That Championship Season
From a review of a revival of That Championship Season by John Simon:
Another revival comes up short: Jason Miller’s That Championship Season. It’s about the twentieth annual reunion of a prize-winning small-town high-school basketball team….The play was impressive in 1972, when we had only one idiotic war instead of one around every corner and presidential scandals seemed safely buried with Warren Harding….The 1972 play feels in 1999 like our twenty-seventh reunion with petty sinners whose sins have shrunk further.
As it was with the 1972 play, That Championship Season, it is with that other 1972 play now in revival, Watergate: a reunion with petty sinners whose sins have shrunk further. But in the case of Watergate: the MSM is still living the myth, though Deep Throat himself has had second thoughts. Timothy Noah explains in Slate:
Why did Felt maintain his silence for so long? Part of the reason, I imagine, is that Felt knew his prosaic, bureaucratic-infighting motive was at least as strong as any moralistic desire to expose the truth about the crooks in the White House. That tarnishes Deep Throat’s luster a little. Also, Felt’s previous brush with national publicity involved his criminal conviction for bypassing warrants in his investigation of the Weather Underground. Ronald Reagan pardoned him, but it was a deeply painful experience, and Felt thinks the stress contributed to his wife’s early death. It would only be logical that he’d avoid the spotlight after that. Possibly, too, he could imagine that the press would note that Deep Throat shared with Nixon an enthusiasm for illegal break-ins.
But the main reason, I think, was that Felt saw his leaks as a betrayal of the FBI. Six years ago, I asked Felt (who at that point was still denying he was Deep Throat) whether, if he were Deep Throat, that would be so terrible. His reply:
It would be terrible. This would completely undermine the reputation that you might have as a loyal, logical employee of the FBI. It just wouldn’t fit at all.
But wasn’t Deep Throat a hero?
That’s not my view at all. It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.
So Mark Felt is an anti-hero in his own mind. Well, there are plenty of anti-heroes in the story, including, most notably, Woodward and Bernstein. These two have made a fortune off this one story, in 2003 even selling their papers to the University of Texas at Austin for $5 million. Meanwhile, Woodward said this morning on the Today show (link when available) that Mark Felt’s bedroom is his converted garage. As someone once said a long time ago: follow the money.
We won’t expect any self-awareness from the Old Media as they reflect on mythical glory days. Woodward and Bernstein have been canonized, and that’s that. But we remind you that it was not the sainted Mainstream Media that broke the crimes of Watergate; moreover, this has been known for three decades. Edward Jay Epstein from his Commentary article in 1974:
In any event. the fact remains that it was not the press, which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institution, of -government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath.
In the end, the difference between That Championship Season and Watergate is this: in the theatrical play, the flawed characters actually had won the championship; in the political play, the characters have been writing of their supposed heroism for so long that now they actually believe it.
UPDATE
Michael Ledeen amplifies our observations, as does Polipundit. Ledeen:
I sometimes lecture on “journalism,” and much of that talk consists of excerpts from All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein. In that book, they admit to a wide range of unethical and illegal behavior, from tampering with a grand jury to illegally obtaining and using private telephone records (a kind of private Patiot Act for the “Post”). Then I read from a section (pp. 184-192) in which they discuss an unhappy event. They had written that grand jury testimony had fingered Haldeman as a conspirator in “Watergate”. Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, had violently denied it. Woodstein went back to their sources, and concluded they had been deceived. The story was wrong. Then (pg 192): “The reporters said (to Bradlee, their editor) they were virtually certain that Sloan must not have given testimony about Haldeman before the grand jury. Woodward suggested writing that much, at least, and acknowledging their error.”
No way, said Bradlee…”Bradlee then turned to his typewriter…after a number of false starts, he issued the following statement: “We stand by our story.”
And there’s a footnote: “He was later to recall: ‘I issued two statement in that one year…Geez, what options did I really have? …I can remember sitting down at the typewriter and writing about thirty statements and then sort of saying, “F**k it, let’s go stand by our boys.” ‘ ”
Which is why I have no heroes in this saga…