in memory of deep throat

A hero died yesterday, (even if he wasn't a hero.) W. Mark Felt was an FBI guy. As Deep Throat, he may have had selfish or even petty reasons for exposing Presidential corruption but ultimately, he did expose it to Woodward and Bernstein and he did resist the orders of President Nixon and for that, he dies an American Hero.

As an aside, I sure do miss Nixon. Today after the release of so many hours of taped conversations, he seems to hail from a simpler time. I won't go so far as to say the Bush administration is too smart to tape themselves presumably for posterity but they have clearly learned from Nixon. For that matter I am sure Ronald Reagan learned from Nixon as if he had not, we would by now have evidence that he did know all about the Iran-Contra affair.

In any case, Felt's death got me to thinking about similar, whistle-blower style heroes. In pop culture there is a saying, "Snitches get stitches," which is to suggest tattle-tales get injured. This is a backwards idea. While we would all teach our children not to be the playground narc, telling on their friends for petty issues, we should all view the Mark Felt's of the world as heroic. If not for Felt, worse things than the public not knowing about Nixon's immoral behaviors might have come to pass. Nixon might have served out his full term. He might have expanded his illegal wiretapping program perhaps even to a point of gaining such an advantage over political adversaries as to seriously damage our democracy.

So who else has acted as Felt acted?

• Scott McClellan - McClellan is the closest thing we have to someone who has turned on the Bush administration and frankly, considering the level of corruption therein, it is surprising more have not come forward. (Perhaps there are pleasant surprises yet to present themselves.) McClellan wrote a book entitled, What Happened, in which he spoke of deception in the run-up to the Iraq war and claimed to have been mistaken in giving the White House the benefit of the doubt. While Karl Rove and others have derided McClellan for not speaking up at the time, he is to be lauded for speaking up eventually. The President should not govern as if in a permanent campaign just as he should not lead the country into an unnecessary war for his own reasons so if McClellan says he gained greater perspective upon exiting the White House bubble, I believe him and appreciate the fact that he threw off the credo of the old boy network and was willing to speak the truth, (even if it was not as damning as it might have been.)
• Dr. Jeffrey S. Wigand - Russell Crowe portrayed Wigand in The Insider, the film about the 60 Minutes expose of the tobacco industry, which garnered seven Academy Award nominations including one for Best Picture. Wigand talked to 60 Minutes and revealed the tobacco companies had engaged in manipulation of the addictive nicotine in their products. Without Wigand's revelation, tobacco companies might still be engaged in a campaign of denial, claiming nicotine to be void of any addictive properties. Wigand was harassed for speaking up and even received anonymous death threats. Laurence Tisch, then head of CBS, exerted his influence to alter the original broadcast of the 60 Minutes story in November of 1995, which illustrates just how difficult it truly is for a hero of Wigand's nature to be heard.
• Jason Giambi - Jason Giambi is the credible Major League Baseball player to stand up and admit he used steroids as well as Human Growth Hormone. His admission was important in exposing to the public the lies of so many others in baseball who never admitted to the truth and in fact, lied and lied and lied on the subject. While this issue may not be as important as President's acting corruptly, Americans still do not appreciate being lied to even as it relates our sporting records and statistics, and this exposure has likely saved the lives of some kids who have become better informed about how unhealthy and even deadly steroids are.
• Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins - Cooper and Watkins exposed the financial corruption scandals at Worldcom and Enron respectively.
• Daniel Ellsburg - Ellsburg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Those papers revealed to the public that the government had knowledge, early on, that the Vietnam war would not likely be won, and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed that high-ranking officials had a deep cynicism toward the public, as well as disregard for the loss of life and injury suffered by soldiers and civilians. These are precisely the reasons heroes who expose corruption and the betrayal of the public's trust are so important.

There are many more whistleblowers and exposers of corruption but these are a few worth mentioning and appreciating in honor of W. Mark Felt, a man who died yesterday and who did the country a great service by revealing corruption at the highest level.