Nixon died for Mark Felt’s sins

Some people still haven’t got over the downfall of Richard Nixon. Others haven’t got over his rehabilitation. The latter cheer Mark Felt, the former number two man at the FBI who has now been revealed (in Vanity Fair magazine) as the legendary Deep Throat, the anonymous source behind much of the Washington Post reporting on the scandal that became known as “Watergate;” the former deride Felt as a “traitor” and a “snake.”

Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 to avoid impeachment for his role in covering up the Watergate crimes, which included wiretapping the Democratic National Committee offices, a burglarly at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist — Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a damning record of US involvement in Vietnam, to the New York Times — and the Watergate burglarly that led to his downfall. He was immediately pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, for any crimes he may have committed while president.

Among those crimes was the use of the CIA to impede the FBI investigation into the scandal.

Nixon remains the only president to have resigned the office, although Bill Clinton was the object of a concerted effort during his second term to add him to the list.

Many of the Watergate players are now dead: Nixon died in 1994, after his resurrection as one of the nation’s wise men (read the late Hunter Thompson’s admiring obituary); his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, who uttered the famous lines, “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative,” to explain the shifting White House stories about the scandal, died in 2003; his attorney general, consigliere and campaign manger John Mitchell died in 1988; his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, died in 1993; the other of his two Praetorians, John Ehrlichman, died in 1999; his loyal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, died in January of 2005.

Other Watergate figures are still very much alive, including Felt and two Nixon loyalists, Charles “Chuck” Colson and Pat “Pat” Buchanan, and John Dean, the then-White House counsel whose testimony before Congress helped sink his boss. Colson was Nixon’s chief counsel and is now a born-again prosyletizer; Buchanan, a White House speechwriter and polemicist turned political commentator, revisionist historian and two-time presidential candidate.

Felt was conflicted about his role in bringing down Nixon, apparently questioning his own character for years until being persuaded by his family that he had done the right thing. (It probably didn’t help that Nixon testified on Felt’s behalf in the latter’s trial on charges relating to, ironically, burglaries committed by the FBI.)

Colson and Buchanan aren’t at all conflicted: Both say Felt behaved dishonorably, with Buchanan calling him “a snake in the FBI,” and Colson saying that Felt was “sneaking around dark alleys, cloak and dagger style handing out stuff to a couple of young reporters … I thought Felt took his responsibility with a great more care than that.”

Buchanan, bizzarely, went on to blame Felt for the Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia:

People forget that six months after Watergate, Nixon was at 69 percent, he had won 49 states, the POWs were coming home, every provincial capital was in South Vietnamese hands. Two years later, after he was destroyed, you had a holocaust of a million people dead in Cambodia. So I think that Mark Felt was ashamed at what he did. That’s why he lied about it for 30 years, and he ought to have been.

Both Colson and Buchanan believe that Nixon’s presidency could and should have been salvaged.

John Dean’s reaction, curiously, seems to consist mostly of pique. Dean, who authored a book about the mystery, “Unmasking Deep Throat,” is quoted by Associated Press as saying, “I never thought he was in the loop to have the information … How in the world could Felt have done it alone?”

Buchanan was among the Deep Throat candidates Dean named in his book; Felt was not.

Dean is probably most famous for telling Nixon with respect to the Watergate coverup that “There is a cancer growing on the Presidency.” In an article written for FindLaw, Dean said of George W. Bush that “In the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush Administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed.”

Dean was writing in 2003, long before the the Downing Street memo surfaced to directly implicate the administration in a horror of lies.

In 1977, Nixon began his rehabilitation with a series of confessional, if often disingenuous, interviews with David Frost (now Sir David). During the years until his death, he worked to remake himself as an elder statesman, granting occasional interviews and gaining adherents primarily in relation to his historic overtures to China. And of course he always had his defenders, the Pat Buchanans and others who insited that although, in Buchanan’s words, “We’ve always conceded that the `old man’ handled it badly,” his failings — never “crimes” — didn’t warrant his resignation and disgrace.

But Mark Felt did the right thing; perhaps his example will prod today’s potential Deep Throats to come forward in time to rescue the country from another malignant administration.

We leave you with an excerpt from Thompson’s obituary of Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-seventh President of the United States.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him — except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.