STILL TRYING TO CLEAN UP THE MESSES NIXON LEFT FOR HIM WHEN HE WAS WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL, DEAN SAYS FELT IS FAR FROM FLAWLESS
Give John Dean credit for at least this much. Instead of reflexively becoming an attack dog when assessing Mark Felt like clown-felon G. Gordon Liddy and White House lackey Pat Buchanan, he puts Felt's impact and legacy in proper perspective, in a column that appeared today on www.findlaw.com.
"It is time to learn from what happened, not refight battles Nixon has, for good reason, lost," Dean writes.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20050603.html
Which is not to say Dean is riding shotgun on the Felt bandwagon. He notes Deep Throat may have been a worthy whistleblower, but one who was far from perfect. In fact, he's still a bit puzzled over how much Felt told Woodward was misleading or, in his perhaps jaundiced view -- dead wrong.
Given the complexity of Watergate, it is not difficult to understand how Felt made some mistakes when meeting with Woodward in the dead of the night. Yet in other instances, it is not easy to comprehend how the No. 2 man in the FBI could have provided such bad information, knowing it could become public. And why has Felt let this bad information sit on the historical record for the past three decades?
Felt's outing prompted Dean to return to "All The President's Men" and offers an appendix to show instances where the book is wrong, based on what he says are Watergate documents he's reviewed as well as his own, considerable knowledge of what went down.
Interestingly, Dean looks beyond Felt to tip his hat to who he says is the real hero of Watergate, none other than Ben Bradlee "who not only supported Woodward and Bernstein, but had the trust of the Post's owner, Katharine Graham ... Although The Washington Post never "cracked the case," their keeping the story in the news within the Beltway had a great influence on the Congress, making it an important story. Had Bradlee not done so, history might have been much different."
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