The outing of Deep Throat

[Geee]

Human Events:

As the 40th anniversary of Watergate impends, we are to be bathed again in the great myth and morality play about the finest hour in all of American journalism.

 

The myth?

 

That two heroic young reporters at The Washington Post, guided by a secret source, a man of conscience they dubbed "Deep Throat," cracked the case and broke the scandal wide open, where the FBI, U.S. prosecutors and more experienced journalists floundered and failed.

 

Through their tireless investigative reporting, they compelled the agencies of government to treat Watergate as the unprecedented constitutional crisis it was. No Pulitzer Prize was ever more deserved than the one awarded the Post in 1973.

 

These young journalists saved our republic!

 

However, the myth, fabricated in "All the President's Men" and affirmed by the 1976 film of the same name, with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, has a Hellfire missile coming its way.

 

"Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat" is an exhaustive study of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein and the leaking by the FBI's Mark Felt, whose identity as Deep Throat was revealed in 2005.

 

"Leak" author Max Holland zeroes in on the last great unanswered question of Watergate: Why did Felt, an FBI No. 2 on the short list to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, risk reputation and career to leak secrets to the Post?

 

Woodward and Bernstein paint Deep Throat, writes Holland, as a "selfless high-ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House." But this is self-serving nonsense.

 

The truth was right in front of Woodward. His refusal to see it made him a willing or witless collaborator in the ruin of the reputation and career of an honorable pubic servant, Patrick Gray.

[logicnreason]

I've always been supportive of W & B as the last of the truly "investigative" reporters. Not "expressors of wrong headed and cloudy logic" opinionators as we have in today's "media", but truly investigative reporters.

 

Of course, my vision is clouded by the fact that I could not abide Nixon. At the time, I often used the word "hate" to describe my feelings toward that individual (of course, compared with the current foreign born stain that occupies the office, I absolutely LOVED Nixon).

 

It is a shame to realized that at least one of the "dynamic duo" was a dupe, patsy, and opinionator in his own right.

 

Ah well, as Linda Elerby used to say: ". . . And so it goes."