On "Deep Throat"

Recently, there has been a lot of commentary about whether or not W. Mark Felt should be considered a hero. Arguments point out that he was a top-ranking member in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which was a sleazy and subversive organization at the time (which is an understandible view point). However, where I detract from Felt's critics is in their assertion that Felt should not be considered a hero because he acted selfishly in allowing the press to break open the Watergate case; they argue that Felt only did what he did because he was upset that he was passed over for the top spot at the Bureau.

But if you were to read Bob Woodward's recent article in the Washington Post, or even the Vanity Fair article that brought about the recent "Deep Throat" media frenzy, you would see that is not the case. You will read about a man who was very concerned and protective of the Bureau, and who felt the integrity of his organization was being compromised by the Nixon White House (of course, the "integrity" of the Hoover FBI is certainly debatable). Considering that he leaked information to Woodward and the press about Nixon Administration corruption prior to Hoover's death (in regards to Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew's taking of bribes), I don't think that this is an accurate portrayal.

Was he an arbiter in an extremely subversive organization? Certainly, and for that reason he deserves to be maligned. But considering the topic, it should be his actions in the Watergate scandal, not his history as an FBI bureaucrat, that should be under scrutiny, especially as it is our actions that deem us heroic and rarely anything else. Martin Luther King Jr. had several illicit extra-marital affairs; that does not make him any less of an individual to aspire to be like. Are Oskar Schindler's actions any less meaningful because he did not speak truth to power and did not publicly renounce Nazism as he was certainly aware that the Holocaust was going on? Felt was not perfect, but nor were any of these other people, or anyone else we consider to be heroes for that matter.

As an example of the type of criticism that has been made on the character of Felt these past few days, I want to point to an article featured in the Chicago Tribune written by Clarence Page. He writes:

In a telephone interview, Jackson, a veteran of the Rev. Martin Luther King's civil rights organization, described his reaction as "mixed." He was delighted that Nixon's reign ended but troubled that Deep Throat turned out to be a top lieutenant in the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's Constitution-trampling war against civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, Black Panther leaders and other left leaners.

Indeed, Felt was a top enforcer of burglaries, wiretaps, extortions and other "black-bag" jobs for Hoover during the time when then-Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy authorized the FBI to wiretap and otherwise spy on King, based on Hoover's unfounded suspicions that King was a communist.
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No, Felt was not a pristine clean "goo-goo," which is what the Democratic machine used to call "good-government" types when I was covering Chicago politics in the '70s. But few anonymous whistleblowers fit the image of Boy Scouts motivated only by their duty to do the right thing. In fact, many whistleblowers have mixed motives and that puts an extra burden on journalists to use anonymous sources cautiously and sparingly.
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Felt appears to have had some dirt under his fingernails and his detractors are making the most of it. He resented being passed over by Nixon to succeed Hoover as FBI director. Judging by Woodward's account, and others, Felt also was engaged in an old-fashioned Washington turf battle to preserve the independence of Hoover's FBI against power grabs by Nixon's White House.

I disagree with this author's assertion of Felt's character. It is unfortunate that the author minimizes Felt's loyalty to the FBI as "an old-fashioned Washington turf battle," because a lot of that mischaracterization explains Felt's actions. He did not like the corruption he was seeing in the Nixon Administration. And he certainly did not like that corruption spilling over into the FBI (re: the appointment of Gray as the new head of the FBI).

I will end with a quote from the Woodward piece in the Washington Post:

Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons. The young eager-beaver patrol of White House underlings, best exemplified by John W. Dean III, was odious to him.