Foul Felt

NRO ^ | June 03, 2005 | William F. Buckley Jr.

[neverdem]

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June 03, 2005,

1:16 p.m.

Foul Felt

Now he wants some money for it.

Mark Felt has made it clear that he wants to cash in on this whole Watergate business, and why indeed not? It was thought for some thirty years that Deep Throat did as he did to preserve the honor of his country. Perhaps that was the precipitating motive of Mark Felt. But to agree on that point requires that you agree that getting Richard Nixon out of the White House was the supreme national concern, in which event it would have been okay to shoot him. What Mark Felt loosed was a series of explosive newspaper stories which bound public opinion and overwhelmed policy-making and policy-makers. It is indisputable that Watergate doomed South Vietnam, and accounted for the Republican defeats of 1974 and 1976. It can certainly be argued that Mr. Nixon dug his own grave by making the mistakes he made.

Presidents do that all the time. They make fateful mistakes. But the judicial arbiters of history tend to come up with appropriate punishments. Monica Lewinsky came close to tossing President Bill Clinton out of office. Yet it does not follow that because the president dallied with Ms. Lewinsky he should have been impeached and tossed out. Nixon's overreaction to the publication of the Pentagon Papers didn't mean that his mandate to govern was for that reason forfeited.

No, what ejected Nixon was the accumulation of crossed stories. It is well documented that beginning about November 1973 life at the White House centered on Watergate. The series of lies and evasions and misrepresentations finally caught Nixon up in a direct lie taped by his own machinery. On June 28, 1974, Gerald Ford was on Firing Line and I asked him directly whether President Nixon would successfully persevere. He answered that there was no doubt about the survival of Richard Nixon as President. Six weeks later, Ford was sworn in as president.

Now Mr. Felt steps forward and says that it was he who in effect staged the end of the Nixon Administration. What he did, over a period of months, was to report to two industrious journalists at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, everything that came to his attention through the fish-eye lens. Mr. Felt wanted to know everything about the traffic of dollars to and from the Committee to Reelect the President, and everything about the background and the activities of everyone associated with the White House, from the Attorney General down to the plumbers.

As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), not to the Justice Department, but to the two journalists. Bob Woodward is thoughtful enough to have recorded, the day after the news about Fell broke, his first meeting with Deep Throat back in 1970, two years before the Watergate break-in. There they both were, waiting, in the West Wing of the White House, Woodward to deliver a message from the Chief of Naval Operations, the Assistant Director of the FBI on a mission of his own. "I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes I introduced myself. 'Lieutenant Bob Woodward,' I said, carefully appending a deferential 'sir.'

"'Mark Felt,' he said.”

Mark Antony, meeting Brutus, deserved no greater headline in history.

Such things happen. On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me, accompanied by one of his daughters (my goddaughter, as it happened). He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme.

I took what I thought appropriate measures. I do not believe Jack Anderson's life was actually imperiled, but meanwhile, in an adjacent theater, Mark Felt, posing as an incorruptible agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was advancing his own drama. And now he wants some money for it.

	http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200506031316.asp

[hogwild]

"Nixon had NO involvement in any wrongdoing when Felt started squealing. The alleged coverup was months later."

Alleged coverup..? Nixon resigned because of it. To avoid impeachment. It's part of history. Get over it. He was a crook.

[Wild Irish Rogue]

" Does anyone know if the 91 year-old Mark Felt is still mentally competent? From some stories he has severe mental dementia, and from other stories he can be lucid.
....who's behind this this sudden revelation that seems so....opportunistic?"

The June 1 issue of the News Virginian , " On The Trail Of The Secret Informant " by J Todd Foster is a very interesting take on the author's dealing with the daughter and father, when he was freelancing for People magazine a few years ago. I tried linking ,but,this computer balks - a Google should do the trick.

The deal with People fell through when the daughter and the family lawyer demanded " a lot of money."
Foster referred the daughter to Harpers Collins who were willing to pay the Felts for the story, but, backed away when they could not substantiate the Felt's story.

"He was very impaired, and I thought he was dying," his daughter, Joan, told my writing partner.

" Felt soon moved into his daughter's basement. He was unhappy at the convalescent home and hard to manage by staff. He even spent all afternoon one day trying to reach the FBI, where he had retired more than 30 years earlier."

" He had dementia. And memory loss," his daughter said.
"He was extremely confused. He was up in the middle of the night [at the convalescent home], knocking on people's doors, thinking that he was doing investigations for the bureau."
Foster quotes occasions where his writing partner interviewed Felt and Felt denied being DT, denied knowing Woodward, thought DT was a fictional character, etc. Albeit after the stroke , but, he appeared lucid.

" It was only after prodding and coaching from his daughter and the family's attorney, John O'Connor of San Francisco, that Felt even gave his lukewarm admission."

Imagine Nancy Reagan doing to Ronald, what Ms Felt is doing to her father-pimping an old man with senility.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

[spanalot]

"Nixon resigned because of it. "

In 1932, Stalin started WW 1.5 wherein he killed more than all soldiers killed in WW 1 - on both sides!

You did'nt know that?

Well fancy that - I wonder if it because of the coverup by the leftist MSM - Duranty and the NY Times even got a Pulitzer that year saying what a great job Papa joe did.

The same leftist press stabbed Nixon in the back.

You need to get over the perception that Nixon's efforts to find and stop the leak of confidential info from his subordinates to the leftist press was illegal.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that Nixon did the break-in - he did not.

[laconic]

Exactly what crimes was Nixon guilty of? Please specify, other than some Ben Bradlee/Carl Bernstein bilge about bringing down the Consitution. In 1979, Jaworski's chief deputy prosecutor admitted there was no way he could have gotten an indictment of Nixon due to the supposed "Watergate" scandal. Felt was CONVICTED of far more severe felonies than Nixon was ever accused of. Felt the hero so concerned about illegal wrongdoing by the White House but unconcerned about his own criminality doesn't quite connect; Felt the disappointed office seeker and scurrilous backstabbing tool of the liberal Washington elites does.

[syriacus]

Felt, Woodward, and Bernstein could each be called a vigilante with an antisocial attitude.

[Zeroisanumber]

Exactly what crimes was Nixon guilty of?

A full copy of the Article of Impeachment can be found here:

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/impeachments/nixon.htm

He was a crook.

[Valpal1]

Hoover knew amd was complicit about Nixon's criminal acts. How could Felts have confided with him regarding his knowledge of such. He did the right thing.

Um, Hoover was dead by then. Felt was PO'd because he was passed over for the now open #1 slot. IMO, it was always about payback, I don't think Felt was smart enough to predict the dominos falling they way they did. I think he intended to make the new head and the administration suffer a bit not topple it to the ground. He didn't have Hoover's smarts or finesse obviously and it all got away from him. He completely misunderestimated the media's hatred of Nixon for being a commie hunter in the 50's.

[Valpal1]

Felt's not the one who directed burglary and obstructed justice

Perhaps you are unaware that Felt was convicted of the exact same type of operations as the Watergate bunglers and was later pardoned by the newly elected President Reagan.

He was Hoover's johnny boy and did not have clean hands.

Nixon was not the instigator of nor did he approve of the illegal acts done in his name, although he did try to assist his underlings in the resulting cover-up.

[John Robertson]

Sarge, I think you missed it.

Buckley is not, never will be, a purveyor of leftist tripe.

And his example of Ms. Lewinsky was put forth as the kind of thing a president should NOT be impeached for. Eeverything that fell from it, perjury, obstruction, etc., those ARE impeachable. He just didn't get around to listing them, as he was moving forward, making other points. My opinion.

[pankot]

I think the proper phrase is "to shill for a buck".

[B4Ranch]

Foul Felt

Not a word about silicone!

[TheForceOfOne]

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got rich, a president was disgraced, millions of innocent men, women and children died, Felt lives in his mothers garage, and for thirty years hid the facts that could have sent him to jail, we lost a war against communism, soldiers got spit on, and this is what the MSM thinks was the utopia of liberal journalism.

And the can't understand why we love the alternative new media, hate the MSM's guts, and take pleasure in their demise.

[Kay]

Hmmm. Looks as though you came over here to gloat about your hero, Deep Throat. Must be rattling to you that Felt is a crook -- much more so than Nixon. No wonder you are upset.

[MHGinTN]

"He [Feldt] will always be known as a betrayer." Well, it depends upon who writes the History in the next few years. If the current leftist sycophancy known as the mainstream media writes it, Feldt will be lauded as a hero. If others write it, he will be a footnote as a petty little man angry at being passed over for promotion to run the very Bureau he defamed with his perfidy.

[laconic]

The Articles of Impeachment, huh? Written by that noted scribe of the law (and one of New Jersey's most courrpt politicians) Peter Rodino? Let's see: Nixon was supposedly guilty of bombing Cambodia -- that country had been used as a sanctuary by NVA troops for a decade with the complicity of its leaders. The Communists could fire at and kill our troops across the border who couldn't fight back so to protect American troops, Nixon defied Congress. Oh, what a crime! The beauty of this week's news is that the painting of Dorian Woodward-Bernstein finally shows its age in the wasted appartion of a bitter, greedy old man and his disgusting, ugly, family demanding money: the Watergate crap was not some shining moment for the Constitution played out by those with patriotic motives but a cheap, grubby attempt to "get back" by a passed-over bureaucrat and a politicl power play to steal an election by those who could never win it.

[-=Wing_0_Walker=-]

"Felt is a number two guy in a number two business. He will always be known as a betrayer."... in a number 2 agency. 90+ or not, he should be prosecuted, even if it is for stealing Government information.

Clinton was in bed with the Red Chinese. Where were the newspapers with their "Deep Throat" then? The info was leaked all over, but we didn't have any newspaper pursuing the matter.