Tag Archives: Mark Felt

What We Believed Because Of What We Were Told

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On Wednesday, Front Page Magazine posted an article about Watergate. Watergate was a long time ago, but the article explains how it is relevant today. The article is titled, “Exploding the Watergate Myth.” The article deals with a recent book written by John O’Connor, a veteran criminal prosecutor and friend of FBI number-two Mark Felt (who later admitted to being Deep Throat). The book is titled, The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened. I would also recommend another book that undoes much of what we have been told about Watergate–The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President by Geoff Sheppard. Both of these books totally contradict what we were led to believe at the time and both reach very interesting conclusions. For more information on the Geoff Sheppard book look here.

The article cites a lot of interesting ideas from the John O’Connor book:

By book’s end, Woodward and Bernstein – and their editors – no longer look like heroes. Far from it. Also, the title All the President’s Men turns out to be a misnomer. Watergate wasn’t really a Nixon job. It was a CIA caper.

Where to start? Perhaps with Howard Hunt, the White House operative whose name was found in address books belonging to two of the Watergate burglars.  If you saw All the President’s Men, you may remember Woodward’s discovery that Hunt was also at the CIA and that he worked part-time at a PR firm called Mullen. Mullen never comes up again in the movie. In fact, as Woodstein soon found out, it was a CIA front.

But that little detail never made it way into any of their Post articles. Because on July 10, 1972, according to CIA records to which O’Connor gained access, Mullen’s president, Robert F. Bennett made a deal with Woodward – O’Connor calls it “a conspiracy of obstruction” – to feed him Watergate stories in exchange for a promise to omit from Post reporting any mention of Mullen’s role as a CIA front. It was a highly curious arrangement, given that, as O’Connor notes, “Bennett had no stories to feed Woodward, who, with Deep Throat’s help, hardly needed Bennett. So if Woodward kept quiet, and intentionally so, about Mullen, it was for the Post’s purposes, not the CIA’s.”

And what were the Post’s purposes? Well, it soon became clear to Woodstein that the Watergate break-in had been a CIA operation for which Hunt, because he was a White House official, had been able to claim presidential authorization. Yet the Post – which, as O’Connor notes, was founded in 1877 as “the official organ of the Democratic Party” and which in the 1970s, believe it or not, shared a general counsel (Joseph Califano) with the DNC – didn’t want to bring down the CIA. It wanted to bring down Nixon. And after learning that the CIA’s motive for the break-in had to do not with political secrets but with a prostitution referral service that was operating out of DNC headquarters, the Post wanted to protect Democrats.

Why, then, did Nixon pursue the ultimately self-destructive cover-up? Because John Dean – the White House counsel who, unbeknownst to Nixon, had had his own personal reasons for wanting the DNC’s prostitution records – urged Nixon to do so, never informing him that what he was covering up was, in fact, a CIA project. As O’Connor observes, if Nixon hadn’t pursued the cover-up, the truth about the break-in might actually have come out, and Nixon would’ve been seen not as its mastermind but as an innocent fall guy.

You may ask: if the Post hid the truth about Watergate, how did that truth stay hidden for so long? The answer requires you, if you’re old enough, to think back to the pre-Internet era. It was remarkably easy, back then, to hide facts – even facts that had gone public. As it happens, news stories containing key elements of the real Watergate story appeared at the time in various newspapers around the U.S. But they weren’t national newspapers. Their reports weren’t picked up by other media. And so they disappeared quickly down the memory hole.

The article at Front Page Magazine mentions the Geoff Sheppard book:

There’s another relatively new Watergate book that’s well worth reading. In The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, Geoff Shepard, who was a young lawyer in the Nixon White House, doesn’t focus overmuch on the Post or the CIA or the reasons for the DNC break-in, but instead laments Nixon’s betrayal by appointees like John Dean and Elliott Richardson, demonstrates that Nixon was a victim of “extensive judicial and prosecutorial abuse,” and shows how, once Nixon was in their crosshairs, leading figures in the Deep State – from Bradlee to Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, both Kennedy family intimates – cynically worked together to remove from the Oval Office a man who’d just been re-elected by an overwhelming margin of 520 to 17 electoral votes, but whom they, the Beltway insiders who felt their own judgment should trump that of the American people, uniformly despised.

And they won.

The article concludes:

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t just destroy Nixon. They radically altered the course of American history. By bringing down Nixon, they gave us Jimmy Carter. They revealed to their colleagues in the American news media just how much power they all had to shape public opinion – and how much wealth and prestige they could accrue by bending the facts to fit a partisan narrative. Woodstein’s example made possible the news media’s use, decades later, of endlessly repeated lies about Donald Trump to bring down yet another successful presidency.

In short, the real story of Watergate is far different from the story we’ve been told all these years. The only remaining mystery now is this: to what, if any, degree will John O’Connor, in the face of a press corps and a community of academic historians who are devoted to the Watergate myth, succeed in replacing that myth, in the public record, with the Nixon-friendly, Post-damning facts? 

And this is the reason Watergate is relevant today–it provides a pattern for the media and deep state to destroy a successful presidency that is a threat to their power.

The Story Behind The Story

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The American Thinker ran an article today about Mark Felt. To those of us who were paying attention in the 1970’s, Mark Felt is also known as ‘deep throat.’ He was a major player in the Watergate Scandal. He provided Woodward and Bernstein with the information they needed to keep the scandal alive and eventually remove Richard Nixon from office. Watergate was one of the high water marks of the Democrat party–they were able to remove a duly-elected President from office. They are trying to duplicate that high water mark with the Russian collusion illusion. It isn’t working for many reasons. First of all Mark Felt operated in secret. He had to. Had his identity been known, the information he provided would have been viewed in a very different light.

The article reminds us:

The problem with Felt was his motives. Felt had worked his way up to the level of assistant director of the FBI (Is this starting to sound familiar?) and fully believed that he deserved the directorship. Instead Nixon chose L. Patrick Gray III, a bureaucratic cutout with no ties to the agency. Nixon’s thinking here was clear, and as well considered as many of his decisions: J. Edgar Hoover had been a terror in Washington for generations. His replacement had to be someone with no agency connections who would not entertain ideas of becoming the next Hoover. So the colorless bureaucrat Gray got the nod, did what was required of him for a short period, and moved on.

But this was obviously no solace to Felt, who, consumed by resentment, set out to punish the man who had undervalued him. 

We can see the problem for the Watergate myth immediately. Rather than a high moral crusade led by the country’s liberal journalistic elite, an effort that would redeem liberalism after a decade of corruption and incompetence, the scandal was and irrevocably transformed into a squalid campaign by a disgruntled employee. Rather than white knights, Woodward and Bernstein became gullible, easily manipulated stooges. The rest of the Washington elite come off little better, and one of the foundational myths of post-70s “left-liberalism” disappears in a puff of smoke.

In the Russian collusion illusion, part of the problem is that the leakers have not only revealed themselves to the public–they are writing books!

The article notes some differences between then and now:

This time around, the conspirators had a lot more problems than Felt did – the GOP is nowhere near as naïve as it was in 1972 – and the same can be said of America as a whole. Donald Trump is not Richard Nixon – diffidence and self-doubt, serious flaws in Nixon’s character, are unimaginable in Trump. The media of 1972, composed of the Big Three Television networks and a handful of daily papers, channeled blow after blow against Nixon essentially unchallenged. Today’s alternate media acts to cushion and even curtail any similar campaign.

But there’s another element as well, one that says quite a lot about the character of Comey, Strzok, McCabe et al, one that suggests that they couldn’t have succeeded even with everything going their way.

…But the anti-Trump crowd didn’t see it that way. No – they clearly saw that Felt was left standing when the music stopped. No honors, no bestsellers, no Oscar-winning flicks. Felt remained the odd man out while others collected the rewards.

That wasn’t going to happen this time. The collusion crowd wanted their share of glory. They wanted the NYT Bestseller List. They wanted the cash. They wanted to hobnob with Hillary and Barack. They wanted to appear on Oprah. They wanted prominent mention in the history textbooks. They wanted to be patted on the head.

So there was no secrecy, at least in the long run.

I hope that at some point there will be investigations of the total misuse of government agencies to spy on Americans, to unmask Americans in telephone conversations, and to use the government against political opponents. It is a shame that Robert Mueller has ignored all of that in his investigation while chasing rabbit trails questioning the legality of legal private contracts and legal business deals. If the use of the government as a political tool in the last administration is not dealt with, we can expect to become a place where only one political party has a voice and our freedoms very quietly disappear.