The unmasking of Deep Throat is, rightly, big news. From a historical perspective, it represents the resolution of one of the bigger political mysteries in recent times.
From a media perspective, however, the show has been dazzling, as seemingly every living Watergate-era figure pours out of studio green rooms to celebrate their accomplishments. (Luckily, it's not like they had far to go to get there. You're talking about a class of people who own their own earpieces and microphones.) If I have to choose a winner, however, for the single biggest pantload yet dropped on us by the media -- and rest assured, I do have to chose a winner -- it clearly goes to the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan.
Some wounds don't fully heal because they're too deep and cut too close to the bone. The story that Deep Throat was Mark Felt has torn open old wounds. Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak and Chuck Colson--all at the top of their game 30 years ago, all very much in the game today--were passionate in their criticism, saying Mr. Felt has little to be proud of, was unprofessional, harmed his country. Ben Stein was blunt: Mr. Felt "broke the law, broke his oath, and broke his code of ethics."
And so on, for eight paragraphs. Noonan's effort is especially noteworthy for one feat: here's a column about Watergate, about the uncovering of Watergate, about the "heros" of Watergate, and there's one small, teensy-weensy but critically important word that is entirely missing from the column. And I do mean, entirely. Care to guess what it is?
Crime.
We are told Mr. Felt, the whistleblower, "broke the law" and "harmed his country". But someone who was unfamiliar with Watergate would be hard-pressed to glean, from Ms. Noonan's paean, that Watergate was not merely a political spat or case of poor judgement; Watergate was a
crime. And it was a crime, and a conspiracy, that traveled up the White House chain of command to Nixon himself, as the White House went to
extraordinary lengths to defeat the investigation, including the
destruction of evidence against Nixon himself, who was secretly indicted as a co-conspirator in 1974. Investigation of the Watergate burglary and the subsequent cover-up resulted in
numerous indictments and convictions against White House figures, and the eventual pardon of Nixon himself by Gerald Ford.
Not once does the word crime appear, in Ms. Noonan's examination of Watergate. Instead, we are treated to the following:
When Hooverism was threatened, Mr. Felt moved. In this sense Richard Nixon was J. Edgar Hoover's last victim.
The principle of Nixon as victim is nothing new, of course. Inherent in the celebration of Nixonian reconstruction is that Nixon and his less fortunate prison-bound aides were guilty of nothing except getting caught, and for that they should be pitied. And indeed: for that, the country should be pitied:
Ben Stein is angry but not incorrect: What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon's ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events--the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions--millions--killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.
Sometimes pundits make you scratch your head. Other times, they leave a burning paper bag on the doorstep of your inner eye.
Mark Felt, by exposing the crimes of his superiors, caused "the butchering of children in the South China Sea"?
You know, Peggy -- I can call you Peggy, right? I feel like if someone is going to strut their intellectual nakedness in my living room, that pretty much makes us on a first-name basis -- I can beat you, in this game.
For starters, Ronald Reagan's crappy acting is what caused the Cold War. The Soviet Union rightly saw any country that could produce and support those damn monkey movies as being inherently unstable. And you know where that led.
I myself was responsible for an initiative, in elementary school, that very nearly prevented 9/11. I did an oral report on Afghanistan in the fifth grade, describing their food, clothing, and major exports. If only the government had followed up on my work, we could have prevented Afghanistan from devolving into a failed state, by buying more opium and lapis lazuli. (Of course, it seems the CIA was onto roughly the same idea, so nobody can say I didn't have an impact.)
But enough about Reagan's black-and-white messages of American acting inferiority and my disturbingly prescient school notes. What is so utterly contemptible about the "analyses" of media figures like Peggy Noonan, or Ben Stein, is that it requires building complex, multi-staged Rube Goldbergian devices of logic, such as whether Mark Felt's leaking of government crimes led in a multistage chain to him killing Asian children, in order to deny a much simpler central truth: that Watergate was, and remains, a crime, and one that the criminals, not the whistleblowers, bear responsibility for. This simple fact isn't simply concealed in a bit of partisan pique; it is entirely absent from the thought process of Noonan and other contemporary Nixon apologists. It simply doesn't enter their heads.
Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn't think it was all about their beautiful careers. I'll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in "Born Again," a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren't dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him.
Chuck Colson, Nixon's chief counsel, served seven months in prison for his orchestrating role in the burglary and ransacking of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. Celebrating Colson as a "hero" of Watergate, while trying out various ways to tie the label "baby-killer" around Felt's neck, is evidence enough of Ms. Noonan's priorities.
It should be shocking that as prominent a figure as Peggy Noonan, or Buchanan, or Novak, or any of the rest would be so abject an apologist for crimes carried out in the White House. It should be, but it isn't. Ms. Noonan and the others have been decidedly consistent in their philosophies, over the years: crimes conducted by Republican officials should not be investigated. Thus, we are told that by exposing a criminal conspiracy and the subversion of power within the Nixon White House, Mark Felt "harmed his country."
The criminals of Watergate, like the criminals of Iran-Contra, are widely celebrated by the Republican Party, many moving on to lucrative careers in the same field as Ms. Noonan -- professional Beltway pundits, fully embraced by the media. That Ms. Noonan and much of the rest of the Beltway identify more strongly with the criminals than with the principles of law the Watergate conspiracy so roughly disassembled is, if nothing else, a remarkable self-indictment.