Deep Throat Sucks

Not a shot was fired, but the government was overthrown.

If the clichéd pen is mightier than the sword, then the manual typewriter did what no column of tanks could ever accomplish in our time. Bob Woodward’s anonymous Watergate source known only as “Deep Throat” was taken at his word though his motives were unknown.

Here is a man, who in the shadows of a parking garage in the late hours of night helped a “friend” at the Washington Post bring down the President of the United States, replacing him with a puppet president who would then bury any investigation into the depths of government illegality with the blanket pardon of Richard Nixon.

In recent years Woodward has claimed that Mark Felt, a senior FBI official at the time of the Watergate investigation, was the mysterious source, and he certainly was an unnamed source for some of the reported information, but this by no means proves he was the only such source.

The recent book Against Them by Tegan Mathis pursues the identity of this infamous anonymous source, claiming that in 1999 a summer camp friend of Carl Bernstein’s son told author Leonard Garment that Deep Throat’s true identity could be found in an anagram. Taking the letters that make up DEEP THROAT, one can reorder them into R DEP TO THE A, or Richard, Deputy to the Assistant. Richard Cheney was the deputy to Donald Rumsfeld who was assistant to President Nixon at this time.

Mathis claims that Bob Woodward’s friend from Yale, Dick Cheney, the man who would become the powerful Vice President to George W. Bush, was the mysterious source who brought down the Nixon presidency.

The freighting implication is that a group of men inside the government orchestrated the removal of our freely elected Chief Executive through a series of behind the scenes moves including manipulation of the free press by an anonymous source who stood to gain a great deal of power by way of this widely disseminated disinformation.

Once Ford was installed as president, having never been on a presidential ballot, selected by the man who would seek his pardon, he fired much of Nixon’s staff in what was known as “the Halloween Massacre.” Don Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, a position he resumed under the Bush II administration, and Cheney became the youngest Chief of Staff ever at age 34. The unelected president then appointed George Bush head of the CIA, in case you were wondering who really took office after the silent coup known as Watergate.

The people of the United States to this day believe that the resignation of President Nixon was a low point for him morally, but a triumph for our democratic system of checks and balances. We were told that the system worked, that those who do not follow the law were removed from office by those who do, and thus our nation could begin to heal.

Maybe we even believed it for a while.

Our government remains in shadow by the very systems that are put in place to shed light on such issues; education and news media. Those who question the official story are labeled “conspiracy theorists” and maligned for seeking to understand the inner workings of this country of ours.

Like the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, we were told that we just wanted to move on. To facilitate this healing, we had to forgo a thorough and painful investigation and any consequences for the guilty parties and their accomplices.

Not much has changed in 50 years.

By pardoning Nixon and all involved, Ford nullified all future investigations going back to the Kennedy assassination and what Nixon called “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.” It is the most obvious evidence of the ascendancy of a shadow government in the United States; an unelected man, J. Edgar Hoover’s lapdog on the Warren Commission replacing high level cabinet members with inside people.

It strains logic to believe that Ford, a man who could not walk on his own two feet without famously falling down, made these decisions on his own, the biggest political stooge of all time.

We were told this was a time of healing, when it was the biggest cover-up of all.