Deep Throat's Unmasking, and Ours

After 30 years of speculation and curiosity, we now know Deep Throat was a patriotic federal government employee, passed over for promotion, in conflict with his bosses, at odds with the White House, tormented with himself and his loyalties, caught up in a game of private intrigue, who leaked information to a news outlet. That makes him just like the rest of us who have been involved in Washington's inner circles. It is all pretty disappointing really. We were hoping for an exceptional man. We got an every man.

Maybe that is why this disclosure has become a Rorschach test for commentators, political leaders, staffers, journalists, and everyone else involved in politics. Deep Throat's unmasking as the unremarkable Mark Felt begs us all to stop speculating about him and start looking inside ourselves, examining our own actions. Have we been faithful to our country? Have we served ourselves or others? And when we start doing that we all get a bit fidgety because there is a lot of darkness inside us all. So we stop and lash out instead.

Maybe that is why one prominent conservative commentator wrote that it was Mark Felt who brought down a president, weakened America, emboldened the Soviet Union, and brought forth the demonic Pol Pot and his killing fields. Because he exposed the crimes of a corrupt White House, he is responsible for all subsequent world events? Does that mean he was also the architect of communism's collapse? Should he get credit for the Teletubbies, Spice Girls, and "Star Wars" too, given that they appeared in the post-Watergate era?

Ah, that feels better doesn't it? It is all his fault. If we can just blame our government's failures to confront genocide on Deep Throat, then we bear no responsibility ourselves. This brand of passing the buck in a supercharged, hyperbolic, ideologically driven fashion is the primary characteristic of 21st-century American politics.

But the facts about Mark Felt don't support his demonization. He didn't stand in Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter's way in 1975, 1976, or 1977 as America complacently ignored the torture of millions in Cambodia. He didn't embolden the Soviet Union. He was an old-school career FBI employee who covertly exposed the corruption of an imperious White House team that thought it was under attack from lots of groups including "the Jews," truly believed it was "on the right side of history," and didn't have the humility to admit it was ever wrong.

A prominent liberal commentator writes that the timing of Deep Throat's identification is fortuitous because the Bush White House is just as corrupt as Nixon's was. Bush, this logic goes, secretly took the country to war for his own ends and profit. He wantonly sacrificed more than 1,600 American lives to take out Saddam Hussein. All that America needs now is another super-secret superhero like Mark Felt to expose the insidious cabal convening nightly in the West Wing or some undisclosed location. The real problem is with President Bush.

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