Watergate as seen by Mark Felt; Mark Felt as seen by us

John D. O’Connor’s article about Mark Felt in Vanity Fair is worth reading, if not very satisfying, as it doesn’t provide a clear enough sense of who Felt is and what his motivations were. At this point, I’m not sure how to view Deep Throat and Woodward and Bernstein. Some people, such as David Horowitz, argue strongly that it was a terrible thing to pursue and bring down the Nixon administration over such relatively minor crimes, which other administrations had also committed, when America was at war seeking to save South Vietnam. Nixon fell, and, as a result, so did South Vietnam and Cambodia, consigning millions to death. But, as I see it, Woodward and Bernstein were not thinking about that; they were trying to get at the truth. Should they have been thinking about that? Should they have said: “If President Nixon is forced out of office by this scandal, the Communists will conquer Vietnam, and therefore we’ll let this pass”? I don’t know. My instinctive view of the matter is that they were reporters doing their job, and were not responsible for the fate of Vietnam. But maybe I’m wrong about that. Also, the fact that Bernstein’s parents were Communists didn’t make him a Communist; I’ve read that he strongly rejected his parents’ Communism.

As for Felt, according to the below passages from the Vanity Fair article, he was deeply troubled by the corruption of the administration and what he saw as a blocked investigation:

The heat was also kept on because of a continuing F.B.I. investigation, headed by the bureau’s acting associate director, Mark Felt, whose teams interviewed 86 administration and CRP staffers. These sessions, however, were quickly undermined. The White House and CRP had ordered that their lawyers be present at every meeting. Felt believed that the C.I.A. deliberately gave the F.B.I. false leads. And most of the bureau’s “write-ups” of the interviews were being secretly passed on to Nixon counsel John Dean—by none other than Felt’s new boss, L. Patrick Gray. (Gray, the acting F.B.I. director, had taken over after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, six weeks before the break-in.) Throughout this period, the Nixon camp denied any White House or CRP involvement in the Watergate affair. And after a three-month “investigation” there was no evidence to implicate any White House staffers….

As the F.B.I. pushed on with its Watergate investigation, the White House threw up more and more barriers. When Felt and his team believed they could “trace the source of the money that had been in the possession of the Watergate ‘burglars’” to a bank in Mexico City, Gray, according to Felt, “flatly ordered Felt to call off any interviews” in Mexico because they “might upset” a C.I.A. operation there. Felt and his key deputies sought a meeting with Gray. “Look,” Felt recalled telling his boss, “the reputation of the FBI is at stake. … Unless we get a request in writing from the C.I.A. to forgo the Mexico interview, we’re going ahead anyway!

The article also emphasizes that Felt, though profoundly conflicted about his decision to reveal FBI information to the press and by his life of secrecy ever since, feels today that he was doing his duty. But how he actually felt at the time about his actions, as well as during the decades of concealment and denial that followed, remains foggy. And what are we to think about him? Was he an honorable man doing the right thing, though the right thing forced him to betray his own organization which he loved, and to live a lie for the rest of his life, in a kind of noble self-sacrifice? Or was he a weak man who gave way to the emotions of the moment and didn’t see the larger picture? I don’t know. It is a subject for an absorbing book or movie.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2005 07:18 PM | Send