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Sunday, February 06, 2005
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WAS THIS MAN DEEP THROAT?
this story perplexed me for two reasons. Firstly, I'm something of an avid reader on the Nixon presidency. My library includes about 50 books on Nixon, his administration and Watergate. There are very few Nixon or Watergate scholars that I haven't at least heard of. Yet, Adrian Havill is a new name to me. The second cause for confusion is that Mr. Havill's theory is a complete fantasy.
Mr. Harvill, in reviewing the recently released notes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, has come to the conclusion that former President George W. Bush was Deep Throat. Previously, Mr. Harvill believed that Deep Throat was a composite of several sources, even though Woodward and Bernstein denied this as far back as 1976.
Mr. Harvill supports his theory with the following.
1) Havill said he began to suspect Bush when his president son, who dislikes the press, gave Woodward an unusual seven hours of interviews.
So? President Bush hasn't followed in his father's footsteps in very many areas. For example, the first President Bush refused to enter Baghdad in February of 1991 and later wrote an entire book explaining why.
That the President sat down with Woodward isn't surprising. Woodward seems to get the information anyway, and it is accepted wisdom in Washington that it is better to co-operate with him and get your spin on the story than not.
Woodward's books are also widely read. It stands to reason that being a part of them could be a tactic in the President's running for history. The fact that the book would come out a full 18 months after the operation took place was also helpful in preventing leaks. Playing nice with Woodward is smart politics, not evidence that his father was Deep Throat.
2)The elder Bush had motivation to dislike Nixon, who had urged him to leave a safe congressional seat for an assistant Secretary of Treasury position and hinted he would replace Spiro Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Nixon reneged, and Bush `"was given the thankless task of heading the Republican National Committee in 1973," Havill said
Whether there was motivation for Bush to dislike Nixon is immaterial. There is no evidence that he did. Even if there were true, it wouldn't matter. George H.W Bush is the ultimate company man. He holds loyalty at a premium. Even his harshest critics concede that. His personal feelings have never undercut those he served.
As evidence of this, I point to his relationship with Henry Kissinger. Bush and Kissinger hated one another in the early Seventies. Yet not once did Bush undercut Kissinger in public or private. Why would he do so to the president?
Furthermore, during the pertinent period, Bush was chairman of the RNC, which Nixon ensured was a dead end. Nixon was a centralizer. Just as foreign policy was moved from the State department to Kissinger's NSC office, so was politics. President Nixon had so little faith in the RNC that his re-election campaign was run entirely by his hand picked people at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP.) It was CREEP that instigated the break-in that created Watergate. Had Nixon had some faith in the RNC, there probably wouldn't have been a Watergate at all.
3) Bush was United Nations ambassador in New York from 1971 to 1973 but came to his Washington home on weekends. Seven of the eight Deep Throat/Woodward meetings were on weekends.
And? It has already been established that Bush was frozen out on foreign policy by Kissinger when Bush was UN ambassador, and was frozen out of political strategy by the White House when he was at the RNC. Even if you could prove that Bush was sleeping in Woodward's lower bunk, that still doesn't prove that he had access to the information he needed to be Deep Throat. If Bush was frozen out of the information that he needed to execute the duties of the offices he held, why would he be privy to the administration's darkest secrets?
4)Bush, who later became CIA director, had intimate knowledge of Washington. ``This is a guy with deep political contacts from way back,'' Havill said.
Again, so what? Senator Barry Goldwater, who was a presidential nominee, had even more impressive political contacts and he didn't know about Nixon's personal culpability until the week Nixon resigned.
5)Both Woodward and Bush are Navy men and Yale graduates.
Yeah, and President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. So what? At this point, Havill is just grasping at straws.
One will also notice that as vice president and president, George Bush never once co-perated with Woodward on any of his many books during the period. The senior Bush, to this very day, refuses to be interviewed by Woodward. Why would that be?
Other than being implausable, Mr. Harvill's theory is uninteresting.
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