Blago Stalks Nixon

On my hunt to find photographs of Deep Throat and Richard Nixon, I happened upon a most unusual story. While vacationing in California in 1980 with a friend, Rod Blagojevich, the disgraced former governor of Illinois, camped out in front of Nixon’s house in San Clemente, until the former president emerged. Nixon agreed to give an autograph, and Blago’s friend quickly snapped a shot. Notice that Blago is posing while Nixon seems unaware. The background appears to be the interior of a building. Looks like Nixon may have invited them inside.

ajh

Conrad Black’s Latest: Nixon Testifies for Deep Throat

W. Mark Felt, left, with reporters in Washington in 1980. Felt and Edward S. Miller, right, were fined $8,500.

Like Ben Stein, I find Conrad Black’s writing enjoyable and fascinating. Black’s latest, at National Review Online, is a prime example. He writes succinctly about leftist bias in the media.

One story he recounts, which enthralled me, is about Richard Nixon testifying during a 1980 trial on behalf of Deep Throat, real name Mark Felt, a key man who helped bring about Nixon’s downfall.

The most egregious occurrence of this sort of thing in recent years was the saga of Deep Throat in the Watergate affair. In 2005, he identified himself as Mark Felt, former senior official of the FBI. He was duly lionized as one of the heroes of the Left, and the whole Watergate business was replayed again. What was almost entirely unmentioned in the mainstream national liberal media was that when Felt and an FBI colleague, Edward Miller, were accused in 1980 of criminally violating the privacy of members of the urban-terrorist Weather Underground by authorizing break-ins in their homes, Richard Nixon, although he suspected Felt was Deep Throat, offered to help them pay their legal fees and volunteered to testify on their behalf. They had the decency to decline, saying that they doubted Nixon would be helpful before a largely African-American jury in Washington, D.C. Not to be put off, Nixon required the prosecutors to call him, though he made it clear that he would be supporting the defendants. He appeared on Oct. 29, 1980, amid demonstrators outside the court and hecklers within, who were forcibly removed by U.S. marshals at the judge’s order.

Under constructive cross-examination by defense lawyers, Nixon made a strong case for “warrantless searches” and pointed out that in his first year as president there had been 40,000 bomb scares, and 3,200 bombings that killed 23 people, injured hundreds, and did $20 million of property damage. He defended the conduct of Felt and Miller as necessary to defend the lives of the innocent. They were convicted anyway, but Nixon successfully lobbied incoming President Reagan to pardon them, and sent them champagne and congratulatory notes when they were pardoned. Felt in his memoirs made no mention of this, or of his status as Deep Throat, and when he came out of that closet in 2005, his coronation was not sullied by reference, in the major media, to Nixon’s determined help to his chief accuser. The irony alone should have made it a compelling story. But it was ignored, not to say stifled.

AJH