Every now and then, retired Secret Service agent Larry Newman finds himself talking about old times to students at Colorado State University. Their ignorance of history never ceases to amaze him.
“It floors me,” he said. “I ask them what state John Kennedy was assassinated in. They don’t know. You mention Watergate, and they think it’s a heavy-metal rock band.”
So it’s easy to see why a bunch of paid liars, convicted felons and apologists from the Nixon administration are working overtime to try to discredit W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat.
It’s their chance to distort the truth once more for a whole new generation.
If you didn’t live through that era, it’s hard to imagine how sinister, craven and disrespectful of the Constitution those White House insiders were.
Even James Prochnow, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig who worked on Nixon’s defense team in 1974, said his proudest accomplishment was “resolving matters of constitutionally historic proportions” peacefully.
He was not exaggerating the crisis at that time.
Newman wasn’t working in Washington during Watergate, but he had plenty of contact with Nixon, Bob Haldeman and the other scoundrels.
When he was working in San Francisco, somebody (he won’t say who) asked him to break into the editorial offices of Ramparts (a notorious lefty periodical) to steal a copy of the edition due to hit the newsstands the next day.
“It had an article – God knows how the staff picked this up – that was supposed to be defamatory about Hubert Humphrey,” Newman explained. “I told them they were crazy as hell and wouldn’t do it.”
When he was assigned to Chicago, he had to deal with the outrageous behavior of the people who were hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President (affectionately known as CREEP) to impersonate demonstrators when Nixon came to town to campaign.
“They hired them to dress badly, behave badly and yell at the president to make the public think the anti-war demonstrators were all (jerks),” Newman said. Then, when they’d break the law, the CREEP creeps wanted the Secret Service to look the other way.
“We never gave in to the pressure,” he said. “We arrested them. We didn’t care. We said, ‘They broke the law; you get them out of jail.”‘
Newman said he respected Nixon personally.
“I thought he was a good man who listened to bad advice – frequently, very frequently,” he said.
But agents like Newman risked their lives to protect him regardless of what they thought of him personally because of their profound respect for the office of the president.
Still, they were hardly oblivious to what was going on.
“It was bothersome,” he said. “We thought the actions we saw being taken were taking us another way, a way which was contrary to the Constitution, and it was just very disturbing.”
Newman said he got only a glimpse of what was going on during Watergate, but “I always knew there was something bigger – like a genie in the bottle with horns.”
Prochnow said the atmosphere in Washington was “electric and all-consuming.”
“The subject of Watergate consumed 99 percent of all conversations for months,” he said. “I can’t think of anything like it since.”
Across the country, everybody talked obsessively about the president’s burglars, plumbers, covert operators and his staff of intimates who worked night and day obstructing justice and deceiving the public. It’s not hyperbole to say the very future of the democracy was at stake.
It was in this climate of fear that Felt and others risked their careers and possibly their lives to reveal the truth.
“I think Felt did a good thing,” Newman said. “It took a lot of guts to do it. It was the right thing.”
So, for the sake of our kids and their kids’ kids and history, I’m with Newman. Felt must be remembered for what he really was: a genuine patriot.
A hero.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
