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I Felt I was on a Tripp
Rich Galen Friday June 03, 2005
From The Council of Insurance Brokers
The Greenbrier
White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia
For much of the country "Watergate," as a scandal, is as current as "Teapot Dome." You have to study it in high school, but it happened in 1972. Teapot Dome happened in 1922.
Thirty-three years, 83 years; when you're 17 they are exactly the same distance.
For those who may have slept through it - the class, not the scandal - Watergate is the name given to the broad range of misdeeds by President Richard Nixon and an astonishing number of aides and employees which began with a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
At the time the DNC was housed in the office-shops-hotel-apartment complex known as The Watergate. Hence the name of the scandal.
That is also why, for the past 30 years, ANY scandal in Washington ends with the (often hyphenated) word "-gate."
Monica-gate, comes to mind.
What was first termed a "third-rate burglary" mushroomed into a scandal which touched nearly every senior member of the White House staff and nearly every member of Nixon's re-election team. Watergate ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974.
Watergate was all the more improbable because the 1972 election was never seriously in doubt. Nixon beat the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern (D-SD), by some 17 million popular votes and a suffocating margin of 520-17 in the Electoral College.
The stars of the show, two young reporters on the Metro beat for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, covered the court appearance of the burglars, found that one of them had the phone number of a White House staffer in his notebook and bingo-bongo: Headlines, awards, books, mini-series, movies, musicals - Watergate!
The outing of Mark Felt as the Leaker-in-Chief of Watergate is, after all this time, but a modest blip on the chat show radar. The Left, however, will embrace the 91-year-old former FBI agent as a Hero of the Revolution for his part in bringing down Nixon.
The ends justifying the means and all that.
One senior member of the Elite Media Class said yesterday that the important thing to remember about Felt's leakage - even though he was the number two guy at the FBI at the time - was that everything his said was correct. Never mind he could have, and should have, taken what he knew to a federal grand jury.
Speaking of which, do not spend the weekend waiting for the EMC to make a positive comparison between Felt and Linda Tripp whose revelations - not to a newspaper but to the actual, appropriate Federal investigator - regarding Bill Clinton's lying to one of those federal grand juries led to his impeachment and trial.
No glory from the Left for someone who did damage to the Left.
As far as I'm concerned I would never want to have a quiet dinner with either of them. In Felt's case, he only had the courage of his convictions to the point where he was protected from any backlash - a promise from the Washington Post that they would never reveal his identity.
In Linda Tripp's case, I'm not sure how comfortable I would be chatting with someone who got her 15 minutes of fame by making friends with Monica Lewinsky then secretly taping her phone calls about her affair with Clinton.
The best observation of this whole Deep Throat business came from former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw who said: "In those days you couldn't get anyone to talk. Now you can't get anyone to shut up."
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the Teapot Dome scandal and a Watergate Timeline; a Mullfoto from San Francisco and a Catchy Caption of the Day which may give you nightmares.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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