The big news last week was the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat to be Mark Felt a former FBI agent (my money had been on Al Haig). It was a dramatic turn of events, accompanied by interviews and comments by everyone from Bob Woodward himself to Henry Kissinger to Robert Redford.
However, before running off and declaring Felt a hero, there are some matters which should be carefully reviewed:
The article said the family believed Felt should get credit for his involvement in the case while he was alive and quoted Joan Felt as saying that the family should be a part of any financial gains from the revelation.
But David Gergen, who was Nixon’s speechwriter during the Watergate era, said in a telephone interview yesterday that Felt “was no innocent. Until we understand his motivations we ought to be a little cautious.”
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died shortly before the Watergate break-in. Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, according to the Post, but President Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.
Gray was never confirmed as FBI director, and in 1973 William D. Ruckelshaus was nominated to replace him. Felt clashed repeatedly with his new boss and left the bureau later that year, well before Nixon was to leave office.
In 1978 he was indicted, along with Edward G. Miller, for nine illegal break-ins in New York and New Jersey carried out in 1972 and 1973.
W. Mark Felt always denied he was Deep Throat. “It was not I and it is not I,” he told Washingtonian magazine in 1974.
Felt had a storied career at the bureau, one that also had its share of controversy.
A jury found him guilty in 1980 of violating civil rights by authorizing warrantless searches at homes of friends and relatives of left-wing fugitives during the early 1970s. President Reagan pardoned him, along with another former FBI official convicted in the case.
Felt served as an honorary pallbearer at Hoover’s funeral.
Immediately upon his death, Hoover’s secretary for five decades, Helen W. Gandy, began destroying his files with the approval of Felt and Gray. She turned over twelve boxes of the “Official/Confidential” file to Felt on May 4, 1972. This consisted of 167 files and 17,750 pages, many of them containing derogatory information. Felt stored them in his office and Gray told the press that afternoon that “there are no dossiers or secret files. There are just general files and I took steps to preserve their integrity.” Felt earlier that day had told Gray, “Mr. Gray, the Bureau doesn’t have any secret files” and to prove it had taken Gray to Hoover’s office. They found Gandy boxing up papers. Felt said Gray “looked casually at an open file drawer and approved her work,” though Gray would later deny he looked at any thing. Gandy retained Hoover’s “Personal File” and destroyed it. When Felt was called to testify in 1975 by the U.S. House about the destruction of Hoover’s papers, he said “There's no serious problems if we lose some papers. I don’t see anything wrong and I still don’t.”
So, consequently while Mark Felt is in the process of being canonized with very little digging you find Felt was:
- – part of Hoover’s inner circle at the FBI.
— was pissed at being passed over for the top spot at the FBI after Hoover’s death.
— had no problem with unauthorized wiretaps and break ins as long as it was him determining who was on the receiving end of such violations of civil rights.
— didn’t think there was anything wrong with the destruction of sensitive papers or evidence as long as he was determining what got shredded.
Those last two items - the break-ins/wiretaps and destruction of evidence are what bought down the Nixon Administration. Doesn’t sound to me as if Felt could in any way be considered the defender of civil liberties for this country. Sounds more like there was a power play going on between two branches of government which were way out of control. There aren’t any heroes here, only a bunch of shadowy villains breaking laws and running roughshod over the constitutional rights of the American people. I never thought I would see the day when one of J. Edgar Hoover’s pals would wind up being embraced by the left - these are strange days indeed.
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