What I got out of Mark Felt this week

The orgy of commentary and journalism produced by the revelation that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat has been staggering — and mostly unproductive. The revelation that a key source for Woodward and Bernstein was the number two man in the FBI and a J. Edgar Hoover loyalist has produced a lot of bullshit — and in the case of Pat Buchanan, outright lies. So has there been any commentary of value to be gleaned from this revelation? I’ve seen two things worth reading — though both of them are only tangental to Felt’s coming out party. Surprisingly enough, they’re written by two people who probably don’t get along very well — David Brooks and Sasha Issenberg (click on this Noam Scheiber essay to find out why they don’t get along). Brooks does a great riff off of Bob Woodward’s first person account of how he first met and got to know Felt. This allows him to talk about the topic he covers so well — what aspiring young people do to get ahead:

Bob Woodward… was in the midst of the starting-gate frenzy. Places like Washington and New York attract large numbers of ambitious young people who have spent their short lives engaged in highly structured striving: getting good grades, getting into college. Suddenly they are spit out into the vast, anarchic world of adulthood, surrounded by a teeming horde of scrambling peers, and a chaos of possibilities and pitfalls. They discover that though they are really good at manipulating the world of classrooms, they have no clue about how actual careers develop, how people move from post to post. And all they have to do to find their way amid this confusion is to answer one little question: What is the meaning and purpose of my life? ….Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships. The most nakedly ambitious – the blogging Junior Lippmanns – rarely win in the long run, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites with little “Thought you might be interested” notes…. This is now a normal stage of life. And if Bob Woodward could get through something like it, perhaps they will too. For that is the purpose of Watergate in today’s culture. It isn’t about Nixon and the cover-up anymore. It’s about Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate has become a modern Horatio Alger story, a real-life fairy tale, an inspiring ode for mediacentric college types – about the two young men who found exciting and challenging jobs, who slew the dragon, who became rich and famous by doing good and who were played by Redford and Hoffman in the movie version.

As you would expect, one Junior Lippman takes the time to respond — but if you ask me, Brooks’ point has attracted too much attention for it to be dismissed lightly — see Elizabeth Bumiller and Tim Noah for more on this theme. Issenberg, meanwhile, has a great piece in Slate about how Felt’s revelations bring to mind an excellent Watergate movie — and it ain’t All the President’s Men:

Unlike the movie that made Woodward and Bernstein into matinee idols, the 1999 comedy Dick stripped Watergate of its cloak-and-dagger and left it in pigtails…. Superficially, Dick was a spoof on All the President’s Men. In place of the earlier film’s battle between two grand Washington institutions, Dick renders the White House and the Washington Post as sitcom offices. Heroic Woodward is played not by dashing Redford, but by Will Ferrell, with the halting inanity he brings to every role. But Dick was really a riposte to Oliver Stone’s 1991 epic JFK, which trolled every nook and cranny of Kennedy-assassination conspiracy. In exploring each little question raised by the events in Dallas (including many that are settled, in the eyes of every serious scholar), Stone seeks out the most abstrusely nefarious explanation possible…. Our disenchantment with Deep Throat follows a common American narrative: What begins as conspiracy is eventually reduced to camp. Dick sends up what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 identified as “the paranoid style in American politics.” The movie doesn’t make light of Watergate?the gravity of Nixon’s crimes isn’t questioned, and his young friends are shocked by his meanness, even if he doesn’t come across as diabolical?as much as it spoofs the narrative impulses that drew us to Watergate as a tale. Both Dick and the recent Deep Throat unveiling leave us to reckon with the dissonance of Watergate’s importance and its minor-league cast of characters. With JFK, Oliver Stone tried to invent a story that, in its sprawling scope, could be as big as the death of a president?a counterpoint to a Warren Commission version written in a language of narrowing: lone gunman, single-bullet theory. In Dick, both heroes and villains come only in size small: They are all central-casting buffoons.

Hmmm…. paranoid style in American politics infecting public commentary… yes, that sounds familiar. Well, at least Felt’s revelations will put the conspiracy meme to rest on this question. Oh, wait….