Open Wide and Say "Ahhh"

I'm not terribly interested in the dueling hagiologists and demonizers bickering over the historical legacy of former FBI man Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat"). However, I was interested enough to read a couple of new (and not-so-new) articles worthy of mention:

• Michael Dobb's long feature in today's WaPo has some interesting insights into Felt and his possible motives, as well as the political maneauvering which followed J. Edgar Hoover's death in May 1972.
  
  
• Brendan Lyons, a staff writer for the Albany Times Union, has a very interesting story suggesting that Felt actually was the leader of a group of three other high ranking FBI officials who conspired to expose the attempted coverup of the Watergate story in an effort to preserve the independence of the Bureau. This story was published on June 5th, but somehow has not gained very much attention, as far as I have seen. It seems plausible, but who really knows?

One last point that people should keep in mind. The Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time of Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in was a seriously flawed organization. Hoover has long been suspected of keeping detailed dossiers on leading politicians from both parties that he used to blackmail officials into letting him run the Bureau his way. And his way was somewhat, well, eccentric, you might say. While Hoover may well have been gay, the Bureau was a racist, homophobic, male dominated institution where personal advancement depended upon publicly adhering to the Bureau's straightlaced public image in one's private life. They also illegally kept files on many prominent Americans (like Martin Luther King, for example) cataloging their sex lives and other personal foibles. While Nixon may have been paranoid and perhaps could not be trusted not to abuse a powerful political weapon like the FBI, he was certainly justified in wanting to clean house there after Hoover's death.

While some defenders of the FBI's political independence may have been motivated by idealistic concerns, some of their fervor may have been due to garden-variety bureacratic in-fighting over turf and power. Unfortunately, we may never really know for sure.

Update

Evan Thomas, from Newsweek, makes similar points in a well-written essay appearing on MSNBC.com. Here are the money grafs:

The argument that Felt resisted Nixon because he did not want the bureau to become "politicized" is shaky, or at least hypocritical. After all, Hoover routinely blackmailed politicians. And Judge Laurence Silberman, who, as acting attorney general in the Ford administration, was one of the few non-Hooverites ever to see Hoover's secret files, told NEWSWEEK that every president except Truman and Eisenhower used, or tried to use, the bureau against his political enemies.

If Felt was offended by Nixon's heavy hand on the FBI, what could he have done about it? Not go to his boss or Attorney General John Mitchell, both Nixon stooges. He might have gone to a congressional oversight committee—but that would have invited scrutiny into whatever Hoover had been up to all those years.

So he became Deep Throat instead.  .  .

June 20, 2005 at 09:37 AM | Permalink

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