Deep Throat Critics See Accountability As Crime

by Jack Random

It was the summer of 1974. I was among thousands gathered in New York's Central Park to celebrate the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. The mood was bittersweet, for though we believed our resistance led to this victory, ending America's tragic prosecution of an immoral and illegal war, President Richard Nixon gave the order.

The same Nixon who swore he would never allow public opinion to affect his policies later admitted that the massive antiwar protests made it impossible to further escalate the war. The same Nixon who directed the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, who ordered carpet-bombing as a desperate, last ditch effort to turn the tide, abolished the draft and signed the peace accord.

When Nixon was initially elected with a policy of Vietnamization and withdrawal of our troops, he deceived the American people. When he offered a "secret plan" to end the war on the eve of his reelection, he lied. When he ordered indiscriminate bombing and the use of chemical defoliants, he committed crimes against humanity. On more than one occasion, as history eventually revealed, he suggested dropping the big one on Southeast Asia. During his tenure as president, some 40,000 American and over a million Asian lives were lost.

When Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974, it was vindication for a generation of war resisters and dissidents. Nobody cried when Dick Nixon went down -- not even his friends. Nobody really cared whether he ordered the bungled burglary at the Watergate Hotel. It had Tricky Dick's imprint all over it. No one but the Machiavelli of American politics (the prototype for Karl Rove) would have bothered to implement the usual package of electoral treachery against an opponent so weak he carried only one of the fifty states. Such is the nature of blind ambition combined with moral bankruptcy.

Dick Nixon was the very embodiment of an immoral politician who calculated every move without allowing human life or human values to enter the equation.

It has been over three decades since Dick Nixon resigned but only one since the initial attempt to transform the monster from a national disgrace to a misunderstood statesman. Now, the old Nixon loyalists -- Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan, G. Gordon Liddy, Charles Colson, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity -- are once again trying to resurrect the dignity of their former boss or mentor by suggesting that the man who helped bring him down was betraying a sacred trust.

Defending Dick Nixon is like trying to restore the honor of Benedict Arnold. Along with Lyndon Johnson, Nixon is enshrined in history as a war criminal and one of the most deadly presidents who ever reigned -- deadlier than Truman who dropped the big ones on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

W. Mark Felt -- AKA Deep Throat -- is not the prototypical hero. He was a dedicated servant of J. Edgar Hoover, whose legacy is the enduring portrait of a deeply disturbed, twisted, devious and vindictive man -- not unlike Nixon himself. Hoover spent some forty years spying on private citizens, collecting dossiers on dissidents and political enemies, in violation of the very laws he was sworn to uphold. Hoover was an enemy to virtually everything Americans are proud of and Felt was his right hand man.

Felt was no hero yet his actions directed at exposing the criminal conduct of the Nixon administration were heroic. Without regard for his motives, he was helping to dethrone a megalomaniacal leader who held both the law and democracy in contempt, who disgraced himself and the nation, and who was ultimately responsible for unimaginable death and destruction.

The real debate concerning the unmasking of Deep Throat should be: Given the circumstances of the Watergate burglary and subsequent cover up, would it be possible to hold the president accountable today?

Unfortunately, while much has changed in the last thirty years, little is favorable to the administration of executive justice.

Given the events of the last two national elections, it is hardly unthinkable that this White House could order a burglary. Given the incredible incompetence of the administration in so many areas, it is not beyond imagining that the burglars could not only bungle the job but leave a trail directly to the Oval Office. Given the administration's refusal to accept blame and its steadfast assertion of executive privilege, it is reasonable to assume that the White House reaction to a botched burglary would be denial and cover up.

Here is where the Watergate metaphor ends for if the White House suspected a Deep Throat of leaking damning information (as the Nixon White House did), Rove and company would crush him like a bug. They would expose his wife as a covert agent, indict his son on criminal charges, subject him to humiliating exposure, discredit him, repudiate him and compel him to resign.

Why else were the professionals in the intelligence community replaced by political appointees whose loyalty to the top boss is beyond question?

Even if, however, the source held up, the Washington Post would not. The Post (and its weekly subsidiary Newsweek) is no longer the independent media champion it once was. There is in fact no mainstream media news service or publication that is not poisoned by corporate interest, ownership and control. In short, neither the Post nor the Times nor any other mass media outlet would run with a story of White House impropriety that could not be nailed down and confirmed in triplicate.

Presuming, however, by some miracle of chance, today's media could keep the story on line, it would still fall on deaf ears in the United States Congress. There is no Senator Sam Irvin or Howard Baker probing and pushing for White House documents. In their stead, we have the likes of Joe Lieberman and John McCain, deferring and apologizing for the impertinence of their colleagues, posing for the cameras and angling for their own White House runs.

Perhaps the only institution still capable of rendering justice to an out-of-control chief executive is the courts, which is exactly why the White House is so determined to have its way in shaping the courts to its favor.

In sum, the odds of holding the current White House accountable for anything from war crimes, corruption or obstruction of justice, are something greater than that of a Steinbrenner horse winning the Triple Crown.

At a time when we preach democracy around the world, the sad truth is that there has been little progress toward securing democracy at home. In many ways, we have regressed. At a time when we need an independent judiciary more than ever, we have a Supreme Court that abandoned both law and principle for partisanship in selecting a president. At a time when we need an independent media more than ever, we have a gutless press and media owned and dominated by international corporate conglomerates. At a time when we need an active opposition more than ever, we have a minority party that cannot say no to war, that almost fought back before folding on judicial integrity, and that takes a poll before it takes a stand on any issue.

Watergate should remind us how a democracy is supposed to function. It cannot function properly if informants inside the government are not empowered to expose illegal and immoral activities and protected when they do so. It cannot function properly if the media is more concerned with being invited to White House garden parties than with exposing the dirty underside of White House politics. If this press corps is unable to expose the Machiavellian machinations of Karl Rove and the Bush regime, it is simply not interested. In fact, our media has had at least two shots at the "story of the century" in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. On both occasions, they took a pass.

W. Mark West is not a hero. He is just a man who did the right thing at a very important time and his actions helped to end the reign of one of the most unscrupulous presidents in our history. It was an important reminder to all future presidents that they are not above the law. Unfortunately, that lesson may already have been lost.