The following is quoted from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, Wednesday, June 1, following the Vanity Fair scoop on “Deep Throat”:

“A long time ago I wrote a magazine piece about how Bob Woodward's famous source, "Deep Throat," could have been a mere Secret Service technician -- any one of several people detailed to keep Richard Nixon's secret White House taping system operating. I figured that anyone with access to the system could quickly learn all that mattered about the Watergate burglary: The president's men had done it and the president was covering it up. I showed the piece to Woodward, who would not say whether it was right or wrong, just that it made sense. We both knew, though, that "Deep Throat" was Mark Felt.

            Woodward's knowledge was firsthand, up close and certain. Mine was different. It came from having worked with Woodward early in his career. I was looking into rumors that Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew of Maryland, was under investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore. Somehow -- I can't remember exactly -- I worked a bit with Bob on that story. His source, a person he used to call "my friend," had terrific information -- stuff that, looking back on it, not even the prosecutors in Baltimore had yet learned. Woodward would refer to his notes, and I could see the initials "M.F." They stood either for "my friend" or Mark Felt, whose name almost instantly surfaced. I thought it didn't matter. The two were the same. There was a single source.”

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053101351.html

 

So Mr. Cohen “knew” years ago who “Deep Throat” was, and never hinted at it. What’s more, he “worked with Woodward early in his career” on Spiro Agnew.

 

So here’s from Bob Woodward yesterday, Thursday, June 2:

“In the spring, [Felt] said in utter confidence that the FBI had some information that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had received a bribe of $2,500 in cash that Agnew had put in his desk drawer. I passed this on to Richard Cohen, the top Maryland reporter for The Post, not identifying the source at all. Cohen said, and later wrote in his book on the Agnew investigation, that he thought it was "preposterous." Another Post reporter and I spent a day chasing around Baltimore for the alleged person who supposedly knew about the bribe. We got nowhere. Two years later, the Agnew investigation revealed that the vice president had received such a bribe in his office.”

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060102124_3.html

 

Well, these are the times when it’s fun to live in the vicinity of DC. Having besserwissers around may have helped Woodward keep his secret.

 

More importantly, the mindset Cohen displayed during Agnew’s time – that it was “preposterous” to think Agnew would take a bribe, at least in his office – is the mindset dominant at the Post today.

 

Their donnee always seems to be that an individual in a position of status, regardless of how he got it or how poorly he is acquitting himself in it, could not possibly be doing anything wrong.

 

Examples include every major aspect of the topics of 9/11, the anthrax mailings, Osama bin Laden, Guantanamo, the indefinite incarceration of “terror suspects,” war profiteering, and Iraq. Year before last, one Post reporter mentioned briefly that some people thought Bush was invading Iraq over oil – and added, “Nobody in Washington thinks that.”

 

On Tuesday, May 24, I called Post White House reporter Mike Allen to ask whether he had asked the White House or presidential brother Marvin P. Bush anything about Mr. Bush’s security interests or other connections with the World Trade Center. He said – politely, but in a gruff, strangled voice – that he had not.

 

We’ve got a unit in the White House that was obviously determined from the first to invade Iraq, that seized on the attacks of 9/11 not to investigate but to exploit, that has left crucial security breaches unhealed while invading the Middle East, that has let Osama bin Laden go apparently in comfort and protection (can anyone say “friendly foreign intelligence service”?), and a national paper like the Post can’t see even a possibility that there may have been complicity in the plotting behind those attacks?

 

In today’s Post there is one bright spot, a column by Eugene Robinson, who rightly links the W. Mark Felt story to now:

“It’s ironic that Felt has taken us back to Watergate on a week when the Bush White House, from the president on down, is conducting a well-coordinated campaign to deflect criticism of the shameful – and quite possibly illegal – way our nation has treated thousands of detainees in the war on terrorism. Thirty years from now, I’ll wager, we will look back on this episode with the same sense of shame we now have for Watergate.

            And this time, we don’t have to wait for another Deep Throat to guide us. What we already know is more than enough of a scandal – and certainly more than enough of a stain on the nation’s honor.”

            Robinson continues, “The administration attacks that one word [gulag] to deflect attention from the facts: The United States, land of the free, has swept thousands of people off the streets and held some of them for as long as three years, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons officials won’t tell us about.”

            He concludes, “Richard Nixon tried to blame the messenger, too. But we didn’t let him.

The kicker? – Robinson’s estimable column is virtually hidden in the Post’s web site. Charles Krauthammer’s “Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already” is posted with a link on the front page, as is E. J. Dionne’s “Hyperbole and Human Rights.” But to find Robinson’s spot-on “Denial, Now and 30 Years Ago,” you have to click on “Browse today’s Editorial pages.”