Mitchell, McCord, Sturgis, Ehrlichman, Colson, Dean, Haldeman, Liddy, Segretti, Hunt, Richard M. Nixon. Names from the past. But one of the long kept secrets of the Watergate scandal was the identity of the person known only as "Deep Throat." The confidential source helped the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by pointing them in the right direction when they could have just as easily gone astray. The question? Did the scandal go all the way to the President?
The answer was yes, it did. Not only did it go to the White House, the President personally directed the operations, including the so called dirty tricks part of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The President managed, approved, and funded multiple burglaries, forgeries, and as a chilling example of things to come from Republicans, whispering campaigns full of half-truths or downright lies.
In the end, President Nixon tried to cover his illegal acts by wrapping himself in the flag and declaring national security concerns. He declared that those who would hold him accountable to the Constitution were unwittingly aiding the Communists. That now was not the time to investigate the President because there was a war on and soldiers were getting killed. That it was unpatriotic and dangerous to be looking at his actions and, in any case, he was immune from prosecution.
Comes now news reports quoting a Vanity Fair interview with former FBI Assistant Director W. Mark Felt, now 91 and living in California, as saying he is the man called Deep Throat.
The Republican spinmeisters will probably say otherwise but, in my opinion, whoever is Deep Throat is a patriot and deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Without his actions, one of the most corrupt, anti-democratic, imperial regimes of the last century would have gone unpunished.
Aloha!
