Foul 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, everything that came to his attention through the fish-eye lens. Felt wanted to know everything about the traffic of dollars to and from the Committee to Reelect the President, and everything about the the activities of everyone associated with the White House, from the attorney general down to the plumbers.

As evidence accumulated of wrongdoing and crime, he reported not to the director of the FBI (his immediate superior), not to the Justice Department, but to the two journalists. Bob Woodward is thoughtful enough to have recorded, the day after the news about Felt broke, his first meeting with Deep Throat back in 1970, two years before the Watergate break-in. There they both were, waiting in the White House, Woodward to deliver a message from the chief of naval operations, the assistant director of the FBI on a mission of his own. "I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes I introduced myself. 'Lieutenant Bob Woodward,' I said, carefully appending a deferential 'sir.' "'Mark Felt,' he said." Mark Antony, meeting Brutus, deserved no greater headline in history.

Such things happen. On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me. He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme.

I took what I thought appropriate measures. I do not believe Jack Anderson's life was actually imperiled, but meanwhile, in an adjacent theater, Mark Felt, posing as an incorruptible agent of the FBI, was advancing his own drama. And now he wants some money for it.