 |
| History in an Hour (CC BY 2.0) President Richard M. Nixon |
Posted on Jun 14, 2012
No leak, no “investigatory
journalism” ever revealed any facet of what we know as Watergate that
was not already a subject of investigation and inquiry by authorities.
The marking of the 40th anniversary of the June 17, 1972, Watergate
break-in nevertheless appears to focus on the role of a few journalists.
Robert Redford will reprise the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men”
with a documentary version. Now, of course, he can identify Mark Felt,
aka “Deep Throat,” as the leaker who destroyed Richard Nixon’s
presidency. Felt indeed played a part, and Nixon knew of his actions in
October 1972, as revealed in Nixon’s tapes released in 1997, eight years
before the elderly and ailing Felt went public.
Nixon was furious because he had considered Felt, “that Jew” (he was
not), for the post of FBI director. Nixon realized he could do nothing,
for Felt “knew too much”—as, for example, the illegal break-ins
committed by Nixon’s “plumbers.”
The media’s canonization of its primacy in
“breaking the case” threatens to leave us with “Hamlet” absent the
Prince of Denmark. Inevitably the Watergate narrative will be reduced to
its bare essentials. G. Gordon Liddy surely will not make an index, and
the “President’s Men” will slip into their deserved place as largely
anonymous spear carriers. But Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of
the United States, and his story will endure. Future textbooks (assuming
we will have them) will render his history roughly as follows: “Richard
Nixon, the first president of the United States to resign as a result
of his abuses of power and criminal obstruction of justice…,” perhaps
then followed with several sentences describing other parts of his
presidency. For certain, Nixon is the principal player of Watergate;
journalism will at best be remembered as a bit player in bringing him
down.
Leaks are a way of life in Washington
circles; their purpose and motive are self-evident and self-serving.
Onetime Nixon presidential counsel Leonard Garment regularly talked with
media people to reveal forthcoming potentially explosive news, hoping
to defuse it. Sam Dash, the Watergate Select Committee counsel, once
remarked: “Leak? I leaked all the time”—to advance his committee’s work. READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment