By Victor Greto
Each event in the news opens a window to our culture.
Peel away the surface news, move the heavy rock of context and facts, and underneath wriggles a millipede of cultural meaning.
Take Deep Throat of Watergate fame.
Let’s do what Deep Throat famously advised Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to do, at least in the movie version: follow the money. Because that’s what his outing by his family came down to.
Yes, it was an outing.
A 91-year-old man behind a walker, who had suffered a stroke in 2001, surrounded by two grinning members of his family, confirmed that he was the man played by Hal Holbrook in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men.”
He was the guy in the underground garage who whispered to Woodward through puffs of his cigar about the nefarious reign of President Richard Nixon and the orchestration of the Watergate break-in — among a nest of other break-ins — by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman.
That man behind the walker, W. Mark Felt, was the second-ranking official in the F.B.I. during the Watergate investigation in the early 1970s. The reporters who used his information — Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post — confirmed the revelation.
Felt was outed by his family to the magazine Vanity Fair in its July issue. As Felt’s daughter Joan admitted, she said the revelation, before dad’s death, might pay the tuition bills for her children.
Woodward, who used information provided by Felt for leads, facts and confirmations of information that he and Bernstein dug up around the Watergate break-in, repeatedly promised never to reveal Felt’s identity until he was dead.
Woodward broke that vow by confirming Felt’s outing by the magazine.
It looks like the trigger that pushed Joan Felt to knock on Vanity Fair’s door two years before the outting to talk about it was Woodward’s own desire to write a book when Felt died.
Evidently, both have been circling around the old man since his stroke.
According to reports in the New York Times, Woodward wanted to write a book about Felt and the more than three-decade legend that the culture had built around the reporter’s mysterious source.
Joan Felt beat him to the cash register punch.
Of course, there are other stated reasons. “As he recently told my mother, ‘I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he’s a hero,’” Felt’s grandson Nick Jones told reporters. Jones also said that Felt thought “the men and women of the F.B.I. who have put their lives at risk for more than 50 years to keep this country safe deserve more recognition than he.”
That’s nice, but the irony is that Felt himself was later convicted of breaking into homes illegally in a search for anti-Vietnam War suspects.
To add further to the cynicism, the New York Times’ editorial page writers cheekily and patronizingly stated that, “Younger people who weren’t around when Richard Nixon was president may at least relate to the family’s hopes of using their long-held secret to pay for the next generation’s tuition.”
That makes things much clearer.
It’s about money, short historical memories, broken promises and runaway tuition costs. It’s about the elderly and how we use them. It’s about journalism and anonymous sources and how important they are — up to a point. In short, it’s about hypocrisy.
All this has settled down, and we have since gotten think pieces in the major newspapers and magazines about what Felt’s role in modern American history and journalism meant.
Those pieces talked about the downfall of a hubris-driven president; and the continued partisan goofiness of his lackeys who, even after they heard of the revelation, called Felt “dishonorable” for blabbing.
Felt’s own inspiration to spill the beans to Woodward had more to do with him being passed over by Nixon to be head of the F.B.I.
That’s OK. We’ve already been told a hundred times there are no heroes. This is just another nail in the coffin of that foolishly persistent idea.
After all, each of us has our own reasons for telling tales out of school. It’s just that the bigger results, the larger context, sometimes ennoble them, as they did in Felt’s case.
His self-interested blabbing got rid of Nixon. Although it didn’t prevent him later in his career from doing exactly what Nixon did, well, that special brand of hypocrisy was a tale for his times.
His daughter’s family’s self-interest has put him out in front of us again, his face no longer shrouded by the partial shadows of an underground parking garage. That is a tale for our times.
There is something, however, we can distill from both brands of cynicism.
Let’s continue to follow the money, no matter what the subject or stated intention. Let’s continue to hope for the best, and expect the worst.
But let’s not be cynical. Let’s be, like the press should be, disinterested with power.
We don’t have to grab the tiger by the tail, just watch its every move until it finally tires and falls asleep. Then, we can show it for what it is.