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By Henry Porter
The Guardian (UK)
June
16,
2005 — Our name for him was Wig. And for two
years only a handful of people at Vanity Fair's office in New
York knew what or who Wig was. It turned out to be another code
name for Deep Throat, wittily, or perhaps tastelessly, given
to Mark Felt by Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigations
- undoubtedly the highest moment of journalistic inquiry ever
on either side of the Atlantic.
Woodward was gracious when he learned that Vanity Fair had scooped
him with his own story, as indeed was Carl Bernstein when editor
Graydon Carter called his friend to make a slightly rueful apology
on Wednesday morning. Actually it's a testament to Woodward
and Bernstein's integrity that Vanity Fair was able to capture
the unicorn and reveal the identity of this mythic creature.
This was a serious secret that still has the power to stir considerable
passions in America, as we saw in the reaction of Pat Buchanan,
who instantly branded Felt a traitor. Woodward and Bernstein,
together with the former Post editor Ben Bradlee, held true
to the cardinal rule of journalism of never revealing a source.
In a time of such looseness and compromise, this kind of rigid
probity almost seems old-fashioned.
In many other ways, recalling Watergate this week emphasises
how times have changed, and I am afraid present values in the
US media are not shown in an especially good light. Since 9/11,
when the heroic fortitude of America was at its most visible,
the Bush administration has gradually contrived to cast all
criticism and investigation into its activities as unpatriotic
and an obstruction to its jihad against Islamist terrorism.
Few cross the line in the White House, where a wary and unforgiving
regime - not unlike that run by Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman
for Richard Nixon - ensures that leaks are very rare indeed.
Much the same atmosphere of fear and obedience obtains in the
Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld and at the justice department,
though less so at the state department and CIA.
Broadcasters have largely accepted that attacks on the White
House can only harm America's interests, and when they don't
they are bamboozled and vilified by the shrill voices of the
right.
I visit the States three or four times a year, and watching
the television news in hotel rooms in the last three years has
been like witnessing a time-lapse study of emasculation. It's
not just the unbearable lightness of purpose in most news shows;
it's the sense that everyone is rather too mindful of the backstairs
influence of the White House in companies such as Viacom and
News Corporation that own the TV news. The anchorman Dan Rather,
for example, was eased out by Viacom - CBS's owner - after he
wrongly made allegations about the president's time in the Texas
Air National Guard. It was not a mistake that required his head
on a platter.
The result of this climate of fear and caution is that few Americans
have any idea of the circumstances in which 1,600 of their countrymen
have lost their lives in Iraq, the hideous injuries suffered
by both Iraqi and American victims of suicide bombers, or even
the profound responsibility that lies with Rumsfeld for mishandling
practically every facet of the occupation. The mission to explain
has been replaced by the mission to avoid. If today there was
a whistleblower as well-placed, heroically brave and strategic
as Mark Felt, one wonders whether he would now find the outlet
that Felt did at the Washington Post between 1972 and 1974.
The Post's sister publication Newsweek has just had its nose
rubbed in the dirt by the administration after what is still,
I believe, a questionable scandal involving an item alleging
that the Qur'an had been flushed down the toilet at Guantánamo.
Questionable because Newsweek's erroneous report, which was
based on an official source, palls in comparison to the illegality
of the detention at Guantánamo and the outsourcing of torture
by the administration all over the Middle East. And yet Bush's
spokesman Scott McClellan insisted that the humbled magazine
should go further than mere apology by speaking out about the
"values that the United States stands for ... the values that
we hold so dearly".
What is so worrying about the Newsweek story was the cowed reaction
of the press. In some cases they scrambled to pay obeisance
to the White House's tough line, quite forgetting that the kerfuffle
distracted from the worsening situation in Iraq in which scores
of lives are lost every day. Marty Peretz, the owner of the
New Republic, took space in his own publication to attack the
Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who by the way was once the
hero of conservatives for his hounding of Bill Clinton.
'The Newsweek delinquency," he wrote, "broaches still another
lesson that journalists will have to face, however reluctantly:
that confidential sources - especially 'reliable' confidential
sources, which may mean eager sources who are too willing to
tell because they have their own personal agendas to serve -
can be untrustworthy. The Newsweek scandal deserves to exacerbate
the debate in the general culture about the legitimacy of anonymous
sources that is now burgeoning in American journalism."
This is one of the most knuckleheaded utterances ever made by
a proprietor of current affairs magazine. It is plain that,
despite all his wealth and shrewdness, Peretz does not possess
an elementary understanding of the sacred duty of the press,
which, however dishonoured and ignored, is to watch government
and make it answerable when the processes of democracy are corrupted
by politics and the self-interest of politicians.
The motivated source that he describes perfectly delineates
Deep Throat's position during Watergate. Felt probably did have
an agenda influenced by the fact that Nixon had made Patrick
Gray head of the FBI when Felt was clearly the better and more
experienced candidate. That would have ruled Felt out as a source
under a Peretz editorship, even though Felt was primarily motivated
by a deep revulsion at what was going on around him. He knew
that all investigations into the Watergate break-in and the
activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep)
were being fed back to the White House by Nixon's man, Pat Gray.
The CIA was also providing Felt's investigators with false leads
at Nixon's behest.
As Felt remarked to Woodward long before Watergate, the Nixon
White House was "corrupt" and "sinister". Eventually the Watergate
cover-up compelled him to the lonely and dangerous role of Deep
Throat, but one cannot imagine that this was something Felt
- a career G-man who admired J Edgar Hoover - wanted for himself.
We must remember that these were dark days. Nixon fought and won an election during the Watergate scandal and, had it not been for the persistence of the Post and the wary guidance provided by Deep Throat, he might well have survived to serve a full second term. Had Peretz been editor of the Post at the time, all that criminality and corruption might well have gone unpunished.
It is good that Deep Throat has at last come in from the cold at a time when his country needs many more men and women like him. Let us hope the media are still willing and able to help a great American hero like Mark Felt.
— Henry Porter is the London editor of Vanity Fair. His novel about the fall of the Berlin wall, Brandenburg, is published by Orion on June 22.
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