Watergate: Deep Throat steps out

In the last echo of a long dead scandal, Mark Feld has outed himself as Deep Throat. As he was number two in the FBI, his motivations for leaking can be assessed as a mixture of altruism and vindictiveness - he had hopes of being made FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover's but Nixon passed him over in favour of Patrick Gray. His subsequent shame at the spiteful nature of his actions was the real reason that his identity remained secret for so long.

For me, the interesting story is not about how two intrepid reporters uncovered a scandal that brought down a president (in reality, the legal authorities did muost of the investigative work and the White House leaked like a sieve). Rather it's how Nixon found himself in the hole of his own making.

The origins go back to Franklin Roosevelt's presidency when J.E. Hoover explained to the President and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, that he needed a request from Hull before the FBI could investigate the American Communist Party. According to Secrecy and Power, after Hoover finished his request, Roosevelt looked at Hull, who said:

Go ahead and investigate the cocksuckers.

For the next four decades, Hoover used the above statement as legal authority for the FBI to carry out domestic intelligence operations against not only the ACP but also the Ku Klux Klan and the Civil Rights Movement. In the late 60s, a canny Hoover realized that the tide of political opinion was turning against domestic intelligence activities conducted on such flimsy authority. As a result, he brought to an end these activities and extinguished the FBI's capacity to embark on them without lawful authority.

It was at this time, Nixon became President. Having been in Washington since the end of the Second World War, Nixon knew what the FBI was capable of doing but he had realized that the tide had turned. When Nixon made what he thought were reasonable requests for FBI action, he was surprised and hurt to find out that Hoover would not do what he had done for Kennedy and Johnson. Consequently in an effort to battle Nixon's enemies, the White House created the Plumbers to carry out what the FBI had previously done. Unfortunately the Plumbers acted out of zealous loyalty to Nixon rather than sober professionalism. Although they had one or two successes (they uncovered Yeoman Radford who spied on the White House for the Joint Chiefs of Staff), their lack of caution was such that if Watergate had not happened, the Plumbers would have eventually become enmeshed in a scandal that could have brought down Nixon.