Hoover and Deep Throat

A very small observation about the revelation that Deep Throat was Mark Felt:

I hate entrenched, unaccountable power. And there's probably never been anyone in the U.S. political system whose power was so deeply entrenched, so unaccountable, and for so long, as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. And Felt was very much a part of Hoover's system, one that was intended to transcend the coming and going of presidents. It's clear from Bob Woodward's account this morning that Felt's driving motivation was anger that Nixon's aspiration to use the FBI for political purposes (the Huston plan) challenged Hoover's authority more severely than any president before Nixon had done, and Nixon's decision to pass over Felt and other Hoover loyalists to place an outsider in charge after Hoover's death poured fuel on that fire.

Nothing about Felt's possible motives changes history's judgment: He helped Americans learn the truth about a deeply corrupt presidency. But it does illustrate a sad paradox: Often the only force that can counter entrenched, corrupt power is another entrenched power. As an example, consider that it is Senator Robert Byrd -- certainly the most entrenched figure in modern politics, though never half as powerful as Hoover and not evil -- who has been the most vigorous and effective opponent of Bush's claims to expand the power of the executive.

UPDATE:  I hadn't seen all the Felt-bashing going on before I wrote this, and I think in that context, it's too easily misunderstood as joining in the criticism of his motives, which I don't mean to do. Whether he acted purely out of a belief that the Nixon gang were "Nazis," or out of a sense that the FBI's political independence was threatened (a nice phrase, but there is a thin line between the Bureau's legitimate claim to be independent, as in free from manipulation, and its actual independence under Hoover, which meant being controlled by the whims and manipulations of Hoover alone), even if he acted solely out of personal pique at not being chosen to succeed Hoover, really doesn't matter. He was able to convey the information he did to Woodward because of his own position of independent power. It's not a very profound point, just a small irony of the situation.

Comments

[Petey]

"It's clear from Bob Woodward's account this morning that Felt's driving motivation was anger that Nixon's aspiration to use the FBI for political purposes (the Huston plan) challenged Hoover's authority more severely than any president before Nixon had done, and Nixon's decision to pass over Felt and other Hoover loyalists to place an outsider in charge after Hoover's death poured fuel on that fire."

I think that's an unfair assessment of Felt's motivations, and a fundamental misreading of Woodward's piece.

Woodward writes that prior to Hoover's death, Felt thought the Nixon administration were Nazis (!). He felt they were trying to manipulate the bureau (a psuedo-independent agency within the executive branch) for political reasons.

Given that, Felt's interest in protecting the FBI's turf from political encroachments takes on a much different cast.

Here are a couple of quotes from the article. First from the pre-Watergate Hover era:

Felt, a much more learned man than most realized, later wrote that he considered Huston "a kind of White House gauleiter over the intelligence community." The word "gauleiter" is not in most dictionaries, but in the four-inch-thick Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language it is defined as "the leader or chief official of a political district under Nazi control."

There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angeles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society.

And second from during the Watergate investigation:

Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the bureau for political reasons.

This second quote is from a time period when the White House was actively attempting to politically pressure the FBI to affect the Watergate investigation.

Don't forget that when the WH had the CIA issue the improper request to the FBI to quash the investigation, it was Felt who went to Gray and laid down the ultimatum that he was going to proceed anyway unless he had something in writing from the CIA head, which of course never came.

Felt may have been unhappy at not getting the top job. He may have wanted to protect the bureau's turf. But everything we know indicates that he wouldn't have gone after the administration in the way he did unless they had been interfering with the bureau's legitimate investigation of their lawbreaking.

He couldn't go upstairs. The only people above him were administration loyalists. He couldn't go to the Democrats in Congress for reasonably obvious reasons. The press was the only place he could go to ensure a legitimate investigation of extreme malfeasance went forward.

The dude was doing his job. That was his motivation.

[Petey]

From Wednesday's WaPo:

Shortly after that incident, Hoover died and Felt was passed over to succeed him in favor of Nixon loyalist Gray. As the Watergate investigation began to unfold, Felt was infuriated by what he saw as Gray's capitulation to the White House. Gray was "sharing all the Bureau's knowledge with the White House staff," he wrote in his memoir, which "felt they had neutralized the FBI."

"For me, as well as for all the Agents who were involved, it had become a question of our integrity," Felt wrote. "We were under attack for dragging our feet, and as professional law enforcement officers, we were determined to go on."

[Jon]

Bob Woodward has just published in the Washington Post an account of how the FBI's #2 man Mark Felt became Deep Throat. A key sound bite from Woodward's account, "There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were Nazis."

For more on the demonization of Mark Felt by both Nixon and Bush apologists, see "Gagging on Deep Throat."

[Joe S.]

"But it does illustrate a sad paradox: Often the only force that can counter entrenched, corrupt power is another entrenched power."

Mark,
Meet James Madison.

[Michael J.W. Stickings]

Alas, the pursuit of justice sometimes requires the use of injustice.

Based on my reading of the Woodward piece -- which, like everything else he's written, seems to be more about Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter in the history of journalism, than about the subject at hand -- I would agree with Petey's assertion above that Felt was just doing his job.

Nonetheless, it doesn't seem that Felt was motivated by a desire to see justice done, that is, by anything resembling righteousness. He may have been doing his job, but his job was in the FBI, and his movitation was to protect the FBI from political interference. If the FBI hadn't been involved, I'm not sure Felt (if he knew anything) would have come forward.

I think that's part of the letdown here. It's not just that people were hoping for a Kissinger or a Haig or a Buchanan to be revealed as Deep Throat, it's that there was a hope that Deep Throat's motivation was pure, that he did what he did for the sake of justice, for the sake of the good of the American people -- indeed, for America itself.

That may be part of it, but, as it turns out, it was likely more about the FBI, about internal law enforcement/intelligence territoriality, than about anything as lofty as justice. That's why Felt viewed the White House as a pack of Nazis. Not because they were screwing the country, but because they were screwing his beloved FBI, Hoover's FBI.

I have long thought -- and please pardon my romanticism -- that Americans are a people that seek justice (and I say this as a Canadian -- we Canadians are more modest but less noble than you Americans). In the end, justice was done. But it was done incidentally. Felt is something of a hero, I suppose, but not a true hero, for his motivations were not selfless (perhaps no one is truly selfless, but that's another matter). They were, on the contrary, directed towards immediate personal gain -- maybe not in terms of a promotion to FBI director, but at least in terms of the well-being of the institution to which he had dedicated almost his entire career.

If not a true hero, he was nonetheless a great and courageous man. I have no doubt of that. And, now at the end of his life, he deserves our warmest gratitude. Thankfully, that seems to be what he's getting -- aside from the nasty denunciations of Nixon apologists and others on the right whose opposition to justice and disregard for the truth is ever more apparent.

Felt was neither a disloyal leaker nor a hero of our time, but, whatever his motivations, he helped to bring justice to one of America's darker moments. And that's not too shabby.

One final point: Mark, you say that "the only force that can counter entrenched, corrupt power is another entrenched power". That's certainly Machiavelli's view in The Prince, where he tries to raise an army of followers to bring down Christianity. And it may be true in a number of other contexts. Pope John Paul II helped bring down Communism, for example, but the Church is certainly an "entrenched power".

But what of someone like Gandhi, perhaps the best counter-example? Or Walesa, or any of the other Eastern European anti-Communists? Or the ANC in South Africa (whatever other problems they might have had)? Or, further back, Martin Luther, or the other Protestant reformers (Calvin, Knox)? Or even Martin Luther King? Or -- two anti-American examples -- the Iranian Revolution and Castro?

The point is, there have been a number of asymmetrical battles where great individuals, small groups, or otherwise unentrenched powers have taken down entrenched powers.

[murky]

Petey, I think the misreading is you reading one of the other three articles that came out in the Post at the same time. They contradict each other. Like Mark I come away thinking Felt didn't object to the Nazi-like practices of COINTELPRO so much as interference from the White House in the choice of on whom to snoop. That strikes me as a darn petty complaint, considering the the FBI is a branch of the executive, it's head is appointed by the president and the consequence of Felt's rebellion was the ousting of a president. Looks like we had an administration of tyrants and one of the littler tyrants stabbed the big tyrant in the back. Hurrah.

[murky]

Sorry: All those letters in Cointelpro above didn't deserve capitalization (it's a contraction, not an acronym like NASA). Also sorry for the apostrophe in "it's head is appointed by." More substantively, I should concede that "the choice on whom to snoop" is sort of the crux of the matter, when it comes to whether spying is to interfere with constitutionally protected freedoms like political organizing (such as Hitler would do) or whether it is to interfere with theft , arson, extortion and the like. Had Felt not participated in Cointelpro, we could say he was a guy who didn't mind bending the rules to go after bad guys, and he only put his foot down when he saw the reigns of power shifting to someone who wouldn't be working over only the bad guys. But because he was in on Cointelpro, it seems it took him a while to put his foot down on political persecution by the agency, leaving us to wonder whether he really minded it so much. I guess I'd like to know what specifically what aspects and actions in Cointelpro he went along with, and with how much complaint. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose him planning to bring Cointelpro in line when he became director and astutely surmising that little good would come of resigning before he came to succeed Hoover. Given that Felt apparently did thwart Nixon's desired expansion of surveillance on hippies, it's not hard to imagine Nixon knew Felt strongly opposed his agenda and might stop everything upon becoming director, and so Nixon might have passed him over for this very reason--i.e. Nixon wanted a police state and Felt, our hero, didn't. Nixon's move was suave and would have worked, but for the capture of the bungling burglars, which offered Felt a Plan B. So maybe Felt is a hero, and he managed to succeed without getting killed, which is better than average.

[murky]

Regarding the thwarting of the planned police state, it's no wonder Pat Buchanan is still mad at Felt. Ashcroft ought to be too. Also no wonder that the Bush administration makes no moves to prosecute Felt, lest we get a public airing of Felt's motives while we're reexamining the Patriot Act and counter-terrorism measures.

[murky]

I say we call for a full-blown investigation.

[murky]

Actually it's this Michael Dobbs story that gave me a cynical take on Felt. It appeared alongside Woodward's.

[Marc Schneider]

If you expect perfect heroes in this world, I'm afraid you are going to be sadly disillusioned. Felt was clearly a conflicted person with a variety of motives, some of them noble perhaps, some not so noble. I doubt that Felt's only concern was the FBI's institutional interests or that his only concern was the so-called proto-police state. I think there are very few selfless people that do great things out of purely altruistic motives. Being a hero doesn't mean you aren't a human being. In fact, it's the ability to do great things despite having human failings that often make people heroes, e.g., Martin Luther King.

In fact, the comment by Joe S. about meeting James Madison is very appropo. The founders certainly did not expect virtue alone to be a check on government. As Madison said, "if men were angels, there would be no need for government." (I hope I have the quote right!)