars four years ago now have a value of zero.

Deep Throat: Let the games begin

For thirty years participants, journalists and buffs have been trying to figure out who Deep Throat was. The combed through All the President's Men line by line looking for telling bits that pointed to one suspect or excluded another. Now Mark Felt has seemingly owned up to being the most famous anonymous source in history.

Which really doesn't close the book on the thing. Look for a flood of new information from all corners. The unifying theme-- the lies, red herrings, and discrepancies in the Woodstein account. Was Felt in Washington on all the days Woodward claims they met? Was he really a heavy smoker? Did he have a relationship with Woodward before Watergate?

Some "revelations" will be trivial; others flat wrong. But some will add to our understanding of Watergate.

Right now, i wonder about the Woodward's claim that he and Deep Throat had a relationship that pre-dated Watergate. If Felt had no such relationship (as Len Colodny stated on MSNBC on Tuesday) then that is important. It may be that Woodward was just burnishing his reportorial credentials. It can also be read as evidence that Woodward was trying to hide Felt's motive for the first leaks (spite over the Gray appointment.)

I also wonder what the Post's coverage of Felt's own legal troubles looked like. Any evidence that they pulled their punches? Did Woodward or Bernstein provide any of the reporting?