W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, is both a principled patriot and a no-good snitch.
That’s the assessment of former Colorado state Sen. John Andrews, who wrote speeches for President Nixon during the Watergate era.
“He was someone who believed the country and the Constitution were badly served by the president’s abuse of office,” Andrews said. “He was also a sneak and a snitch who was spying, and that’s distasteful.”
In the long run, Andrews said, the good of Felt’s leaks to The Washington Post outweighed the bad.
“Felt’s actions were to the net benefit of the country,” he said.
Former Colorado Springs resident Jeb Magruder, the only Nixon insider ever to state publicly that the president had known about the Watergate break-in from the beginning, said Felt “was a logical person to be Deep Throat.”
“He was No. 2 or 3 at the FBI. There were people at the White House who knew him,” said Magruder, who was Nixon’s deputy campaign director.
Andrews, a staunch Republican and former state Senate president, resigned as a Nixon speechwriter in 1973. In an interview with The Denver Post the following year, Andrews said he had become disillusioned with Nixon for not taking “moral responsibility” for his actions. As a result, he sent Nixon a memo urging him to “move quickly and dramatically to wipe the slate clean and begin anew.”
Andrews said at the time that White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig intercepted the memo, telling him later that it would have driven the president “up the wall.”
A few months later, disappointed with Nixon, Andrews resigned.
Looking back on the Watergate era on Tuesday, Andrews said that the times were complicated, but the lesson was simple.
“Political power is susceptible to abuse and must be monitored,” he said.
Despite all the grilling by investigators about his role in the events that led to the only presidential resignation in the nation’s history, Magruder said he was never asked whether the president knew about the planned break-in before it happened. In 2003, while he was living in Colorado, Magruder told The Associated Press that during a meeting with Attorney General John Mitchell on March 30, 1972, he listened as Nixon told Mitchell to go ahead with the plan to break in and tap the telephone of Democratic national chairman Larry O’Brien.
In August 1973, Magruder pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to defraud the United States and eavesdropping on the Democratic Party’s national headquarters.
Magruder, who is now a minister, served seven months in the Allenwood, Pa., prison camp.
On the news that Felt had been identified as Deep Throat, Magruder downplayed the role of Deep Throat, calling it a “literary device.”
“Deep Throat never told (Washington Post reporters Bob) Woodward and (Carl) Bernstein anything of real importance. We weren’t worried about their articles, which became the basis for their book. The real story was broken by Judge John Sirica when he was sentencing (Watergate defendants) G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord and the Cubans” who carried out the Watergate break-in.
Staff writer Karen E. Crummy can be reached at 303-820-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com.
Staff writer Mike McPhee can be reached at 303-820-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com.
