The Chris Moeller Archives

Tricky Dick 2005

There are four points I want to make in regards to the public confession of Watergate's "Deep Throat."


Point #1) Maybe now my crazy neighbor Dennis will stay out of my garbage.

Point #2) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were-- and continue to be-- the real heroes of this story. The two Washington Post reporters did the legendary legwork on the Watergate story, and had the persistence to stick with it through the President's resignation. Furthermore, they kept Mark Felt's secret for more than thirty years and even up to the very end. Some political operatives had suggested that "Deep Throat" never existed, or was simply a composite character in the newspaper's investigation. With the exception of a couple specific and regrettable incidents over the past decade in which the reporters flat-out lied to mislead the media about their source ("Deep Throat" was not a heavy smoker, for example,) Woodward and Bernstein acted honorably towards their source, and courageously towards their profession.

Like most of you, I had no idea who Mark Felt was when I heard his name Tuesday, and yet I don't think that's the reason the revelation of his identity has been such a major letdown for me. I think it's the presence of such tawdry details about the man's professional life. The former #2 man in the FBI apparently felt scorned after being passed over to succeed Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, and acted, at least in part, out of malice towards that end. Also, Felt had been guilty of criminal trespass himself in the early '70s, while investigating the Weather Underground, a militant student activist group. (He was pardoned by Reagan in 1981.)

By all accounts, Felt's role all of those nights in a Washington, D.C. parking garage was simply to nod and verify information Woodward and Bernstein had already collected in their investigation. The actions of the Post's reporters inspired a generation of young journalists, who have regrettably proceeded to take the profession straight down the toilet. But today, we can look back charitably at this historic journalistic endeavor executed with diligence, and committed to accuracy. We could justifiably cry ourselves to sleep tonight over the distant memory of a news-gathering culture that valued "getting it right" over "getting it first."

Point #3) It's unfortunate that Felt's story hit on the day that the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm in the Enron case. The court's ruling, for good or for bad, deserves a detailed look by the American news media, which has already committed several years of almost criminal inattention to these cases of corporate theft. The overlap of the two stories, though, did make me ponder how many of the effects of the Enron catastrophe could have been avoided had there been more whistleblowers like Felt high up within the company's corporate hierarchy.

Point #4) The best movie about Watergate is not "All the President's Men." It's a goofy and brilliant political satire from 1999 entitled "Dick." Who needs Hal Holbrook's shadowy "Deep Throat" when you have ditzy White House dog walkers, Arlene and Betsy, bringing down the president? "All the President's Men" captures Bob Woodward's book in exhausting detail and stands as one of the great movies about the journalism profession (an admittedly-weak genre,) but "Dick" benefits from a quarter century of reflection. The brilliant Dan Hedaya is twice the Nixon Anthony Hopkins could have ever hoped to have been in Oliver Stone's "Nixon," a meaningless 1995 bio-pic of the 38th president; and "Dick" is a laugh riot that is also surprisingly moving.

Wrote Esquire's Tom Carson in '99:

"('Dick') may be Hollywood's first depiction of the scandal to capture what Watergate meant, at least to the ordinary citizens who simply got punched in the stomach by what Nixon had done... The final scene, with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams holding up their gleefully obscene sign while a maddened Nixon gives them the finger, can choke you up even while your grinning, because Hedaya's grimace hints at genuine pain, and the girls' exhilaration is also the dawn of cynicism."

I enjoyed the film's explanation as to why the 18 1/2 minute gap appeared on the White House tape-- and of course, the giddy roller skating in the Oval Office. Watch "Dick" with someone you love.

posted by CM @ 8:15 PM