Posted on 04/10/2012 5:12:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
As the 40th anniversary of Watergate impends, we are to be bathed again in the great myth and morality play about the finest hour in all of American journalism.
The myth?
That two heroic young reporters at The Washington Post, guided by a secret source, a man of conscience they dubbed "Deep Throat," cracked the case and broke the scandal wide open, where the FBI, U.S. prosecutors and more experienced journalists floundered and failed.
Through their tireless investigative reporting, they compelled the agencies of government to treat Watergate as the unprecedented constitutional crisis it was. No Pulitzer Prize was ever more deserved than the one awarded the Post in 1973.
These young journalists saved our republic!
However, the myth, fabricated in "All the President's Men" and affirmed by the 1976 film of the same name, with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, has a Hellfire missile coming its way.
"Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat" is an exhaustive study of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein and the leaking by the FBI's Mark Felt, whose identify as Deep Throat was revealed in 2005.
"Leak" author Max Holland zeroes in on the last great unanswered question of Watergate: Why did Felt, an FBI No. 2 on the short list to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, risk reputation and career to leak secrets to the Post?
Woodward and Bernstein paint Deep Throat, writes Holland, as a "selfless high-ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House." But this is self-serving nonsense.
The truth was right in front of Woodward. His refusal to see it made him a willing or witless collaborator in the ruin of the reputation and career of an honorable pubic servant, Patrick Gray.
Felt was consumed by anger and ambition. When Hoover died, a month before the break-in, Felt, who had toadied to Hoover, saw himself as Hoover's successor. But President Nixon went outside the bureau to name Gray from the Department of Justice acting director.
Concealing his rage and resentment, Felt wormed himself into Gray's confidence, and then set out to destroy Gray.
Felt's method: Leak discoveries of the Watergate investigation to a cub reporter at the Post, which everybody in Washington read, rather than to veteran journalists known to be FBI outlets.
This would cover Felt's tracks.
Published in the Post, the leaks of what the FBI was uncovering would enrage Nixon and make Gray appear an incompetent unable to conduct a professional investigation. This would make it unlikely that Nixon would ever send Gray's name to the Senate for confirmation as permanent director.
And if Gray, an outsider, fell because he couldn't keep the FBI from leaking, Nixon might turn to Felt, the ranking insider who could button up the bureau like Hoover did.
By ingratiating himself with Gray as he set out to discredit and destroy him, Felt expected that when Gray was passed over by Nixon, he would recommend to Nixon that he appoint his loyal deputy, Felt, as director.
Even if cynical and vicious, the scheme was clever.
Until Nixon found out Felt was the leaker in late 1972, he was considering Felt for the top job. Felt's machinations and deceptions at the apex of the FBI make Nixon's White House appear in retrospect to have been a cloistered convent of Carmelite nuns.
More revolting than the ruin of Gray's reputation was what Felt did to the good name of the bureau he professed to love. By leaking what agents were learning about Watergate, he was discrediting the FBI.
Inside the government, he made the FBI look like an agency of bumblers who could not keep secrets. Outside the government, the FBI looked like a three-toed sloth, while a fleet-footed and fearless Washington Post was unearthing the truth.
The FBI appeared beaten at every turn by the brilliant Post, when it was the FBI's homework Felt was stealing and the Post was cribbing.
Woodward and Bernstein were glorified stenographers.
And though Deep Throat was portrayed as a man sickened by the wiretaps and break-ins by the White House, Felt himself, writes Holland, "authorized illegal surreptitious entries into the homes of people associated with the Weather Underground."
In 1979, Felt was prosecuted and convicted and then pardoned by Reagan.
In "The Secret Man," Woodward calls Felt "a truth-teller." That's quite a tribute to an FBI man who lied to Pat Gray, lied to all of his FBI colleagues and lied to every journalist who asked him for 30 years whether he was Deep Throat.
If Felt was a hero, why did he not come forward to tell the country what he had done and why?
Because he was no hero.
Mark Felt was a snake. He used the Post to destroy his rivals and advance his ambitions, and the Post didn't care what his motives were because Felt was assisting them in destroying their old enemy.
President Nixon was at least a patriot, unlike this current bunch of jackasses! Where is Mark Felt when this country truly needs one? Not an honest man left Washington?
Woe to the republic!
Interesting.....and eminently believable.
How about this one ~ Mark Felt was not 'Deep Throat" ~ rather, he was just a crazy old koot who'd begun to imagine himself to be "Deep Throat" (working on a body of reports the FBI had done on that matter and on the Watergate events).
The Post was quite happy to let him do that because it served their interests in keeping quiet the true identity of the real Deep Throat!
Woodward and Bernstein were nothing more than tools, chisels used to chip away at a man Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee (publisher and managing editor of the Com-Post, respectively) absolutely hated. Now we come to find out that these “noble” reporters were also used like cheap whores by a disgruntled FBI power-player. It’s not much of a surprise.
Like the recently departed Saint Mike Wallace, Woody and Berenstain are worthy of nothing but our loathing.
A “third-rate burglary” where nobody was killed or even injured, led to the end of a presidency, and the AG in prison.
Now we have Obama’s and Holder’s “Operation Fast And Furious,” with 300+ murdered Mexicans, and two murdered federal agents, and the MSM hits the snooze button and actually helps to cover it up.
What an era we live in.
Today, ABCNNBCBS are full partners in Gangster Govt Inc. American Pravda, no more, no less.
Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins of today?
Ever since Watergate, the press has been trying to produce an encore, but have just managed to practice the politics of personal destruction to the point that good people are leery of running for anything.
The press not only did not save the Republic, they have sent it down the road to destruction, and Watergate was the pivot point.
Yep.
I love all of the theories postulated on FR. "Obama is the culmination of a master conspiracy that took place over decades of work and infiltration by the Bilderburgs and George Soros and something to do with a New World Order and yada yada yada....." And so on.
Could the conspiracy theories all be correct? Sure. But - for instance in the example above - is it just more likely that Obama is little more than an opportunistic political hack that saw a chance to become president and grabbed it? I think so.
When you get down to the bottom of it, there are three things that motivate people - money, sex, and greed. Or combinations of the three. All of the overly complex conspiracy mechinations usually can be distilled down to those three.
Pehaps an honest 'fly on the wall' would be better.
In "The Secret Man," Woodward calls Felt "a truth-teller." That's quite a tribute to an FBI man who lied to Pat Gray, lied to all of his FBI colleagues and lied to every journalist who asked him for 30 years whether he was Deep Throat.
If Felt was a hero, why did he not come forward to tell the country what he had done and why?
Because he was no hero.
Think what we really need is a 'Media' doing it job - honestly. If we had that; and not a Leftist propaganda machine that protects the guilty; we would not be frogs; almost cooked.
The press always claimed ownership of Watergate.....yet it was really a product of Nixon’s paranoia.....
Very well said
Mental illness and brain disease ~ don’t forget that one. Sometimes they’re simply crazy.
Crazy works too. :-) Might be the simplest of all the conspiracy theories - all of the overly complex mechinations only exist in one person’s head.
Yes interesting for sure and a different light on the whole escapade. I don’t believe Nixon had much faith in the FBI because earlier he had “the plumbers” investigating leaks at the DOD which lead to the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. That seemed to me to be the province of the FBI to investigate. L Patrick Gray was a good man who was eaten up by the Washington Political apparatus and media.
“Ever since Watergate, the press has been trying to produce an encore, but have just managed to practice the politics of personal destruction to the point that good people are leery of running for anything.”
Huh???????????
Maybe that is true when a Republican is in the White House - but when a Democrap infests the place????
Clintoon did things that made Nixon look like a Sunday school teacher, and the media absolutely REFUSED to report on any of them. And when they did report on them, they twisted every story to look like “the bent one” was being persecuted. Kind of like the same thing they are doing today with zero.
Now we have Obama’s and Holder’s “Operation Fast And Furious,” with 300+ murdered Mexicans, and two murdered federal agents, and the MSM hits the snooze button and actually helps to cover it up.
Spot. On.
Thanks. The comparison between Watergate and Operation Fast And Furious is the nub of my essay:
“Gangster Government, and Sakharov’s Immunity”
Matthew Bracken, February 29, 2012
http://www.enemiesforeignanddomestic.com/efadGG.htm
Here, after 40 years, is the bold unvarnished truth.
Where is the Woodward of today? The abuses of Obama and his Administration are an exponential component of a "political break-in".
When you realize they brought down a sitting President in the midst of the end of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, from mid 1972-August 1974, these leftists tied us up in knots in the midst of a very dangerous time.
As for the pefidy of Obama, the Post sees nothing, a veritable journalistic Sgt. Schulz. They could see no evil when the Clintons were co-Presidents either.
And Woodward and Bernstein went along with the fame and adulation, as if they had saved the free world.
Democrats truly are the enemies of freedom and need to be roundly defeated in November--at ALL levels.
Taking a hiatus until a Repub is in the white house
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