Posted In: News on June 16, 2015
- The parlor game established by All the President’ Men went on for three decades, until Mark Felt’s daughter stepped forward in 2005. By that time, Felt himself was too far gone to remember anything, let alone confirm his actions in any detail.
- Buzhardt thought at the time that the leaks were coming from Felt and that’s seems to be what Haig told the President (referring to Felt as “the white rat”, his FBI nickname)
- That said, it is not at all clear that Felt did everything described in the book. Even Ben Bradlee privately expressed serious doubts about that – and their publisher seems to indicate that the Deep Throat name only surfaced as a part of an effort to put more excitement into the book.
- My own view is that Deep Throat is a composite, necessitated because Woodward and Bernstein cut a few corners in their journalistic enthusiasm and have no interest in admitting that some of the stuff they wrote was just lucky guesses.
I have always thought the discovery or admission by Mark Felt’s family that he was the secret source was the greatest real break for justice that occurred for President Nixon in all the years since Watergate happened. It proved once and for all the Nixon was right. He could not trust the F.B. I. to actually do their job. That is investigate the anti war movement, stop the leaks that were crippling the Presidents ability to maneuver in foreign policy, and deal with true issues of national security like the releasing of negotiating fall back positions on Vietnam. It was disgraceful how the F.B.I. actively helped the Kennedy-Johnson administrations but worked against Nixon. The revelation that it was Felt leaves you with a clear understanding of just how entrenched the anti-Nixon democratic establishment was in Washington and how they were determined to undermine the President and that the President, just as his predecessor Abraham Lincoln was forced to do, had to take extraordinary measures in order to preserve, protect and defend the United States at this extraordinary moment in history.