Title

Who Are the Good Guys? The Legacy of Watergate and the Tangled Webs We Weave

Abstract

This article examines the astounding revelation that Deep Throat, the anonymous source that brought down the Nixon Presidency, was Mark Felt, the man who ran the FBI during the Watergate Scandal. Was Mark Felt a hero or a villain? Thanks to the recent publication of Bob Woodward’s The Secret Man in combination with historical case law, we now have more historical evidence about what motivated Felt and how he reacted to his own legal misfortunes. This article examines this record and shows that categorizing Felt along the hero/villain continuum is not an easy task, but argues that this type of historical analysis is vitally important to questions of what we should tolerate and expect from our public officials.

Disciplines

Communications Law | Criminal Law | Criminal Procedure | Law and Politics | Law and Society | Legal Biography | Legal History | Legal Profession

Date of this Version

September 2005