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Bamidbar 5765
by Rabbi Dr. Barry Leff
Congregation B'nai Israel
Toledo, OH
Thirty two years ago, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had
clandestine meetings in a Washington DC parking garage with a highly
placed source known as “Deep Throat.” Real cloak and dagger stuff—they
arranged meetings with signals like leaving a flowerpot in a particular
window, or circling the page number of a particular page of a newspaper.
Following tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered what has
come to be known as the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of
President Richard Nixon.
This week, after over thirty years of secrecy and much speculation over
who he was, Deep Throat identified himself as W. Mark Felt, number two man
at the FBI during those troubled times.
The press this week has been full of debates about whether Felt is a
scoundrel, a hero, or someone who did the right thing, but maybe not in
just quite the right way.
If you want to see an interesting example in the bias in news reporting,
take a look at the coverage of Felt’s revelation by CNN vs. the coverage
by Fox. In the Fox report you will find four or five quotes from people
saying he is a scoundrel, and one, from his family, saying he is a hero.
On CNN you’ll find several quotes saying he’s a hero, or at least that he
did the right thing, and one saying he’s a scoundrel.
Charles Colson told Fox News “The position Felt held in the FBI at the
time is "one of the most trusted positions in government.” He said even
though Felt likely thought he was acting in the country's best interest,
"the last thing you'd ever expect is for that man to go to the press so
'hero' is not the word I'd use" to describe him.”
Of course, despite being a born-again Christian Minister, “hero” is not a
word I would use to describe Colson either. He served seven months in
prison in 1974 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the
Watergate-related Daniel Ellsberg case, and he was indicted for his role
in the Watergate cover-up.
G. Gordon Liddy, another Nixon pal and Watergate conspirator told FOX News
that if Felt had concerns, he should not have taken them to reporters.
Liddy said "What you are ethically bound to do is go to a grand jury and
seek an indictment and not go to a single news source." Liddy is of
course a great person to talk about what one is ethically bound to do: he
served nearly five years in prison for his role in Watergate.
Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon’s speechwriter said “I think Mark Felt behaved
treacherously. I'm unable to see the nobility of the enterprise, sneaking
around in garages, moving pots around, handing over material he got in the
course of the investigation."
On the other hand, over at CNN, former President Bill Clinton said
“Ordinarily, I think a law enforcement official shouldn't leak to the
press because you should let criminal action take its course. But there
was some reason to believe he was right. He always felt ambivalent about
it apparently, and I think that's good," the former president said. "Under
these circumstances he did the right thing."
In an article in the NY Times, Floyd Abrams, a lawyer in a high-profile
case defending reporters’ use of confidential sources, said Mr. Felt had
behaved honorably. "Sometimes, adherence to pre-existing rules asks too
much of people," Mr. Abrams said. "In this case, Mark Felt served the
public enormously by breaking ranks and assisting in the exposure of
ongoing repeated governmental misconduct. I think he'll be remembered well
when the history of this period is written."
In an interview with the press Nick Jones said “The family believes my
grandfather, Mark Felt Sr., is a great American hero who went well and
above the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from a
horrible injustice. We all sincerely hope the country will see him this
way as well.”
So who’s right? Patrick Buchanan who said Felt acted “treacherously?” Or
Nick Jones who said he is a “great American hero?” What does Torah and the
Jewish ethical traditional have to say about whether Felt acted properly?
I was 18 years old and serving in the US Army (President Richard Nixon was
my Commander-in-Chief) in 1973 when the Watergate story was breaking. So
anyone much younger than me probably doesn’t have much personal
recollection of Watergate and what it was about. So before addressing
whether Felt did the right thing, I hope those older than me will pardon a
slight digression to explain what Watergate was all about.
Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States in 1968. He was
running for re-election in 1972.
The heart of the story starts early in the morning on June 17, 1972.
Washington DC police discovered five intruders inside the headquarters of
the Democratic National Committee. The burglars were busy adjusting
bugging equipment they had installed during an earlier illegal visit, and
photographing Democrats’ documents.
Two days later, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
(played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the 1976 movie) reported
that one of the five men arrested, James McCord, Jr., was on the payroll
of the Nixon re-election organization as a “security coordinator.”
At first it was not known whether these five guys were working on their
own initiative, or if others in Nixon’s organization knew about what they
were doing or authorized their activities.
In October, 1972—a month before the election—Bernstein and Woodward
reported that “During their Watergate investigation, federal agents
established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign
contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover
campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential
candidates and disrupting their campaigns.” If you learned about
Watergate in a history class, what you might remember is some guys broke
into the Democrat’s office to spy on them, the President knew about it,
but lied about it. Nixon and his associates’ activities were far worse
than just some simple phone taps, which would have been bad enough.
According to the October 10 article, some of the things the Nixon campaign
had been doing included “following members of Democratic candidates'
families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters
and distributing them under the candidates' letterheads; leaking false and
manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray;
seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens
of Democratic campaign workers.” Nixon’s Committee for the Re-election of
the President said the Post story was fiction and filled with absurdities.
The Post story contained specific, verified examples.
I find it somewhat amazing that despite the breaking of the scandal, Nixon
went on to win a landslide victory over Senator George McGovern in the
Presidential election in November. His popularity was widely boosted by
the announcement two weeks before the election by his then National
Security Advisor (later Secretary of State), Henry Kissinger, that “peace
was at hand” in the war in Vietnam. Apparently peace in Vietnam, and a
distrust of McGovern, who the Nixon campaign painted as a very radical
liberal, were more important to voters than the improprieties being
reported in the paper. Nixon distanced himself personally from the
charges against people working for him.
A few months later, in January, the first Watergate convictions came down
as two former Nixon aides were found guilty on charges of conspiracy,
burglary, and wiretapping. Another couple of months later, on April 30,
1973, Nixon accepted the resignations of three of his top White House
advisers, including the Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, and he fired
his counsel, John W. Dean III—the same counsel who the President had
charged with investigating the scandal. Talk of impeachment proceedings
against the President started to circulate.
In June, John Dean admitted that he spoke with Nixon about a cover-up
relating to the Watergate scandal at least 35 times. A month later it was
revealed that Nixon secretly recorded all of his phone conversations and
Oval office meetings. Nixon refused to turn any tapes over to
investigators.
In October 1973, Nixon fired Cox and abolished the office of the special
prosecutor. Attorney General Eliot Richardson resigned because he refused
to fire Cox. Talk of impeachment gained more momentum. A month later
Nixon gave his famous “I am not a crook” speech. In December the
subpoenaed tapes were shown to contain an 18 ½ minute gap. Nixon’s chief
of staff Alexander Haig said the gap might have been caused by some
“sinister force.”
In July of 1974 the Supreme Court rejected Nixon’s claim of Presidential
privilege, and insisted that he turn over all the tapes. The first of
three articles of impeachment was passed against him. In August, 1974,
Nixon resigned and Vice-President Gerald Ford took over.
It’s an amazing story of abuse of power, and hubris and lack of respect
for the law on the part of people entrusted with leading our country. An
ongoing legacy of Watergate has been a loss of trust in the government and
a certain tarnishing of the office of the President. Homage is paid to
Watergate by the fact that any White House scandal since then is called
“something-gate,” like the “Irangate” scandal of the Reagan
Administration, or the “Travelgate” scandal in the Clinton Administration.
In the middle of all this, W. Mark Felt was the number two man at the FBI:
intimately involved in the investigation, and very aware of efforts by the
Administration to cover up the truth. Felt could have resigned from his
job and gone public with what he knew. Felt could have kept his mouth
shut and done nothing. Instead, Felt contacted his friend Bob Woodward, a
young reporter at the Washington Post, and shared information from the FBI
investigation that was being kept quiet. The information Felt shared let
Woodward and Bernstein know where to go digging for more information.
They broke the story that the corruption went all the way to the top—and
brought down the President.
From a Jewish perspective, did Felt do the right thing?
There are those who say what Felt should have done is confront his boss,
L. Patrick Gray, the head of the FBI. This would be in keeping with
teachings in the Torah about rebuking your neighbor. Leviticus 19:17
commands us “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, you shall
surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin on his account.” The Talmud
tells us that the repetition of the word hochiach, rebuke, tells us that we
should even rebuke our teacher – or by extension our boss—if we see him
doing something wrong. So shouldn’t have Felt gone to his boss?
The problem here is Gray was appointed by Nixon—which was something which
disturbed Felt, because he felt he should have gotten the top job. But
more importantly, since Gray was a political appointee, Felt had good
reason to believe that Gray would feel beholden to Nixon, and would
protect him. It is very likely that Gray would not have listened to any
kind of rebuke from Felt—in fact Felt may reasonably have felt he would be
punished he if tried to rebuke Gray for the way the investigation was being
conducted. The Talmud also tells us that just as we are charged with
rebuking someone, we are also told NOT to rebuke someone if we know they
will not listen. In this case, it was reasonable for Felt to assume
rebuke would be pointless, and not to go to his boss.
Another option for Felt would have been to keep his mouth shut. Why did
he have to do anything about it all?
There are several principles in the Torah that say it would have been
wrong for Felt to do nothing. In Leviticus 19:16 we are told lo ta’amod
al dam rei’acha, do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood. When a great
wrong is being perpetrated we are not allowed to just sit around and let it
happen. The rabbis have expanded this verse to not only a concern about a
case where a life is threatened, but even to situations where a person’s
financial well-being are threatened. Clearly, at a minimum, livelihoods,
reputations, and careers were at stake in the Watergate situation. Given
the high level political implications, the future of the nation was at
stake. It would have been wrong for Felt to just keep quiet.
There is also a teaching in the Torah which says midvar sheker tirchak,
stay far from a false matter. Whether he wanted it or not, Mark Felt
found himself in the middle of a very false matter. If he did not do
something to stop it, he would have been complicit as a participant in a
grand-scale deception of the American people.
If we agree that Felt was obligated to do SOMETHING the question still
remains exactly what. Should Felt have resigned his position and publicly
gone to the press with his information, instead of leaking the information
to the press? Wouldn’t that have been the more “honorable” thing to do?
One question that is impossible to know is whether Felt would have been
able to accomplish what he did if he had simply resigned and gone public.
A resignation like that is the sort of thing that might have garnered
headlines for a couple of days and then been forgotten; he certainly would
have been cut off from access to any further information about the ongoing
cover-up.
The principle of lo ta’amod al dam rei’acha, not to stand idly by your
brother’s blood, does not require that you sacrifice yourself to save him.
If someone is drowning and you can’t swim, you don’t go out and drown
yourself trying to save him. You do what you can, throw a life preserver
or a rope, without endangering yourself. Felt was in his late 50s at the
time of Watergate. If he resigned, his career and livelihood would have
been over. He would have been a little old to start over in something
new. It is not unreasonable for him to protect his livelihood under the
circumstances.
Most of the public figures who have spoken out against the way Felt did
things in recent days are people who did jail time because of their
Watergate-related actions. As a viewer from CNN put it, "Saying he was
somehow dishonorable is like a bank robber attempting to get his case
thrown out by claiming the arresting officer had to jaywalk to cuff him.''
I looked at a lot of articles on the internet in preparing this talk.
Interestingly, I didn’t find any quotes, other than from his family, that
said outright, plain and simple, W. Mark Felt is a hero. Most were like
the Clinton quote I mentioned earlier: “well, I guess he did the right
thing.”
The Salt Lake Tribune said “He was a hero, though like others, not a
perfect one.”
Many articles point to his being passed over for the top job at the FBI as
being a big motivator—as if that somehow detracts from the fact, that at
great personal risk, he spoke up about a great wrong that was being
perpetrated by the highest levels of the US government.
Maybe we don’t like putting people on pedestals. Maybe we’re
uncomfortable with heroes. Pretty much all heroes have some kind of flaw.
Abraham didn’t stick up for Hagar and Ishmael when Sarah was bullying
them. Abraham passed his wife off as his sister, seemingly for financial
gain. King David had a general sent to the front so he’d be killed and he
could marry the widow. Yet we don’t make a big deal about their
imperfections—they were heroes.
In this week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar, there is a verse which says “these
are the generations of Aaron and Moses.” Yet the following section only
talks about Aaron’s descendants—it doesn’t say anything about Moses.’
Rashi picks up on this in his commentary, and explains that Moses is
counted as a father to Aaron’s children because he was a teacher to them.
This shows how exalted a teacher is.
And W. Mark Felt is a teacher to all of us. Forget what his motives were.
At the end of the day, he told the truth. He remembered that his real
loyalties were not to his job—not to his boss and not to Richard Nixon—but
to the people of the United States and our Constitution. He had the
courage to let the public know the truth at considerable risk to himself,
just as the prophet Jeremiah spoke the truth even when it got him in
trouble with the king.
Mark Felt IS a hero—he did the right thing. As the Salt Lake Tribune put
it, “The political dirty tricks of the Nixon campaign in 1972 were bad
enough, but the president's attempt to cover up the wiretaps, burglaries
and other misdeeds approached the tactics of a police state.” Those
misdeeds might never have come to light if Mark Felt had simply kept his
mouth shut.
May God protect the whistleblowers—those who have the courage to speak up
in the face of evil.
Amen.
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