Giving a voice to the 'Throat'

Watergate had many villains and many heroes. They were indeed too numerous to mention all of them here.

But, indisputably, at the top of the pile was Richard Nixon, who as president during the scandal was both villain and hero. He was what Shakespeare would have crafted as a tragic hero - someone who was brought down by the very characteristics that made him a success in the first place.

The irony of Nixon's ambiguous nature should not be forgotten as we assess the other players in the Watergate drama, and especially not as we now take the measure of W. Mark Felt, the man in the mask who anonymously (as "Deep Throat") provided information that helped unravel a White House conspiracy that was as serpentine as any in Shakespeare's history plays.

"Deep Throat" was the bit player who jump-started the investigation of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein whenever they started to stall. What had begun as a minor break-in at the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., had started to look like a major political brouhaha, except for one thing - no one could trace the conspiracy from the burglars in the hotel to the bunglers in the White House.

That's where "Deep Throat" came in. He pointed Woodward and Bernstein on the way to their place in history with three key words that rival Shakespeare for their simple statement of the poetry of power - "Follow the money."

The reporters did follow the money, and week after week they put together a patchwork of payoffs that eventually led back to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (eerily nicknamed CREEP) and from there to the attorney general and other figures in the White House. Eventually President Nixon was forced to resign to avoid the certainty of impeachment.

For all these years, many have staked a claim to being the hero of Watergate, from Woodward and Bernstein to Judge John Sirica, who squeezed the burglars until they started singing, to Sen. Sam Ervin, the countrified lawyer who played cat and mouse with the White House and always seemed to end up with a mouse tail between his teeth.

And for all these years, "Deep Throat" has remained a shadowy, mysterious figure who might even be the concoction of Woodward and Bernstein.

But now we know that the anonymous source that Bob Woodward first called "My Friend" was exactly that - Mark Felt, a career FBI man who had befriended the much younger Woodward when he had been a naval lieutenant making a delivery to the White House. Felt, in fact, was the No. 2 man in the FBI at the time of Watergate and he was well-placed to know all about the investigation.

Felt had been passed over by Nixon when J. Edgar Hoover had died. Instead of promoting Felt to fill Hoover's shoes, Nixon had appointed L. Patrick Gray III, a political flunkie, as acting director. It is presumed by some that Felt took offense at this matter and was motivated at least in part by his hurt pride when he leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein that was damaging to the president.

Some former Nixon aides such as Pat Buchanan have even gone so far as to call Felt a "traitor," and Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy said Felt should be in jail.

That just shows how deep the fault line runs in American politics, and why Felt chose not to report his concerns to the White House that employed Buchanan and Liddy. Indeed, Gray, his ill-fated boss at the FBI, would ideally have helped him get the truth out, but was instead burning incriminating documents at the behest of the White House.

Clearly, those were dangerous times, and it would have been foolhardy for Felt to "go through channels" to make sure his information was heard by the right people.

But just who are the right people, anyway?

We propose that they are the American people - not the ones who are employed by the government, but the ones who ARE the government - the American people who elected Richard Nixon president and had a right to know what he was doing in their name.

Mark Felt will no doubt remain little more than a footnote to history. And after a distinguished career in the FBI, he will now be forever known as a whistleblower. But let us remember that in the United States of America, we actually provide protection and incentives for whistleblowers who put the country first.

Let history debate his motives. But as for us, we are glad that when it counted, Mark Felt was more loyal to the Constitution of the United States than to the president. Let it always be so.