Mark Felt’s emergence as Deep Throat has occasioned a prolonged
Old Timer’s Day of the American left, allowing various aging fakers
to take one last, long victory lap. With relish they have renewed
their intense moralizing about Richard Nixon even though their own
ethics evaporated a long time ago. We overthrew a corrupt order,
they in effect say by puffing themselves up — an arrogance that
would be more comprehensible if they hadn’t proceeded to create a
new corrupt order. The champions of Deep Throat built atop the
ruins of Richard Nixon not a better culture but a base culture that
would culminate in the Deep Throat presidency of Bill Clinton.
The glib use of the Deep Throat moniker by the establishment
buoying Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was itself a signal of the
new corruption: one form of crassness had been replaced by a more
chic crassness. And that crassness — at once willing to wallow in
scandal in the popular culture and conduct puritanical political
purges against select reviled figures — would masquerade as
morality for years until it exploded in the liberals’ complicity in
the very lies, perjury, and obstruction of justice that they spent
their youth decrying.
The destroyers of Nixon ended up his disciples. Disciples not of
his ends but of his means. An accidental admission of this came
when Bill Clinton offered an almost gaudy eulogy at Nixon’s
funeral. Of course, Nixon’s critics furiously deny any resemblance
to the low ethics they once opposed and insist that whatever low
means they have employed can be chalked up to necessity. (Mark Felt
had to break the law, they have said this week). How dare
Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan lecture Felt and his enablers on
morality, Ben Bradlee practically thundered on Wednesday’s
Nightline to an ingratiating Ted Koppel.
Why can’t they question the propriety of it? Ben Bradlee is
hardly a credible scourge of corruption in the presidency. He was
John F. Kennedy’s see-no-evil boon companion, whose sister-in-law,
a JFK mistress, was murdered mysteriously, a scandal Bradlee was
willing to cover-up by helping to destroy her diary detailing the
affair.
On Thursday morning in the newspaper of this friend of JFK, a
president with ties to Mobsters, appeared a Bob Woodward story that
contained a casual reference to Nixon’s circle as “Nazis,”
according to Mark Felt’s estimate. This was a revealing excess in
Woodward’s story: In the left’s feverish, self-justifying
nostalgia, Nixon has to be turned into a Nazi for its hysteria to
make any sense.
Not mentioned, by the way, in any of the motive-measuring pieces
on Deep Throat is discussion of any of the motives driving the
Washington Post’s coverage. Why did Ben Bradlee give two
cub reporters investigative carte blanche against the Nixon White
House? One motive was Bradlee’s apoplexy over what he believed to
be Nixon’s attempt to put the kibosh on the Post company’s
application for broadcasting licenses. Just as Bradlee covered for
Kennedy out of personal support, so he exposed Nixon out of
personal hatred.
And to destroy Nixon required imitating him. The liberal posse
would catch this lawbreaker by breaking laws themselves. They would
expose his lies through their own. Somehow Nixon’s
ends-justify-the-means thinking was unfathomably evil, but their
own perfectly justified. I recently asked Herb Meyer, an aide to
former CIA director William Casey, about Bob Woodward’s
trustworthiness. Woodward had interviewed Meyer at length for his
book on the CIA, Veil. Meyer’s response to my question:
“Everything Woodward put in his book about me is wrong.”
The radical chic culture that upended Nixon encouraged making
stuff up for the cause. The lies and lawbreaking the radicals would
accuse Nixon of was always on display in their own conduct. The
radicals, both high and low, in Georgetown with the Ben Bradlees
and at protests with the bombthrowers, didn’t object to Nixon’s
means; they shared them. What they objected to was his ends, and
once they thwarted them they unveiled their own ends which proved
calamitous, advancing a nihilistic culture in which the only
approved oracles of wisdom go by such noble names as Deep
Throat.
