Rewriting History, Thirty Years On

I've always been bugged by revisionist history, maybe because it requires either hypocrisy, intellectual sloppiness, outright mendacity or a bit of each. Over the past few days, the revisionists have been out in full force.

The comments about Mark Felt from characters like Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan are predictable and worth no more than the paper on which their resumes are printed. What interests me is the spin from conservatives who have no personal axe to grind about Watergate, and in many cases were not old enough at the time to do much more than sit on the floor watching Star Trek. The stable over at NRO's Corner, for example, has penned a variety of intimations and hysterical outbursts over the past few days, including the following: Felt was literally crazy; he had ulterior motives; he was the head of a right-wing conspiracy against Nixon; Watergate would have been uncovered without the press; the mainstream media has acted like a fat, middle-aged guy reliving high-school glories; Woodward and Bernstein were unimportant and the story would have happened without them. Notice how the press is the focus of much of this instead of the actual crimes that were committed? And Rich Lowry actually had the stones to play "gotcha!" and dig up a piece Josh Marshall wrote a few years ago in which he speculated Deep Throat might be Pat Buchanan. Rich, is that really a game you want to play?

Today, Jonah Goldberg posted the following email from a reader:

My dad was a Special Agent in the FBI from 1951 until 1977. He knew Mark Felt and had significant contact with him. Felt was always on my dad's short list of who Deep Throat could be, since the info provided to Woodward and Bernstein had to have come from someone with access to an incredible amount of sensitive information. Dad says it was no secret among FBI agents that Felt was angry that Nixon passed him over to replace J. Edgar Hoover and instead appointed his longtime crony Pat Gray. So Felt clearly had an axe to grind and by going to the media he exacted his revenge. He argues that any statements to the contrary about Felt's motives are a disingenuous attempt to recast him as an altruistic whistleblower, which simply isn't true.

Dad's take is that Felt should have done something with the info he had, but going to the WaPo was illegal and, more important to my dad, a betrayal of his oath of office. Dad 's position is that Felt should have gone to the grand jury, which would have been independent of FBI, DOJ and White House control, personal consequences be damned.

Felt should have gone to the grand jury? What grand jury was that? The Watergate burglars were arrested on June 17, 1972. There was no grand jury until that September; the first action it took was to indict Liddy, Hunt and the five burglars. In the months between the burglary and those indictments, Woodward and Bernstein wrote crucial early stories about the conspiracy based on tips from Felt. Indeed, as Woodward wrote in today's WP, within 48 hours of the burglary he was getting information from Felt. Facts matter, guys.

Besides that, the argument that Felt should have taken his information to a more traditional enforcement entity ignores the historical context. First, as Woodward wrote in today's WP, Felt---a former Nazi spy catcher---considered the group around Nixon to be "Nazis" and "sinister." There were characters like Liddy, Colson and Tony Ulasewicz; it's possible Felt feared for his safety. Second, where else could Felt have turned? The nature of this conspiracy was that the tentacles reached deep into various parts of the government. One of the burglars (James McCord) was a former CIA agent and a coordinator for Nixon's re-election campaign, Howard Hunt was a CIA employee for 21 years, and John Mitchell ran the Department of Justice as well as the Committee to Re-Elect the President. How's that for an impartial, trustworthy Attorney General to whom a whistleblower confidently could turn---especially considering the burglars had been paid with Nixon campaign funds? Felt could not be sure how many were dirty or how deep the conspiracy went. And last, this would have been Mark Felt against a very popular President; a few months after the Watergate break-in, Nixon beat McGovern by 60% to 37% in a historic landslide.

Besides ignoring this important historical context, some conservatives have shown striking ideological hypocrisy over the past few days. If there is one symbol of everything to which traditional conservatism is diametrically opposed, it would be Watergate---a big-government criminal conspiracy to violate civil liberties, subvert the legal process and undermine the institution of democracy. If you call yourself a conservative but are more outraged about the press or a whistleblower, you've really lost your way. And if you're Jonah Goldberg, you need to explain why some leakers are more equal than others; Ken Starr was considered an egregious leaker about an episode upon which Jonah built a career.

And if intellectual honesty, historical accuracy and ideological consistency are not compelling enough, maybe some of these alleged conservatives can convince themselves that without Watergate there probably would have been no President Carter. And without Carter, there might not have been a President Reagan.

How's that for an easy, reassuring way out of the memory hole?