Pres

Of course, in America’s continuing internal struggle to balance authoritarian impulses that run in contradiction to the nation’s foundation of democratic values, Pres. Reagan wasn’t applauding the heroism of Deep Throat, rather to the contrary he was forgiving Felt’s black bag spying on the Weathermen.

Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, both high-ranking FBI officials, had been convicted in 1978 of authorizing illegal burglaries involving a search for information among friends and relatives of known members of the infamous Weather Underground. Mr. Reagan, once in office at the start of the 1980's, pardoned both men and made a point of complimenting them, obviously because in the right-wing viewpoint, spying on homegrown radicals is both appropriate and patriotic.

Realistically, it is hard to imagine that Mr. Reagan would have been so generous in his remarks, or his actions, had he known Mr. Felt was in fact Deep Throat, whose clues and revelations helped to assure the downfall of Republican President Richard M. Nixon a decade earlier. Nonetheless, Pres. Reagan was right. Mark Felt "served the nation with great distinction."

It is ironic, of course, that both situations involve burglaries; that is, Mr. Felt’s conviction as a result of his approval of illegal acts he authorized against the families of radical dissidents and juxtaposed to that his current fame as Deep Throat, who helped unravel the criminal machinations of the Nixon Administration and its most famous break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Yet it is important to recall the time period.

What happened between 1965 and 1975 was profound in American history.

America had not seen a more volatile period since the Civil War. One hundred years later the so-called Vietnam Conflict divided the nation in many similar ways, and in fact the government reacted in largely the same fashion. It is worth recalling that the fundamental right of Habeas Corpus was suspended under the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Further, his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, worked with radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress to initiate a variety of Draconian measures designed to weed out dissidents.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was created as a federal police force in response to widespread and organized crime during Prohibition, quickly followed in the same footsteps.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Mark Felt, who had risen through the FBI ranks to be essentially the operational executive in charge of the FBI in the early 1970’s, would be able to convince himself that national security and personal patriotism were aligned. Given such a personal and organizational belief, it is hardly surprising that the use of any and all techniques to uncover the plots of the Weathermen or any individuals or organizations that seemed to threaten the American structure was approved at all levels and was in fact expected in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

The radical Weathermen had repeatedly shown that they were committed to bombings, bank robberies and other criminal acts. Their policies were in accordance with their stated belief that civil disobedience and political action against the Vietnam War and the policies of Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson and his successor, Republican Richard Milhous Nixon, were useless.

Breaking into private homes and businesses was unsavory, to say the least, but in Hoover’s FBI there was a long history of questionable activities, taken first against Depression era union organizers and others suspected of being Communists, and belatedly included spying on home-grown Nazi Bund organizations at the advent of WWII.

Such clandestine and often vaguely or obviously illegal activities continued during the various GOP driven witch-hunts before and after WWII, especially during the McCarthy era of the late 40's and early 50's, and all of this encompassed the FBI career of Mark Felt. It’s no surprise, therefore, that he would authorize such activities against people close to members of the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground clearly appeared as a threat against the nation. Taking illegal action against them was nonetheless wrong, but in the context of history it is at least understandable. And such black operations had never been punished before! Such actions only, finally, became publicly disreputable in the aftermath of Watergate and its revelations of criminal activity at the highest, and lowest, levels of the federal government.

Watergate was something different.

What Mark Felt quickly discovered was that the burglary at the Democratic Party Headquarters was part of a continuing clandestine political effort on the part of the Nixon Administration to undermine the American political process. He suddenly realized that the Nixon White House was developing its own so-called ‘intelligence agents’ and using them to thwart the Constitutional processes of American government.

This was clearly a massive threat to the nation.

There can be little doubt that Mr. Felt agonized over these issues, but as the facts kept piling up – and he was in position to see them all – he and other as yet unsung Americans followed their hearts and their lifelong commitments to the nation; that is, Felt, and others who assisted him, determined that the only course available to thwart the ambitions of the Nixon Administration was to go outside the normal channels of government, and he did so by becoming the source that led Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to their expose of Mr. Nixon and his cohorts.

It has been intimated, by Nixon loyalists and former Nixon cohorts, that Felt should have worked within the system, but how would that have been possible? The U.S. Justice Department had been largely co-opted under the leadership of Mr. Nixon’s appointee, John Mitchell. It was a partisan branch of government that was revealed to have been directly involved in supporting Mr. Nixon's agenda, and it has also been shown that many of the actions of the Mitchell Justice Department would not stand up under the light of the Constitution. How harsh the Mitchell era at Justice was is illustrated by the controversy that still surrounds the death of Mitchell's outspoken wife Martha, who was publicly critical of the Nixon Administration.

Now, at age 91, however, Mark Felt has stepped out of the Nixon era shadows and into the sunlight, admitting his role as Deep Throat while he is still alive and able to act.

Immediately, of course, he has been attacked.

To the great shame of CBS and NBC and other mainstream media, the very people who were directly involved with Richard Nixon have been given vast airtime and a great podium from which to call Mr. Felt a traitor.

An amazing example was provided by Chris Matthews on his MSNBC show, Hardball, the very day that Mr. Felt’s Deep Throat identity became known. Matthews had Pat Buchanan, David Gergen and other prominent Nixon era people on his show, and the only counterpoint was Robert Redford, who played Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, and a woman reporter who covers Washington. The upshot was that Nixon's old cohorts and co-conspirators dominated the show and Mark Felt was repeatedly painted as a traitor, so anyone listening to the show who may not have known the history, or who may not understand the Constitution and its dictates and division of powers, might think Mr. Nixon was in fact wronged by Felt’s actions.

In the entire hour of Matthews’ so-called Hardball show, not once was the Constitution mentioned, by Matthews or anyone else, but it was repeatedly asserted that Mark Felt had somehow violated a trust as a senior FBI official, and perhaps had even committed treason. Chris Matthews, who likes to portray himself as a hard-hitting and balanced journalist, never pointed out that Mr. Felt’s oath of office was to the Constitution of the United States, not to whatever president might be in office at any given time.

How could such a massive journalistic oversight occur?

Perhaps because there is no such thing as a liberal media. There isn’t even such a thing as an objective media. But there is a Republican owned and controlled media. To paraphrase Deep Throat’s famous words, anyone who doubts the truth of these assertions about media ownership need only ‘follow the money’ and determine who owns what stock in what media companies.

For a full news cycle – 24 hours – on the day of Deep Throat’s revelation the media was loaded with comments from Nixon era officials and even from Nixon era henchmen; the very so-called operatives that Mr. Nixon created as his own ‘intelligence’ agency, his black-bag operatives.

The capstone and proof positive of where the power of media ownership truly exists was when Bernard Barker was resurrected so that he could be given prime-time coverage of his view and opinion of Deep Throat.

Bernard Barker, for those who don’t recall or who have never been exposed to this important part of recent American history, was a prominent member of the Watergate burglars. He is a Cuban-American thug who was hired by the CIA in the 1950’s and was involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Barker had been a member of Fulgencio Batista's Secret Police during that Cuban leader's fascist regime, which was largely supported by U.S. dollars until it was overthrown by the emerging Communist, Fidel Castro.

Barker, who served the CIA for decades and finally became prominent by being caught in the Watergate burglary as a member of the Nixon White House "Plumbers" group, the people who were available for all types of ugly, covert operations plumbing the depths of the political system, was and remains a dedicated hater of the late Pres. John F. Kennedy because of the perverted view that Kennedy somehow failed the nation by not kowtowing to the sneaky machinations the CIA employed prior to and during the ‘invasion of Cuba.’

Jack Kennedy, it is worth recalling, was given carefully crafted information about the Eisenhower/Nixon Bay of Pigs plan, which was developed using secret bases and was in place, ready to implement, when Kennedy beat Nixon and took office.

One can only imagine what had been expected of Richard Nixon had he won the election, but to the great dismay of the CIA planners, Nixon lost to Kennedy. What Kennedy was subsequently told about the Cuba Invasion , the Bay of Pigs plan, was shaped so that Kennedy would not pull the plug on the so-called invasion, the battle plan of which hinged on an assumption that a boxed-in president would then order up a full-scale air strike in order to pull the CIA's chestnuts out of the fire.

This scenario might have given Nixon the cover he would need to justify initiating direct involvement of the American military, particularly the US Air Force, despite the potential reaction that could well be expected from Cuba’s ally, Russia, but it wasn’t the kind of nuclear brinkmanship that Jack Kennedy was willing to engage in, especially since he quickly realized he had been maneuvered into a compromising situation by the CIA and its GOP allies.

Kennedy smartly stood firm in the face of the CIA’s disaster and refused to accede to the hopes of Allen Dulles and his brother, John Foster Dulles, and their allies in the infamous military/industrial complex that Pres. Eisenhower belatedly warned against at the end of his administration.

Eisenhower failed to acknowledge or apologize for the fact it was on his watch that the perversion of American principles took place, but he at least had the courage to point to the problem Kennedy was inheriting in a warning to the new president and to the nation that he gave during Kennedy's Inauguration. Eisenhower was clearing his name for history and illustrating once again his own true patriotism.

But when Kennedy recognized that the Bay of Pigs fiasco was in fact a part of what Eisenhower had warned against and refused to be co-opted by the CIA plan, he was vilified in right-wing circles as a coward and a traitor.

Pres. Kennedy, of course, showed his courage and American spirit by assuming full responsibility for the debacle, even though he could easily have excused himself by revealing the manipulations of the Republican holdover executives in his cabinet, particularly those of CIA Director Allen Dulles, coupled with the overall involvement of Richard Nixon and the Eisenhower Administration. Mr. Nixon was of course the link between the Eisenhower Administration and the CIA in the planning for the invasion of Cuba.

The real traitors were Dulles and all of the people who knew that the Bay of Pigs Invasion would fail if it didn’t have solid American Air Force support, but who obfuscated that fact to Kennedy and went ahead anyway hoping to buffalo the young Pres. Kennedy into reacting as they desired once the disaster unfolded.

So there is a long history of calling true patriots traitors, while the actual traitors hide behind the flag, and now Mark Felt has joined those ranks of maligned heroes.

Mr. Felt should be proud.

To have people like Bernard Barker and Patrick Buchanon and the rest of the Republican revisionist crowd join hands to directly call him a traitor is truly a compliment to Mr. Felt. The media, in giving such people a wide and extensive podium, has further revealed the depth of the problem afflicting the country’s communication industry; that is, the callow attempt to make what is white appear black, and what is black appear white, and similarly to allow others the opportunity to use the media for those purposes without question or counterpoint, either because of shared viewpoints or simple institutional cowardice.

Asking Bernard Barker or the other Nixon era felons for their opinions is much like asking members of the Capone gang what they think, in retrospect, of Elliot Ness.

Mark Felt is a true American patriot and he deserves to be recognized as such. Ronald Reagan was right, "he served his nation with great distinction."

6/6/2005