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
Telling a Family Secret
Can Be Treacherous
By
Stephen Amidon, Washington Post, Sunday Outlook, June 5, 2005;
B01
Watching
W. Mark Felt appear alongside his daughter and grandson on Tuesday to affirm
that he was Deep Throat, one could be forgiven for suspecting that he was not
the driving force behind this very public admission. Smiling like an
eager-to-please child, his pajama top tucked poorly into mismatched bottoms,
the 91-year-old looked like a man who no longer made many decisions for
himself. Any evidence that he was once among the nation's most powerful lawmen
was long gone. The two faces framing his, however, seemed to be very much in
charge. His attractive, determined daughter Joan and his clean-cut, law
student grandson, Nick Jones, positively glowed with purposefulness. It was
hard not to think that they were the ones behind the revelation, not the shaky
figure clutching the walker.
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
