Some days ago I made mention of Mark Felt AKA DeepThroat.
Max Holland explores the message [1] that has sprung up around Mark Felt, and essentially demolishes it.
Hollywood, and a good deal of Washington approves of the myth because in the end Felt was instrumental in ending the presidency of an erstwhile Republican called Richard Nixon.
Trouble is, that’s a false narrative like so many that the Democrats latch themselves onto.
Columnists, talking heads and op-ed writers are holding open auditions for a role that presumably needs to be filled if we are ever going to get to the bottom of what seems fated to be dubbed, for better or worse, Russiagate: a new Deep Throat.
I get it. In the years since Watergate, the Washington Post’s famous golden source—later revealed to be former FBI No. 2 executive W. Mark Felt—has become practically synonymous with the ideal of the noble leaker. The original Deep Throat “was instrumental in thwarting the conspiracy and bringing [President Richard] Nixon down,” Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, approvingly wrote in the Los Angeles Times in May. “Was it wrong for Deep Throat, as FBI official Mark Felt was then known, to guide the investigation?” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan asked in June, in the midst of a column praising leaks and anonymous sources, and inviting more. New York magazine columnist Frank Rich has gone a step further and already announced his casting choice: James Comey is today’s Deep Throat.
The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.
But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.
Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life.
What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat.
But, why would the Democrats latch on to the false narrative so quickly and so easily?
It’s not hard to determine, really. Forever Believers in big government, there is an incessant need on their part to believe in the idea that the only source of corruption in government is amongst those who don’t believe that government is the end-all and be-all. And of course the subset of that would be that anything that brings down a Republican has got to be worth the price of admission. In other words they’ll support anything that advances the cause. All this explains their loinizing Peter Strzok, [2] as well.
Holland himself raises the question that I will echo here… Is James Comey today’s Mark Felt? It would take a True Believer in big government to dismiss this idea out of hand.
I will say this plainly; Mark Felt was a power-hungry backstabbing opportunist. No wonder the Democrats hold him up today as a hero, being, (as they have demonstrated so often) power hungry backstabbing opportunists themselves.
(I discussed this situation in these spaces back in 2008 [3] when Mark felt died. Here’s [4] a complete listing of our comments on Felt over the years.)
As I suggested in 2005, the FBI has a long history of acting politically…
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see that what this is all about is ‘positioning’.
Set up a bad cop, as a hero, because he took down a sitting second term, moderate Republican president.
Why? So you can get someone to come forward and bring down… facts or no… a sitting second term moderate Republican president. So that there’s PRECIDENT for a corrupt political activist, being treated like a hero, for taking down a second term moderate Republican president. It’s called self-justificaion.
The implications of all of this for the events of today as history repeats itself, are nothing short of staggering.