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August 2005 · Notebook · Previous · Next   PDF

Moving on

By Lewis H. Lapham

He looked round for his gun, but in place of the clean, well-oiled fowling piece, he found an old firelock lying by him, the barrel encrusted with rust, the lock falling off, and the stock worm-eaten.

—Washington Irving

Having kept the secret a secret for thirty-three years, W. Mark Felt at the age of ninety-one emerged on May 31 into the sunlight of network television to say that it was he, Felt, employed in the summer of 1972 as associate director of the FBI but operating undercover as the notorious “Deep Throat,” who had set up the hit on the Nixon Administration. The news footage showed an old man in poor health waving from the porch of his daughter’s house in California, and on seeing him smile for the camera as if in hope of a long overdue welcome and reward, I was reminded of Rip Van Winkle in Washington Irving’s famous tale, asleep for twenty years in the Catskill mountains, awakening to find his gun rusted, his beard turned gray, the American Revolution come and gone. The sky was still blue, the birds still singing in the trees, but what was nowhere to be found was the world as it once existed in the minds of Van Winkle’s fellow countrymen.

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SEE ALSO: Career as Deep Throat; Political corruption; Press and propaganda; Truthfulness and falsehood; Felt, W. Mark; Watergate Affair, 1972-1974

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