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Besides
historical review, Deep Throat’s unmasking this week generated national post-9/11
soul searching anew, some good and some opportunistic. We’ve seen some reformed
characters, such as Chuck Colson, revert to hypocrisy, angry to be once again
in a less flattering spotlight. Some
of the pundit conversation and Talk Radio bombast seemed highly nervous that
comparisons would be made between the Nixon White House and today’s. That’s
already been done by one of the real Watergate characters, John Dean, who wrote
a book titled Worse than Watergate,
referring to the Bush-Cheney penchant for secrecy and unilaterialism. Aside from the
significance of Watergate on American culture and the changes that it generated
within subsequent White Houses (see Woodward’s book Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate) part of
the national conscience we are exploring covers what we remember and what we don’t,
as China and Japan know well, too.
What were the relevant lessons of Watergate? As talk continues about anonymous sources in the media and
the White House argues that today’s media has exaggerated prisoner abuses, others,
like Daniel Ellsberg and George McGovern, have been calling for a new Deep
Throat to think of the public first, not the administration. But this is
more than a national tale, it’s also the story of families and individual
choices. I just spent an intense week with my brother and parents in a family
project that involved generational transitions, looking back and glimpsing the
future, both from different perspectives, ruffling our age-related (6 years) differences
and adult life experiences. This commentary below struck a chord with me. I also wondered about the family behind
the man when I saw these faces for the first time. As with the unanswered
questions since raised, I suspect there is more to this story, and in time,
history will reveal more to us. In the meantime, we will revisit Watergate and
its relevancy today, especially because some of the key players are still with
us. For example, on the stage of history with the reporters and politicians is
one William Rehnquist, who as Assistant Attorney General on June 18, 1971 asked
the Washington Post, under heavy attack by the Nixon White House, to not
publish any more of the Pentagon Papers. At the end of the current Supreme Court term this month,
Chief Justice Rehnquist is expected to retire, bringing to full circle just one
of the chapters of this national passage. I wonder what secrets he may keep? KwC It's All Relative By Stephen Amidon,
Washington Post, Sunday Outlook, June 5, 2005; B01 While the professional
ethics of Felt's Watergate conduct will be debated for years to come, what
privately transpired within his family leading up to the publication of the
fateful Vanity Fair article is equally compelling. Why would Felt come forward
now, after more than 30 years of tight-lipped silence? Was it because his
family discovered his secret and pressured him to reveal himself? Just how
willing a participant in the decision to go public was a man whose "health
and mental acuity" are described by Vanity Fair as being in decline? All families have
secrets. Occasionally they are as monumental as the Felts', though most are
common things, deeply emotional within a household but unexceptional to those
outside -- a father's alcoholism, a daughter's unwanted pregnancy, a mother's
infidelity. What happens after these secrets emerge often defines a clan. Will
the family pull together? Or will the secret tear it apart? This is why so much
great literature is based upon the revealed secret -- it is the ideal lens
through which to observe a family's true nature. Hamlet's fate (and his kin's)
is sealed by the disclosure of his mother's murderous adultery; Hardy's Tess is
undone after confessing her non-virginity to her new husband. Oedipus comes to
ruin by insisting that he be told the truth about his family's hidden past,
while Lear and his children are destroyed when his youngest daughter refuses to
keep her true feelings to herself. What is notable about
these stories is that it is the revelation of the long-suppressed truth that
leads to tragedy, rather than the existence of the secret itself. Without the
visit from his father's ghost, Hamlet would have soldiered on in his melancholy
funk, grumbling about Claudius but willing to accept him in the end. Tess and
Angel would almost certainly have lived happily ever after if they hadn't
shared their sexual histories; Oedipus and Jocasta would have survived if he
had not pressed the soothsayer Tiresias. Lear and Cordelia, meanwhile, could
have avoided tragedy if they had not insisted on speaking their minds. When it comes
to family secrets, it is often a case of the less said, the better. One
person's honesty can lead to another's destruction. Many times, the only thing
holding a family together are the truths its members keep under wraps. There
is, after all, a good reason why grandfather doesn't tell the kids what he did
in the war, or dad refuses to divulge the details of his bachelor party. The virtues of keeping
family secrets did not seem to be on the minds of the younger Felts as they
stepped into the California sun on Tuesday, however. On the contrary, they
looked like people who believed that their disclosure would bring them nothing
but happiness and prosperity. But will it? Or have
they instead broken an unspoken bond that has held three very different
generations of a family together? There is no reason to doubt that Joan Felt
and her son sense that they are doing what is best for Mark. Neither seems to
believe that going public has a downside for the FBI veteran; both appear
mystified by his long refusal to claim credit for his role in Nixon's
resignation. To them, he is a national hero, not a sinner. By urging him to
reveal himself, Joan believes that she is ensuring him "some closure, and
accolades, while he was still alive." She also said, in the Vanity Fair
article, that the family will be able to "make at least enough money to
pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education."
College is expensive, and if Mark Felt is owed a debt of gratitude by the
nation he helped save, what better way for America to show it than to help put
Nick through law school? But Mark Felt and his
daughter do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on the value of "closure"
or the certainty of public honor. Joan is a college professor and single mother
who is described in the Vanity Fair article as "high-strung and
overworked." She is, in other words, a creature of our times. As a young
woman, she was estranged for a while from her father after she joined a commune
at the very moment that Mark Felt was leading a government crackdown on
radicals. Is she really capable of understanding her father's apparent shame at
violating the FBI code of secrecy -- a feeling profound enough to keep him
silent these past three decades? As she pressed her
father to reveal himself, did Joan ever really ask herself why he guarded such
a potentially lucrative and accolade-attracting secret all these years? Or why
he demanded it be kept hidden until after his death? To a person who has never
belonged to a rigid, code-bound organization like the FBI, it is difficult --
if not impossible -- to imagine the pain of such a confession. Cultures like
the FBI see themselves as families. To take a secret outside this charmed
circle is a special kind of betrayal, no matter how justifiable. Until Tuesday,
perhaps the only aspect of his role as Deep Throat that gave the old G-man
peace was the knowledge that his brethren would not know he had broken their
trust until after he was gone. We can only speculate
now, since it is clear that the one person who can tell us for certain how Mark
Felt feels no longer speaks for himself. The secret is out, and there is little
doubt that the younger Felts consider themselves better off for this
unburdening. The child of the commune has received her "closure"; the
grandchild of the dot-com era may get some of those staggering college bills
paid. But what does W. Mark Felt get for his brief moment in the sun? Will he
really die happier now that his true identity is known? Will the family be
closer than when they were keepers of his deepest secret, and perhaps his
deepest shame? Or has Joan Felt instead opened a Pandora's box that will create
fissures in her family? The greater risk is that, like some modern-day
Cordelia, her frankness may make her father's last days as troubled as Lear's. Stephen
Amidon is the author of "The New City" (Doubleday), a novel that
describes the intrigues among three families in a Watergate-era D.C. suburb. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/04/AR2005060400153.html For more on The Pentagon Papers http://www.vva.org/pentagon/history/history.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers |
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