Lots of great takes on Watergate and Deep Throat as the MSM's self-proclaimed finest hour is revisited over the last couple of days. Felt is a hero or a bum, depending on who you're reading. Peggy Noonan isn't ready to call him a hero...
Was Mr. Felt a hero? No one wants to be hard on an ailing 91-year-old man. Mr. Felt no doubt operated in some perceived jeopardy and judged himself brave. He had every right to disapprove of and wish to stop what he saw as new moves to politicize the FBI. But a hero would have come forward, resigned his position, declared his reasons, and exposed himself to public scrutiny. He would have taken the blows and the kudos. (Knowing both Nixon and the media, there would have been plenty of both.) Heroes pay the price. Mr. Felt simply leaked information gained from his position in government to damage those who were doing what he didn't want done. Then he retired with a government pension. This does not appear to have been heroism, and he appears to have known it. Thus, perhaps, the great silence.
...she suggests another Watergate figure as perhaps more heroic...
Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn't think it was all about their beautiful careers. I'll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in "Born Again," a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren't dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him.
John Kass wonders why Felt is a "hero" but Linda Tripp is not. (via RCP)
Tim Noah calls Felt an "antihero". Check out the Deep Throat article archive and lots of great links in Noah's Slate piece.
And Thomas Lifson doesn't get the double standard that is based on whose ox is being gored...
I am confused by the liberal media. Until yesterday’s revelation that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, I was pretty sure that liberals disapproved when a top official of the FBI gathered information from the Bureau’s formidable investigative apparatus, and then used that information to accomplish a personal agenda, by threatening to use it to discredit top politicians, or even, in rare cases, using it to bring down someone.
Here's Bob Woodward's story from today's Washington Post. To this day he claims he was unaware of Felt's motives for feeding him information, and as far as I know, there's no reason to doubt Woodward on this. It must be liberating for Woodward to tell this story, now that he can fill in some of the spaces that have long been blank. It's fascinating reading in any event.
Related:
The Vanity Fair piece that broke the story.
Good stuff at Power Line, here, here, and here.
Posted by dan at June 2, 2005 11:26 PM