Bush Anxious to Learn More of Deep Throat

Greatscat cued me to this article in the Washington Post.

President Bush said on Wednesday the disclosure that the former No. 2 official at the FBI was Watergate's "Deep Throat" source caught him by surprise and he's anxious to learn more details about his relationship with the news media.

"It's hard for me to judge" whether former deputy FBI Director Mark Felt provided a valuable public service or acted improperly, Bush told reporters.

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Since Bush has done everything in his power to make sure there are no "Deep Throats" in his administration, I doubt this took him by surprise at all. Porter Goss's shake-up over at the CIA is certainly an indication that the President wants to plug up any leaks that might come down the pike from there. He'll probably review the Watergate story more thoroughly to make sure he hasn't left himself with any more loose ends to tie up.

How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'

Bob Woodward writes the column:

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House. One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair came in and sat down near me....

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "sir."

"Mark Felt," he said....read on

Medal of Freedom, Anyone?

via BlondeSense: Did anyone else see Ben Bradlee on Ted Koppel tonight? Koppel asked Bradlee what he thought of Pat Buchanan's comments that Deep Throat Mark Felt was not ...
Bradlee didn't even allow Koppel to finish.
Bradlee said, why should I see Buchanan or Gordon Liddy practically fresh from prison talk about Mark Felt and morality.... Felt couldn't go to Attorney General John Mitchell--who is worse? Mitchell or Gonzalez? Because Mitchell helped plan Watergate with Liddy in his office at the Justice Department. read on

BALANCE, CABLE NEWS–STYLE

via Tapped ...Nothing quite captures the storied revolving-door problem in American political punditry like seeing old Watergate players themselves (or, in the case of Pat Buchanan, not a Watergate participant but certainly a loyal Richard Nixon soldier) playing disinterested pundit-analysts on one talking-head show after another discussing Mark Felt. At this point maybe it shouldn’t seem so bizarre to me to see Chris Matthews chatting with G. Gordon Liddy about this story as if they were David Brinkley and Chet Huntley chewing over the day’s headlines.

That these characters have carte blanche on the cable chat shows to serve as credible Felt naysayers is just one more illustration of the wonderful cloak of immunity enjoyed by all right-wingers in the clubby, insular D.C. punditry world. Lying, stealing, prison time -- literally nothing can discredit a conservative gabber enough to cancel their membership card to the commentariat. And today we have Peggy Noonan to thank for granting some establishment pundit legitimacy to Ben Stein’s thoughtful Deep Throat-as-genocidaire thesis. Can’t wait to hear Liddy’s thoughts on it tonight on Hardball.

He was the first major whistleblower of our time, and speculation on his identity was the topic of numerous books and articles until 2005, when his family revealed his part in the major political drama of the Sixties:

W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat," became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95.

Felt died at 12:45 p.m. at a hospice near his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., where he had been living since August.

Felt "was fine this morning" and was "joking with his caregiver," according to his daughter, Joan Felt. She said in a phone interview that her father ate a big breakfast before remarking that he was tired and going to sleep.

"He slipped away," she said.

As the second-highest official in the FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and interim director L. Patrick Gray, Felt detested the Nixon administration's attempt to subvert the bureau's investigation into the complex of crimes and coverups known as the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

He secretly guided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as he and his colleague Carl Bernstein pursued the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings and later revelations of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies.

On the Today Show, while Pat and Colson were condeming Mark Felt, Tom Brokaw puts them in their proper place.

Download | play -WMP

Download | play -QT

The theme that "Deep Throat" is a traitor is ridiculous and is now the talking point that is being regurgitated by the right.

via Christy: My favorite? Check out Bob Novak’s newest piece. In it, he lashes out against Mark Felt’s motives for becoming a source, saying Felt may have been driven by “reasons that were not necessarily noble or patriotic.”

Hmmmmm. Bob Novak attacking a secret source’s motives...

via Direland: A whistleblower about to testify to the House Energy Committee about persistent financial fraud at the Los Alamos Nuclear Labs was beaten this past weekend by a gang who lured him to a rendezvous, pulled him from his car, and assaulted the whistleblower so badly he was hospitalized with multiple severe injuries, including a fractured jaw.

Now what do you think would have happened to Mark Felt if he had revealed his identity? He would have gotten himself an "Eagleburger."-(yes my new phrase)

Eric takes a look at him: The media includes many liars. But to claim that the US would have won the war in Vietnam, and also would have won a full-scale war in Cambodia, if only Mark Felt (Deep Throat) hadn't helped Woodward and Bernstein: that is the biggest lie told this year...read on

A former FBI says he was the source called "Deep Throat" who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, Vanity Fair reported Tuesday. W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward' s source, the magazine said.

Will Woodward and Bernstein confirm this?