From Mike Kozlowski comes this message about an earlier post here…
I'm a daily reader of your site, and I've been following your Deep Throat posts with some interest. Although I'm a registered Republican, I agree with you for the most part — Mr. Felt did the right thing. He should be regarded, to a great extent as a hero. He exposed, quite literally, "high crimes and misdemeanors," and I most certainly do not believe that he had any plans to profit from it in the future. (Frankly, I don't believe he's the one planning to profit from it now, but that's another story.)
My problem — such as it is — is in his apparent motivation at the time. By all accounts I have seen, there was a considerable personal motivation due to his being bypassed for promotion at the FBI. And there have been some stories in recent days pointing out that at one point he was placed in charge of the hunt for — of all people — Deep Throat. Again, without denying that his actions were instrumental in removing a criminal from the Presidency, that's where I think some people start to get a little uncomfortable. I think the best way to summarize it is that he did the right thing — but for some of the wrong reasons.
Please don't misunderstand — I wouldn't want to change history and not have Mr. Felt come forward; God alone knows what he and the reporters and (in truth) the politicians on both sides of the fence in those days saved us from. I'd just feel a bit better about it had Mr. Felt turned in his FBI badge and then walked up the steps at the Capitol to testify before the Select Committee. Hope this helps explain the misgivings some of us have.
I think there's been a lot of "spin" out there trying to tar Mr. Felt, a lot of it from folks like Gordon Liddy, Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson, who have been trying for years to sell the idea that their boss, Mr. Nixon, was unjustly ousted from the presidency. (It's amazing how many times lately Liddy and Colson have appeared on interview shows without anyone bothering to mention that they went to prison as an indirect result of the man they are now criticizing. Think that might have a little something to do with their outrage at the guy? Just a little?)
The "spin" they and others have been trying to impose is that Felt leaked tons of confidential information to Bob Woodward. Well, maybe he did…but we don't know that. That's speculation. There's no law against an FBI man talking to a reporter, even in a garage at 3 AM. We know very little of what Felt imparted and it may not have been raw FBI files, as some have suggested. Woodward says "Deep Throat" rarely volunteered information and that he functioned mainly to confirm or deny what the reporters' investigations had uncovered. The conversations quoted in All the President's Men are pretty much in that vein. Unless Woodward gets into more specifics in his forthcoming book, that may be all we'll ever know about what Felt leaked to him.
Another bit of "spin" they're trying to sell is Felt as operating wholly because he was ticked off at not getting a promotion. That sounds exaggerated to me, and I seem to recall that many FBI officials were upset when L. Patrick Gray was appointed as Acting Director. A government agency like that is supposed to operate roughly on succession from within, and Nixon had instead installed not only an outsider but one who was widely viewed as a marionette. Let's remember that Gray is the guy who presided over the Watergate investigation by destroying physical evidence that could have implicated presidential aides. He also made sure that Nixon's aides were briefed on every step of the investigation into the possible criminality of…Nixon's aides. Felt probably believed he was entitled to the job — which he was — but the primary anger may well have been over the fact that it went instead to someone who was there to turn the FBI into a slightly more legitimate version of Nixon's plumbers. Again, we don't know for sure what was on Felt's mind and shouldn't accept the G. Gordon Liddy version of things.
There are things that unsettle me about Mr. Felt's actions but I don't think he should have turned in his badge and then gone in to testify before the committee. For one thing, the committee didn't exist when he started meeting Woodward in the garage, nor was there a Special Prosecutor yet. Somehow, I don't think taking the matter to John Mitchell would have resulted in a thorough investigation.
If Felt's mission was to make sure the abuses of the Nixon boys came to light — especially with regard to the FBI — then he may have felt his job was finished once a Special Prosecutor was appointed and the hearings were convened. (Felt left the FBI about the time both those things occurred.) One could speculate that he didn't quit his position before that because he didn't want to leave Gray unchecked. Also, from all reports, Felt was largely running the bureau's non-Watergate activities and doing a good, important job in that post. As I think we've seen in many years of Washington Watching, quitting one's position of power is a very good way to marginalize yourself and to lose your effectiveness. How many former members of the current Bush administration have we seen testify against current policies and not make much of an impact?
Actually, the more I think about it, the less important I think Mark Felt was to Watergate. Can anyone name one sizzling revelation that he imparted to Woodward and Bernstein that impacted the case? I think the biggest one cited in All the President's Men was that one or more of the Nixon tapes had suspicious gaps…a fact that would have come out anyway. The book details how the reporters obtained and confirmed the important stories they did break, and I think D.T. is only cited for confirmation.
I'll be interested in what Woodward has to say about Felt's motives, and also whether "Deep Throat" was happy with how things turned out. Felt may turn out to be less honorable than I think, but I'd like to make that judgment based on something more than we have. Maybe he did it all because he had delusions of being Mark Twain, and wanted to be portrayed by Hal Holbrook.