“Nixon’s Empire Strikes Back”

The unveiling of the identity of “Deep Throat”, Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI, seems to confirm the version according to which the story of the Watergate case represents the victory of lone journalism and its mysterious source. In fact, the issue of knowing who was “Deep Throat” masked the real problem: what was “Deep Throat”. It certainly was a secret FBI operation against Nixon who threatened the bureaucratic positions of its leaders.
Nixon’s big plan consisted in concentrating executive powers in an imperial presidency, politicize bureaucracy and invoke national security as a flag to wage partisan warfare, organize purges, and build a large majority base. These political intentions were confirmed by William Safire in his memoirs and by Nixon himself in his. Today, the policy of George W. Bush goes even beyond what Nixon dreamed. The president places himself above the law, organizes a purge within the CIA, makes the Justice Department end with the separation between the Church and the State, suspends the scientific analyses by the Environmental Protection Agency and submits our diplomacy to the Pentagon.
It is not surprising that the three architects of this policy began their career during the Nixon administration (Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney), as well as one of their collaborators (Karl Rove). They silenced the Senate and the press and, what is worse, they turn the media into their accomplice, as it happened with the New York Times and the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
In the middle of all this, the unveiling of the identity of “Deep Throat” is only nostalgia.