From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE WESTERN FRONT
'Throat' the Bums Out
Hero or not, Mark Felt did America a great service.
This is an open memo to those on the right who've spent the past week chastising their counterparts on the left for calling Mark Felt, a k a "Deep Throat," a hero. It's true that the recently outed Watergate supersource might have acted for his own interests, and that real heroes pay the price for their heroism instead of hiding in the shadows of a parking garage. It is therefore difficult to laud his personal character or portray him as someone young people should emulate.
But if Mr. Felt isn't personally a hero, his actions look a lot more heroic than the actions of those who've had the most biting words for the now 91-year-old man who at the time was the No. 2 official at the FBI. Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, called Mr. Felt a "snake." Charles Colson, another Nixon aide, who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice, said Mr. Felt was "violating his oath to keep this nation's secrets." Watergate conspirator turned radio personality G. Gordon Liddy, who also served time, is quoted as saying bluntly that Mr. Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession."
These are valid points, though they ring rather hollow coming from the defenders of a corrupt administration, two of whom spent time behind bars for their crimes. And in any case, even if Mr. Felt acted for the wrong reasons, his actions helped pull the nation out of a moral downward spiral.
At the time of Watergate, the nation had just suffered through the moral upheaval of the 1960s: antiwar activism, the hippy rebellion, political assassinations. It's notable here that the first story Mr. Felt helped Bob Woodward on was an assassination attempt on George Wallace. Earlier Mr. Felt had tipped Mr. Woodward off that Vice President Spiro Agnew had accepted a bribe--a charge Mr. Woodward had been unable to corroborate, but that ultimately led to Agnew's resignation.
In this period of bullets, beads and rule bending, corruption in government had become rampant. In part that corruption was allowed to grow to touch the highest reaches of government because, whether it was the War on Poverty or the Cold War, there was always a bigger battle to be fought--much for the same reason the Democratic Party a quarter century later never repudiated the Clinton administration for its long list of scandals. The irony was that a nation that lacked moral self-confidence was also a nation that would be unprepared to wage what were ultimately moral struggles against the demons of poverty and communism. This is something Richard Nixon never seemed to understand as he spent more money than LBJ did on the welfare state, embraced Keynesian economics, and otherwise tried to placate critics on the left by co-opting much of their domestic agenda, even as he fought on in Vietnam.
Perhaps the nation's moral slide downhill began with the 1960 presidential election. Nixon had graciously conceded, but many were left grumbling about a "stolen election" that put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Regardless, by the time Nixon won the presidency in 1968 he was ready to get his hands dirty in the rough game of hardball politics. And why not? J. Edgar Hoover had been using the bat as director of the FBI for years, feeling free to open files on everyone from gangsters to Martin Luther King. Hoover was feared, and he was tolerated because he got his share of high-profile collars, even as he occasionally ran roughshod over civil liberties.
Mr. Felt himself participated in this rule bending. He was a Hoover protégé and he was later convicted of conducting illegal searches aimed at dismantling the domestic terror group the Weather Underground. (Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1981.) When Hoover died in 1972, Mr. Felt was miffed that he was not handed the top job at the Bureau. Instead of resigning, he started leaking information to Mr. Woodward.
Going to a grand jury or the voters before the 1972 elections would have been much more honorable. Nonetheless, Mr. Felt effectively became the pressure valve we needed to let corrupt air out of the government. He could not have known that his leaks would eventually bring down the president. Nor could he foresee the negative impact the collapse of a presidency would have across the country and across the world. The subsequent loss of the war in Vietnam and the political and economic disarray of the 1970s were not his fault. They were the price the nation paid for the moral turpitude of the political class.
Three decades ago it would have also been impossible to foresee how long the road back would be for the nation. That road, however, had to begin with the repudiation of President Nixon, the highest officer implicated in the scandals. In Nixon's wake came Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan. Mr. Carter, by all accounts a good man at heart, proved ineffective. But by shifting foreign policy toward an emphasis on human rights, he helped lay the groundwork to make the moral stand that eventually brought down the Soviet empire.
It would have been impossible for Reagan to make that stand if the nation hadn't first repudiated the corruption of the 1970s. Nixon was given a chance in 1968 to provide the nation with moral leadership along with the right domestic and foreign policies. That he chose to undermine his own administration with what was at heart a petty break-in, reveals how nonchalant he was about moral leadership. That, of course, is what made it possible for Mr. Felt's leaks to Mr. Woodward in a deserted parking garage to bring down the most powerful man in the free world.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
