Foul Felt.(Mark Felt)

NEW YORK, JUNE 3

MARK FELT has made it clear that he wants to cash in on this whole Watergate business, and why indeed not? It was thought for some 30 years that Deep Throat did as he did to preserve the honor of his country. Perhaps that was the precipitating motive of Mark Felt. But to agree on that point requires that you agree that getting Richard Nixon out of the White House was the supreme national concern, in which event it would have been okay to shoot him. What Felt loosed was a series of explosive newspaper stories which bound public opinion and overwhelmed policy-making and policy-makers. It is indisputable that Watergate doomed South Vietnam, and accounted for the Republican defeats of 1974 and 1976. It can certainly be argued that Mr. Nixon dug his own grave by making the mistakes he made.

Presidents do that all the time. They make fateful mistakes. But the judicial arbiters of history tend to come up with appropriate punishments. Monica Lewinsky came close to tossing President Clinton out of office. Yet it does not follow that because the president dallied with Ms. Lewinsky he should have been impeached and tossed out. Nixon's overreaction to the publication of the Pentagon Papers didn't mean that his mandate to govern was for that reason forfeited.

No, what ejected Nixon was the accumulation of crossed stories. It is well documented that beginning about November 1973 life at the White House centered on Watergate. The series of lies and evasions finally caught Nixon up in a direct lie taped by his own machinery. On June 28, 1974, Gerald Ford was on Firing Line and I asked him whether Nixon would successfully persevere. He answered that there was no doubt about the survival of Nixon as president. Six weeks later, Ford was sworn in as president.

Now Felt steps forward and says that it was he who in effect staged the end of the Nixon Administration. What he did was to report to Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, ...