quote Marley23:
“Gray was cooperating with the White House. He kept them informed of the case against them and destroyed evidence. So if you ask me Felt was correct in not trusting the system to do its job. We can’t know how the story would have turned out if the public pressure that Woodward, Bernstein brought about with Felt’s help hadn’t been a factor. I think the White House’s attempts to suppress the truth would have been more successful, if not totally successful.”
From Wikipedia…
In 1973 Gray was nominated as J. Edgar Hoover’s permanent successor as head of the FBI. This action by President Nixon confounded many, coming at a time when revelations of involvement by Nixon administration officials in the Watergate Scandal were coming to the forefront. Under his direction, the FBI had been accused to mishanding the investigation into the break-in, doing a cursory job and refusing to investigate the possible involvement of administration officials. The Senate confrimation hearing which Gray would be subject to was to become the Senate’s first opportunity to ask pertinent questions about Watergate.
During the confirmation hearing Gray defended his agency’s investigation, however, during questioning he let it be known that he had handed over the files on the investigation to White House Counsel John Dean, in spite of the fact that people with strong links to the White House were being investigated. He confirmed that the investigation supported claims made by the Washington Post and other sources of dirty tricks and “ratfucking” committed and funded by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, notably activities of questionable legality committed by Donald Segretti. The White House had for months steadfastly denied any involvement in such activities. By the end of the hearing, the ineptitude of the FBI’s investigation of Watergate was publicly made clear, increasing the suspicions of many of a cover-up.
Is it a fact that he destroyed evidence? What was the evidence? Did he suffer the consequences? Was this evidence resurrected by Felt, communicated over to W&B (Woodward & Bernstein) and THEN and ONLY THEN did it become key evidence in the investigation? That is not my recollection. My recollection is that the internals controls, such as Gray’s own Senate confirmation hearing, were working fine and that the good people that serve in the government would come to the truth eventually. Did B&W fuel a fire? Certainly. Was it necessary and was it constructive to the investigation? Debatably, it had no effect and perhaps all the attention was a hinderence.
Well the information Felt / Deep throat had was available to several people… including the #1 at the FBI… yet they didn’t go to the grand jury either… so why blame Felt for going anonymous ?
Quote from Rjung:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.”
My point was that some are all too quick to jump to conclusions that nothing is being done – whereas, good people are doing good things within proper channels all the time. Such investigations take time. Unfortunately, people want immediate satisfaction, become impatient, and screech “conspiracy cover-up” at the slightest delay. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Watergate was not one of the biggest attempt by an Administration to conspire to cover-up – hell, it is the posterchild. What I am questioning or, better yet, I posit that Felt’s leaking of confidential information to B&W was not vital to blowing the cover off these attempts. It simply served to get the news to the public sooner than later.
{From Wikipedial} Interestingly, in 1980, Felt himself was convicted of ordering illegal break-ins at the homes of Weathermen suspects, & their families. Ironically, Richard Nixon testified on his behalf- for the man who did so much to undermine his Administration.
They met by chance while Woodward was still in the Navy, delivering a classified document to the White House. They became friends well before Watergate ever happened.
There’s Bob Woodward’s characterization of them as friends, well before Watergate ever happened. Is his false too, or just mine?
My post didn’t suggest that.
My post explictly said:
He had a duty to deliver his information to a grand jury.
As a government official, he had no business feeding his friend a scoop that made his career.
Both of these assertions strike me as self-evident. An official may not choose to pick a particular journalist and make his career by feeding him non-public information - especially when that information is from grand jury proceedings, which are secret as a matter of law.
An FBI official has a general duty to apprise the cognizant US Attorney when he becomes aware of serious federal crime. I don’t use “duty” here in a strict legal sense – that is, his failure to so act doesn’t breach a duty of care owed to any particular person – but rather “duty” in the sense that THAT is his job.
Stein’s been saying that for years. I have the book, The Clothes Have No Emperor, which is an account of the news stories throughout the Reagan years and there’s one entry back in the early 80s where Ben Stein writes in an editorial that well, hey, Watergate wasn’t THAT big of a deal-no one even remembers what it was all about!
Stein should stick to Wonder Years conventions for those remarks.
I’ve never heard the “Pray with me Henry” story-what was that all about?
(Damn, I should have paid more attention in class, I suppose. D’oh!)
What possible difference does it make that Woodward was his friend? Is there some rule that says leaking is okay as long as the journalist isn’t your buddy? Or does leaking it to a journalist who is also your friend turn it into First Degree Leaking?
Oh, your concern for whistleblowers is quite touching. Why, I’d bet that if a government employee were to have concrete and provable evidence of wrongdoing by a high government official, you’d be just as solicitous of their reputation and employability, huh?
That’s more than enough cause to go public. The director of the FBI, who was supposed to be in charge of this investigation involving the White House, was clearly helping them impede the investigation. If you’re #2 in the Bureau and you care about the investigation, you’re all but forced to seek other means to advance it.
That’s not “controls… working fine” in my opinion. People went to jail for their involvement in this affair, and Gray’s punishment for protecting them was… being denied a promotion. He did not suffer the kind of consequences that many others did.
Maybe the “good people” would have “come to the truth eventually,” but that’s not something I can just assume. What happens if they didn’t ‘come to it’ until after Nixon left office?
Woodward and Bernstein weren’t the only people covering it, so I don’t think anything Felt did could have been a hindrance. You’re speculating on a lot of things here and I don’t see the support.
I got too involved in hypotheticals here and should’ve just skipped it.
Woodward and Bernstein, with the help of Felt and others, played at least some role in keeping the pressure on the White House and on the people investigating it. If they were somehow a hindrance, the credit would be shared with many other journalists, but their reporting was the clearest light into what was happening.
All I’m really seeing from you are assumptions, yo no se. It’s possible that they were a hindrance, it’s possible that if they hadn’t gotten involved everything would turn out fine. But I can’t think of any reason to think any of that would be true.
If Felt truly was motivated solely by selfless concern… and he truly believed that going to a grand jury would simpy have gotten him fired, so he acted outside channels for that reason…
then why are we only hearing about it NOW? Why didn’t Felt come forward after Haldeman was convicted? Or after Nixon resigned? At that point, the effcets he was shooting for had happened. Afraid he might lose his job? Then why didn’t he come forward after he left his job?
May a politician pick a single journalist and feed him secret government information, solely at his own discretion? What if the journalist and the politician were romantically involved? What if they were husband and wife? At what point, to you, does a politician’s choice of a single journalist to leak incindiary information cross any kind of a line? You sneer at “First Degree Leaking” - so you tell me. Felt’s actions apparently didn’t cross the line – IS there a line? Where?
Nobody that I’ve seen here is claiming Felt was 100% “selfless” in acting as Deep Throat. The issue is rather more complicated than that. Was he justified in what he did? Were the results of his actions good? (A: Yes and Yes. Fans of public corruption and abuse of constitutional power may feel otherwise.)
Well (a), as you claim, he committed some sort of crime in leaking, so he probably wasn’t all that thrilled about copping to it. Who knows, might have even endangered his government pension. And (b), a guy’s gotta work. He retired from the FBI, not from the job market. Employers may be somewhat less likly to hire security experts who are known to leak on their employers. (Ewwww . . .)
Sure. Matter of fact, Bob Novack has made quite a career of that discretion.
Government leakers generally don’t hold press conferences to announce their inside information. They disclose information to the journalists of their choosing, with the intention that the information be made public (usually with the explicit or blessing of their superiors). Who gives a shit which journalist they choose? The crime (if any) and the results are the same.
Having read the article, I’d say it proves exactly the opposite. More after this:
As the article Moto links to admits, the Watergate investigation hadn’t gotten any further than Liddy, Hunt, and the five burglars (McCord and the Cubans) until late March of 1973.
Before the 1972 election, Woodward and Bernstein had managed to track the conspiracy all the way up to Haldeman. So they were in fact running well ahead of the investigation.
Absent Woodstein’s stories in the WaPo, does anyone think the Senators would have known or cared enough about Watergate to ask Pat Gray any questions about it at his confirmation hearing?
That was a rhetorical question. The answer is No.
Absent the Woodstein/WaPo stories and the Pat Gray hearings, would Sirica have decided to press the original Watergate Seven so hard, and would McCord have been as likely to break down and talk?
That’s not a rhetorical question. But if there hadn’t been any story up to that point, then those seven would have known that all they had to do was hang tight, and the whole thing would blow over, no matter how much pressure Sirica put on them in a mostly empty courtroom. It certainly would have lengthened the odds against McCord’s spilling the beans.
And if no Gray and no McCord, then in all likelihood no need for John Dean to observe that a cancer was growing on the Presidency, let alone any incentive for Dean to switch sides.
Are you suggesting that Judge Sirica based his judicial actions on something other than the trial record before him? I’m shocked, shocked to hear such an accusation.