'The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn’t what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat’s identity.'
These are the words of George Friedman, founder and CEO of respected American private intelligence site Stratfor and author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.
It's an interesting allegation, as we discovered this week that the FBI and American Justice Department officials discussed whether to remove Donald Trump from office using the 25th Amendment on the ground that he was incapable of discharging his duties.
The political struggles between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President John F.Kennedy were, of course, also hugely important and very murky.
The political struggles between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President John F.Kennedy were, of course, also hugely important and very murky.
Hoover and Nixon appeared to be the best of friends and allies
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politics, though, they had long been on opposite sides of some the most
fundamental questions of governance. Hoover believed in the administrative
state—in the power of independent bureaucrats, divorced from politics, to
serve the public good. Nixon, by contrast, was someone who hated
the bureaucracy and believed that loyalty and voter control offered
the best hope for effective government. For more than two decades,
personal friendship and ideological sympathy papered over those differences.
After Nixon’s election as president, that tenuous compromise fell apart. When
Hoover died in May, 1972, he left behind an executive team led by Felt that
was primed to question and resist the Nixon administration’s initiatives.
Watergate might best be viewed, especially in its earliest phases, as a struggle
between the president and a bureaucracy that he could not control.
In that struggle, neither side looked entirely as one might expect. Hoover
often played the civil libertarian, arguing against a concentration of power in
the executive even as the FBI conducted its own covert operations. Nixon
himself appeared less like an imperial president than like an extraordinarily
weak one, struggling to hold on to power and to force federal agencies to
accede to his will. One of the most striking aspects of his relationship with
the FBI is how seldom Nixon had the upper hand. At nearly every point
where Nixon and Hoover found themselves in conflict, Nixon lost dramatically,
the elected official giving way to the wishes and desires of the autonomous
bureaucrat. Nixon’s founding of the Plumbers intelligence unit, often
cited as the ultimate example of presidential hubris and overreach, grew in
part out of frustration with his inability to control the FBI.
Even today, Watergate remains known primarily as a high
point of investigative journalism, one of the few
triumphal moments of a 1970s liberalism in decline. As it turns out,
the most mythologized of the Watergate actors was a conservative
intelligence officer who had far more in common with Richard Nixon
than with his liberal enemies. Felt cooperated with Woodward not to
preserve the American constitution or to limit the imperial presidency
but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.
Ultimately, the discontent and public outrage unleashed by Watergate
helped to change the FBI much as it transformed the relationship between the
president and Congress, and the public’s attitude toward the state as a whole.
By 1975, Hoover’s autonomous bureaucracy, like the imperial presidency, was in
freefall, a casualty of congressional committees determined to rein in executive
power. In that sense, the story of Watergate, like so many great historical dramas,
is a tale of unintended consequences. In the effort to preserve the Bureau’s
autonomy and save its reputation, Hoover and Felt helped to destroy them.
Beverly Gage
Deep Throat, Watergate, and the Bureaucratic Politics of the FBI
https://yalechess.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Gage-Watergate.pdf