Isn’t it a scream that “Deep Throat” turns out to be some 91-year-old geez who had a beef about not getting promoted fast enough way back when, in the days when he was an FBI agent?
Yup, W. Mark Felt, the man who brought down the Nixon Administration, was actually the Joseph “Yellowcake” Wilson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They didn’t make Felt FBI director when J. Edgar Hoover kicked the bucket–boo hoo!–so he went running to the parking garage to spill the Watergate beans to Woodward and Bernstein. If I were Tricky Dick, I’d be chuckling so hard in my grave out there in Yorba Linda, Calif., that I’d cause a minor earthquake.
Oh, the ravages of time! Some 32 years have elapsed since 1973, when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be a young investigative reporter for the Washington Post like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was very heaven.
Remember how Hollywood made the pair’s Watergate book, “All the President’s Men,” into a hit 1976 movie–“the most devastating detective story of this century”–and superhunky Robert Redford got to play Woodward and saturninely handsome Dustin Hoffman got to play Bernstein? The big ties! The power sideburns! Those were the days! Every Ivy League grad who’d worked on the Harvard Crimson or the Yalie Daily suddenly wanted to go to journalism school and be an investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
You should see the white-haired Bernstein and the receding-haired Woodward now! And hard-charging Post executive editor Ben Bradlee–played in the movie by none other than Jason Robards! Those three all now look almost as old and befuddled as W. Mark Felt! Ah, and the Post’s circulation is falling, and no one wants to be an investigative reporter anymore, and even though it was supposed to be the most devastating detective story of the century, no one can remember exactly what Watergate was supposed to be all about, except that the name had a “-gate” at the end that implied some sort of scandal, like “Monica-gate” and “Swift-gate.”
And the Post didn’t even get the Mark Felt story! That honor fell to Vanity Fair and to Felt’s lawyer, John D. O’Connor. How the mighty have fallen!
There’s a lesson in this somewhere. The lesson for me was how glad I am that I stood six hours in a driving rain to walk by Nixon’s casket in Yorba Linda and pay him my last respects when he died in 1994. He’s having the last laugh right now, and I’ve got to smile, too.