At first I found W. Mark Felt’s revelation that he had been Woodward’s anonymous source somewhat anticlimactic, especially given the sense that, in failing health at 91, he had been persuaded by his daughter to uncover himself because there might be a book in it that could fund his grandchildren’s college educations. The flip side to that, of course, is the impression that he was never vainglorious, keeping the most sought-after secret in Washington for over thirty years with no apparent thought of personal fame. On the other hand, the impression grows that he decided to start providing the information because he was embittered that Nixon had passed him over for promotion to head the Bureau on Hoover’s retirement.
Lest we think he acted solely on principle, Felt himself was later convicted of allowing FBI agents to break into homes without warrants in pursuit of members of the Weather Underground, which I find somewhat in the same spirit as the Watergate offenses. I suppose this has something to do with the fact that these were not, or are not, so much aberrations but the normal way anyone involved in doing the government’s business, no matter what their position on an issue of the moment, inevitably does the job. In an eerie reflection of the current situation in which the zealots prosecuting the WoT® are doing far more damage than the supposed terrorists they pursue, Reagan pardoned Felt for “[acting] on high principle to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.”
However, some of the jaded cynicism about this ‘Deep Throat’ revelation must come from the fact that, in the years since his role as an informant helped change history, the use of anonymous sources has become somewhat debased and come under attack. Consider the contrast to the recent Newsweek source who leaked information on the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo but recanted under the subsequent firestorm of pressure even as independent corroboration of the abuses emerged. I am not sure the calumny for that and similar situations, however, belongs with the sources so much as the news media. The debasement may be in the lack of thoughtfulness in which relationships with informants are built and evaluated, and in the rather more fist-in-glove relationship the mainstream media have with the corporate and political oligarchs these days. And now major news outlets are in the midst of restricting the use of unnamed sources only to situations where they are, essentially, unavoidable. (Another way to read that: only those rare situations where the saleability of the news they would provide outweighs the potential liability to the news outlet?)
Contemplating Felt’s heroics anew ought to reinspire us, at a time when an administration at least as malignant as Nixon’s reigns, to speak truth to power, despite its having become a trickier proposition these days with the degradation and cowardice of the ‘free press’. On the other hand, although I have long said that the techniques the powers-that-be use to control and spin consensus reality become ever more subtle, refined, and difficult to recognize, the Bush administration bucks that trend, lying more openly and clumsily than any other administration in recent history. I don’t know if it is because they craftily espouse the philosophy that hiding things in plain sight is the best strategy, or if it is just that their avarice and contempt for the people they rule makes them inept and stupid at what they do. In either case, you really don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows these days.
