'Deep Throat': Hero or villain?
From Bill Schneider
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- "As he recently told my mother, 'I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal. But now they think he's a hero," says W. Mark Felt's grandson, Nick Jones.
Apparently one person who changed his mind about "Deep Throat" was -- "Deep Throat" himself.
"I asked him, I said, 'Well, would it be such a terrible thing to be Deep Throat?' and he said, 'Yes, it would be. It's a terrible thing to do that to the FBI, to leak details of a criminal investigation,' '' online magazine Slate.com's Timothy Noah said of his August 1999 conversation with Felt.
If you want to impugn Mark Felt's character, it's not so hard to do.
"He lied about his role being Deep Throat. He later was indicted for other Watergate-related activities," says Howard Kurtz, of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and The Washington Post.
Felt's motives may not have been pure.
"This was a fellow who was also trying to get even with Richard Nixon for not appointing him as director of the FBI, that there was a revenge factor here," says former Nixon adviser David Gergen.
Felt's critics say if he saw wrongdoing in the White House, he had other options.
"He could have walked into Pat Gray's office, the director of the FBI, and said, here are things that are going on the White House that need to be exposed. The president needs to know about this," says former Nixon White House counsel Charles Colson.
Author Rob Kessler doesn't think so.
"The fact is that Nixon was trying to cover up this whole investigation. He was trying to suppress it," says Kessler.
"You kind of have a lawbreaker... blowing the whistle on a lawbreaker. So no one's really a hero here," says Noah.
CNN heard from viewers who took a larger perspective.
One wrote, "In all the talk about motives and honor, no one has ever said that anything he said wasn't true.''
Another viewer urged a sense of proportion: "Saying he was somehow dishonorable is like a bank robber attempting to get his case thrown out by claiming the arresting officer had to jaywalk to cuff him.''
At least one figure from the Nixon White House believes most Americans will see the larger picture.
"Every secret deserves a decent burial. And I think that this particular secret will probably receive a state funeral," says former Nixon White House counsel Leonard Garment.
