Deep Throat Endgame and the Nixon Legacy

Well, this is one of those news items that people have been waiting for thirty-three years to hear. One of the great mysteries surrounding probably the greatest political calamity of the second half of the twentieth century was apparently solved on Tuesday. The mysterious "Deep Throat," who was the inside source for the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's expose of the secret web of interrelations behind the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up. This, as we all know, was the central issue that brought down President Richard Nixon and changed the way Americans think of their president and political leaders.

This is the story that broke it all: Read it in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
Read the coverage that includes the confirmation from Bob Woodward in the Washington Post.
Also, check out their excellent timeline of Watergate events (that forgets the death of Richard Nixon on May 17, 1994 for some reason).

I will approach this topic from three angles: what I heard said in the media by former members of the Nixon White House, my reaction to this news and a discussion of the impact of this new information on the contested legacy of Richard Milhous Nixon

First, what the "Nixon generation" and others connected to the Nixon administration had to say on the talk shows and such (they all seemed to make the rounds of CNN, MSNBC and FOX News).

• Charles W. Colson - Special Counsel to President Nixon - Colson, who participated in many of the vaunted taped conversations collected in the White House claimed that he suspected that Felt had something to do with the leaks as he had leaked stories in the past. He supposed that this was the way that Nixon felt too. Colson reserved judgement on wether Felt was the only one or wether Deep Throat was a composite of a few people.
• John W. Dean, III - Counsel to the President - Dean, who is generally thought to have been the one that ordered the Watergate break-in, said definitively that Felt may have been a part of it, but was not the only one. He points to Woodward's stories and citings of Deep Throat that are inconsistent with the facts that he would have been privy to as Deputy Director of the FBI. Dean wrote a book on the subject in 2002 (so has his successor as Counsel to the President Leonard Garment) wherein he details these arguments.
• G. Gordon Liddy - Finance Counsel, Committee to Re-Elect the President - Liddy, in his incomparably crazy style, made his central point that the likes of Felt are traitors and should not be considered good Americans. On a more realistic note, Liddy (who was one of the Watergate burglars) noted that it was most likely Felt, but had his doubts about any close friendship between Felt and Woodward. Liddy also made a point of saying that John Dean didn't tell Nixon the truth about Watergate for nine months, making the messy cover-up necessary; more about that later.
• Pat Buchanan - Speech Writer for President Nixon - Challenging Liddy for craziness, it was often speculated in the past that Buchanan might be Deep Throat. He, like Liddy, called Felt a bad American who cost a man the Presidency. He did make a good point in that Nixon, in the famous 1976 David Frost interviews, said ultimately he was the architect of his own political destruction. Buchanan said that Felt was a major part of the leak of information from the government to the press.
• General Alexander Haig - Chief of Staff to Nixon (after H.R. Haldeman resigned) - Haig was the only one that I heard who said for certain that Felt was the only one. In fact, he claimed that he made this speculation in his second book, but that section was edited by his publisher. This sort of claim, furthermore, would not be out of character for Haig (remember his classic "I'm in charge" statement after President Reagan was shot in 1981).

...and there were others, people like David Gergen (who apparently has been whoring himself out to every administration and party since Nixon). Second of all, what to make of all of this? Having studied some of the situation surrounding Watergate (I was quite infatuated with it when I was in high school), I can say for myself that Felt was a likely suspect but I agree with Dean and Colson that he couldn't have been the only one. If you look at Woodward and Bernstein's 1974 book All The President's Men, Deep Throat is first described on page 71 as a "member of the Executive Branch," and later alluded to someone who was a White House insider. I really don't think that the Deputy FBI Director would have been privy to the scope of information that Deep Throat revealed. So who were the others?

The real focus is now on Woodward and Bernstein and their response to this news. It will most likely break in the next few days and it will hopefully fill in the rest of the story. Although they did admit in the Post that Felt was the guy, it remains to be seen what more he knows and what more Woodward and Bernstein can now reveal from their own investigation. The spotlight is really, as John Dean piquantly pointed out, on the integrity of Woodward's journalism. While I think that Woodward has reached the unimpeachable level (or close to it), in the era of Newsweek and Dan Rather, who knows?

Lastly, what impact, if any, does this development have on the legacy of the Nixon administration. For now, I think it is too early to judge such a thing, but I can speculate that more information will come out that may confirm some suspicions. What do I think of the presidency of Richard Nixon? I think that he is a complicated figure who has left a complicated legacy to American history. Clearly, his administration was fraught with corruption, deceit, lying, and breaking the law and it seems just that it was toppled from the top, causing the only president in American history to resign on August 6, 1974. Nixon was a paranoid man with an obssession for secrecy and loyalty. He tried to surround himself with a protective wall of people who coult deflect the unimportant and control access to power in the executive branch. This wall, mainly composed of H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichmann, kept the president so sealed off that when the Watergate was broken into, he didn't learn about it for nine months. This is partly John Dean's fault and why Nixon ever trusted him is unclear. So, clearly, there were problems in the Nixon White House.

It always struck me, however, that these sorts of things went on all the time and these guys just got caught. Who knows what secret dealings in the halls of power go down without anyone else knowing. If Nixon had done the right thing, and not given comfort or concession to the Watergate burglars, and Dean would have told him right away, I feel that the crisis would have stayed inside the White House at least until Nixon was out of office in 1976. The Presidency is a large part damage control and Nixon didn't have the info on time.

Is there anything good that can be said about Richard Nixon and his presidency. Unfortunately, he is a character that will be overshadowed by the great calamity of his administration. In domestic policy, Nixon ran in 1968 on a "law and order" policy, y'know get the hippies under control. He did pass some landmark legislation in his time, such as the 1972 Clean Air and Water Act and the 1970 Organized Crime Act (RICO Act). He was also, in my estimation, the last of now seemingly dead strain in the Republican Party-non-conservatives. It was 1964 when Barry Goldwater laid the groundwork among the younger members of the Republican party for the rise of conservatism in the party. Nixon was a product of an earlier generation, having served as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president from 1953-1961. Nixon was conservative on many accounts, but he also moderated with such things as wage and price controls (a policy that would have made Ronald Reagan drop over dead) and dialogue with the Russians and the Chinese.

It is often said that in foreign policy, Nixon made his most positive contribution to the century. The first U.S. President to visit a Chinese President and a Soviet Premier, Nixon was absolutely in his element when he was in conference with Mao Tse-tung or Leonoid Brezhnev. He made these moves in the dead of the Cold War. He even negotiated the SALT II treaty in 1972, paving the way for nuclear detente with the Soviet Union. I think that no U.S. President can claim that they ended the Cold War...the oppressed people of the Soviet Bloc were more than happy to do that. Nixon did, however, prove to the world that the Soviet Union and the PROC could be engaged in discussion and could be negotiated with, a fact that had not been tried since Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 and 1946, respectively. The Soviets were people with needs, fears and desires; Nixon understood this and played it to his advantage.

So, I believe that Nixon will not go down in history as demonized as he has seemed in our lifetimes. He did bad and illegal things, but so have other presidents. They ARE just people. His legacy will be divided and open to contention for years and years to come. There will come a balance as the current memories of my parent's generation melts into the abyss of historical time. In an odd way, it is then when more even-handed judgements can be made with the cool detachment of the professional scholar. One must never forget, however, the mind of the people (however that may be expressed) in shaping history and legacies of prominent people.

So, in a way, I guess we will always have Nixon to kick around, for better or worse.

Works Cited

1. Bernstein, Carl and Bob Woodward. All The President's Men. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.