|
|
|
American Society for Public Administration - Vol. 28 No. 7 - July 2005 |
|
|
Now We Know: Deep Throat Was A Bureaucrat
Imagine my surprise when I learned that Deep Throat was not only a bureaucrat but that we grew up in the same hometown and graduated from the same high school. I always liked Deep Throat and now I know why. Because of my fondness for bureaucrats and because Deep Throat is a fellow Twin Falls High School Bruin, I must leap to his defense. This is done with some anxiety due to lingering passions on all sides of the Watergate scandal.
After the early internet release of a story by John D. O'Conner in the July 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, Bob Woodward confirmed that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the former deputy director of the FBI. It was Woodward of the Washington Post, along with Carl Bernstein, who broke open the Watergate scandal in 1972. Their reporting was based in part on inside information from Felt, who famously came to be known as Deep Throat.
Woodward agreed that Felt would be an anonymous source, and Felt's anonymity was honored for over 30 years, until Felt himself revealed that he was Deep Throat. It was the Watergate scandal, a botched White House sponsored break-in at the Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate complex and the subsequent cover-up that eventually forced the resignation of Richard M. Nixon from the presidency. Mark Felt was not a political appointee but a career FBI agent. Therefore, put bluntly, a civil servant helped topple the president of the United States of America. How can such a thing possibly be defended?
First, the relationship between Mark Felt and Bob Woodward long predated the Watergate affairs. It was an amiable relationship based on friendship and trust. That Mark Felt was second-in-command at the FBI and Bob Woodward was an energetic young Washington Post reporter at the same time the Watergate break-in was discovered was a serendipitous coincidence. Given his FBI experience, it is unlikely that Felt would have made confidential disclosures to someone he did not absolutely trust. It turns out that his trust was well placed.
Second, well before the Watergate scandal the Nixon White House was attempting to politicize the FBI, as Felt's book The FBI Pyramid carefully documents. J. Edgar Hoover, the colorful but greatly flawed director of the FBI, had more than enough control over his own agency and enough independent political capital to stand up to the Nixon White House. It is not surprising that the Watergate "plumbers" had CIA rather than FBI backgrounds.
Hoover died in May of 1972, and the Watergate break-in was on June 17th of that year. L. Patrick Gray was appointed acting director of the FBI by President Nixon. According to Felt, "The record amply demonstrates that President Nixon made Pat Gray the acting director of the FBI because he wanted a politician in J. Edgar Hoover's position who would convert the Bureau into an adjunct of the White House machine." At the time even the most liberal critics of the FBI acknowledged that under Hoover the Agency had never been used for political advantage. But, under L. Patrick Gray and his nominal boss Attorney General John Mitchell, President Nixon's notorious bagman, Felt believed that the FBI was being moved in a decidedly political direction.
Third, Felt was put in charge of the FBI portion of the Watergate break-in investigation. His dilemma was this. The FBI, after a few weeks of investigation had implicated several senior White House staff in either the Watergate break-in or in its cover-up. Felt was convinced that his boss, L. Patrick Gray, was not able to stand up to the President and that little would come of the FBI Watergate investigation. He was further convinced that Gray's boss, John Mitchell, would do all in his power to protect the President and those around him.
Fourth, as Albert Hirshman would put it, Felt's choices were "exit, voice or loyalty" and Felt chose voice, but a unique form of voice. He became a secret whistle blower. As Woodward and Bernstein's book All the President's Men carefully describes, Felt secretly guided Woodward away from dead ends and toward the truth about Watergate and the cover-up. It was Mark Felt's way to let the truth be known, and the truth brought the President down.
Did Mark Felt do the right thing, the ethical thing?
It can be argued, as L. Patrick Gray does, that Felt was disloyal and had betrayed him. It can be argued, as John Dean, Charles Colson and Patrick Buchanan do, that Mark Felt was a cowardly careerist sneaking around parking garages in the night working against the President. Or, it can be argued, as John D. O'Conner and Bob Woodward do, that Mark Felt is a national hero.
Can a case be made for anonymous leaking of information to the press, for snitching without confessing that you are the snitch? This is how O'Connor sees it: "Deep in his psyche, it is clear to me, he still has qualms about his actions, but he also knows that historic events compelled him to behave as he did: standing up to an executive branch intent on obstructing his agency's pursuit of the truth. Felt, having long harbored the ambivalent emotions of pride and self-reproach, has lived for more than 30 years in a prison of his own makingŠ" Hard ethical questions have a way of inducing such ambivalence.
Having come up through the FBI ranks, it is clear that Felt was a deeply committed institutional man. In social science parlance, in the Hoover years the FBI was a "high culture organization," and Felt was a squared-away agent enlisted in the fight against crime, communism and pretty much anything that J. Edgar Hoover believed to be un-American.
Although we admire passionate dedication on the part of those who lead our public institutions, we also recognize that the interests of one agency are not the same as the public interest. In the Watergate case, however, it could be argued that the interests of protecting an independent and professional FBI were compatible with answering the question of whether the President was a crook.
In the end, it was excessive institutional zeal that got Mark Felt. Few remember, but terrorism was a big problem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buildings on university campuses, police department buildings and even the Pentagon were bombed, mostly by the Weather Underground Organization (WAO) but also by Palestinian organizations.
According to the General Accounting Office there were 63 federal building bombings between January 1970 and May 1972. Several WAO members were indicted and the FBI was attempting to track them down. In addition the FBI was attempting to prevent future terrorism. Mark Felt claimed that formally unauthorized systems of "surreptitious entry" or so-called "black bag jobs" were "known to Presidents, Attorneys General and to any government official with enough brains to figure out where a Communist Party membership list or confidential data about the Mafia from 'Anonymous Sources" really came fromŠ The Department of Justice and the FBI have always distinguished between investigations designed to gather intelligence and those for the purpose of gathering evidence to be used in court against a person charged with a crime.
As I understood it, intelligence gathering is not intended to result in criminal charges and is therefore not limited by Fourth Amendment prohibition against 'unreasonable searches and seizures.'" Some claim that black bag jobs were widely used by the FBI and the CIA at that time but Felt claims that at the FBI they were infrequently used. On the "Face the Nation" television show he said: "You are either going to have an FBI that tries to stop violence before it happens or you are not. Personally, I think this is justified and I'd do it again tomorrow."
Although Felt retired from the FBI in June 1973, in 1978, after Jimmy Carter was elected President, his Attorney General Griffith Bell charged L. Patrick Gray, Edward S. Miller and W. Mark Felt with authorizing the practice of "surreptitious entry" against the Weather Underground Organization. They were convicted in 1980 and Felt was fined $5,000. The New York Times saluted the conviction saying it showed "that zeal is no excuse for violating the Constitution." Felt and the others appealed and the day Ronald Reagan took office he pardoned all three.
Today we live in a world facing even larger threats of terrorism. How shall the FBI and the new Department of Homeland Security balance the imperative to prevent terrorism while at the same time preserving individual and family liberties? We have, in the case of Deep Throat, a cautionary tale.
ASPA member H. George Frederickson is Stene Professor of Public Administration at the University of Kansas and co-author of both The Public Administration Theory Primer and The Adapted City: Institutional Dynamics and Structural Change. E-mail: gfred@ku.edu.
Check out a few sample chapters of ASPA's new publlication: PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION WITH AN ATTITUDE, a collection of Frederickson's columns that have appeared in PA TIMES over the years.
|
