By Jerry Burke
On June 17, 1972, at 2:30 a.m., five men were arrested trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington. Two weeks later, the Washington Post revealed that a $25,000 cashier's check earmarked for the Nixon campaign wound up in the bank account of one of the burglars, Bernard L. Barker.
On Oct. 10, 1972, FBI agents established that the Watergate break-in stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon re-election effort. The bombshell had little effect, for on Nov. 7, 1972, President Nixon was re-elected in one of the largest landslides in American political history, crushing Democratic Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.
The investigation, however, continued. On May 18, 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee began nationally televised hearings. Highlights included White House counsel John Dean saying he discussed the Watergate cover-up with Nixon at least 35 times, and Alexander Butterfield, the former presidential appointments secretary, revealing that since 1971, Nixon had recorded all conversations and telephone calls in his offices.
Nixon refused to turn over the presidential tape recordings to the Senate Watergate Committee or the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. On Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon fired Cox and abolished the office entirely. A month after declaring, "I'm not a crook," Nixon and the White House could not explain an 18 1Ž2-minute gap in a transcript of one of the subpoenaed tapes.
A seven-month battle to obtain the actual tapes ended when, on July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court rejected the president's claim of executive privilege and ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tapes of 64 White House conversations. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three articles of impeachment, charging obstruction of justice.
On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign. Vice President Gerald R. Ford assumed the country's highest office. He would later pardon Nixon of all charges related to the Watergate case and would repeatedly fall down stairs for the following two years.
I just thought I'd recap before busting the bubble on this neo-con fantasyland where W. Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, the No. 2 FBI guy who leaked information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is a traitor to his country. (Other attractions in this section of the park include Mr. Rumsfeld's Wild Armorless Humvee Ride, the Trickle-Down Economics roller coaster and Cheney's House of Turned Corners.)
Felt is no traitor. You can debate the hero part all you want, but a traitor? Hardly. Nixon and his aides did the crime. They were the ones who spied on their political opponents and tried to cover it up. They were the ones who abused their power and sought to undermine the American political and judicial processes. Felt didn't topple the White House; Nixon did. All Felt did was point two journalists in the right direction.
Anyone who sees nothing wrong with what Nixon did is either an idiot, a former Nixon aide or both. And as the aging Felt comes in from the cold, I'm kind of in awe of what an insider with a soul could do back then.
A lot of my friends pray daily that Deep Throat II starts slipping notes under Seymour Hersh's door about what the current administration is doing. Unfortunately, it's a bit moot. We've had our whistle blowers, like Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson, Sibel Edmonds and Joseph Darby, systematically smeared as traitors to the cause. Anonymous sources can't be trusted, because half of them are spreading misinformation on behalf of Karl "I need a hug" Rove.
Don't believe me? Try this one on for size: Imagine that a month before releasing a Pentagon report detailing detainee and Koran abuse at Guantanamo, a mysterious inside source calls the reporter who broke the Monica Lewinsky story and tells him the Pentagon will be confirming reports that a Koran, the holy book of Muslims, was indeed flushed down a toilet.
Then comes the outrage! The source (surprise) retracts. Newsweek has already printed the story. How dare they! It single-handedly made Muslims everywhere hate us and riot (even though a week earlier, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said the story had nothing to do with those riots). There's no proof of THAT happening!
Then came the truth, last Friday afternoon, long after everybody in the media has gone home, that guards "accidentally" splashed urine on the Koran and wrote obscenities in one copy. Doesn't matter. Big media has yet again been discredited, and the public doesn't care.
Well, it had better start caring. It's not that we need another Deep Throat or more daring reporters. We need a populace that doesn't look upon chronic corruption and call it patriotism. One that doesn't trade in the Bill of Rights for a false sense of security.
We need to wake up and realize that creators of illegal wars are war criminals. Blame Newsweek and Amnesty International all you want; President Bush is the one who opened up this Pandora's Box. If he can't close it himself, then it's time to let the adults do it for him.
We also need someone who can explain to me how a soldier can "accidentally" splash urine on a Koran, barring of course the possibility that the strapped-for-warm-bodies Army has lowered their standards to allow pantless incontinents to serve as guards.
