Without Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!

Watergate was a criminal conspiracy, exposed in large part by The Washington Post, which brought down a Republican president. Whitewater was a shady deal, conflated to some extent by the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, which unfairly tormented a Democratic president. So when the WSJ editorial page compares the two in “Deep Throat's Legacy”, the only commonality that I see is the “water” part. While the Watergate investigation opened the floodgates to expose real corruption, the Whitewater probe closed the dikes due to a drought of valid information. The WSJ editors conclude that “the Fourth Estate's first duty is to report the facts” — advice that they should have followed back in the 1990s when they were obsessing over Whitewater. By continuously churning Whitewater, they managed to create a lot of turbulence and no dirt really settled. Per the old adage, they should have known that “still waters run deep”.

Speaking of deep, Washington has been agog in the past couple of days with the outing of “Deep Throat” after 33 years under cover. This is a truly remarkable story in a number of ways, since it highlights:

* The irony of Woodward and Bernstein preserving a secret for three decades in a town that they seduced for gobs of information over three tumultuous years (1972-74) to unravel a corrupt presidency. Undoubtedly, along with Ben Bradlee, they have helped restore some integrity to journalism, which has taken a pounding in the past few years with the problems at The New York Times and USA Today.

* The dilemma for conservatives now vilifying W. Mark Felt, since he was pardoned by their hero, Ronald Reagan — albeit in a separate case. Nevertheless, President Reagan’s statement, while granting a pardon in 1981 to FBI agents Mark Felt and Edward Miller, praised “their good-faith belief that their actions were necessary to preserve the security interests of our country” and also said that they were “two men who acted on high principle”.

* The indispensable value of one’s conscience in prodding one to do the right thing, irrespective of one’s personal motives, as long as one determines that there are tangible benefits to organization, society, government, etc. in the long run.

Finally, one has to wonder, without Deep Throat how would “our long national nightmare” have ended? Here’s one scenario – Nixon would have completed his second term, Ford would have then probably beaten Carter in 1976, but Ford would have then lost to Mondale in 1980, Reagan would have been too old to run in 1984, so Mondale would have won a second term by beating Bush Sr. instead, Clinton would have defeated Dole in 1988 (instead of 1996), but Clinton would have lost a second term to Perot in 1992 – both, Republicans and Democrats, must agree that without W. Mark Felt "our long national nightmare" would be still going on!