Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Further Medical Notes

(Reprinted from the issue of June 9, 2005)

Trouble at both ends: last month foot surgery, this month a minor stroke. No plans yet for next month’s medical crisis, but at this rate I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

Honest, friends, I’m not trying to make medical history, not even family medical history. I hadn’t even stopped to reflect on how many members of my own family had suffered strokes before I had my own. Both parents and both my mother’s parents had had them. That should have told me something!

My own stroke was barely noticeable. My younger son Mike, though, saw that something was wrong with me and called the doctor, who after a quick examination sent me back to the hospital. There tests on the old noggin confirmed the suspicion.

Mike had been tipped off by the news of another stroke in the family. Two weeks earlier, his big brother Kent in Ohio had had one too, leaving him partly crippled at age 38 (though he’s recovering well). Needless to say, it’s much easier to bear your own afflictions than your child’s. My firstborn, so handsome and healthy all his life, suddenly unable to walk without a cane! My nightmare. Even now I can hardly believe it.

Mike and the two girls, Vanessa and Chris, agreed not to tell me about it while I was still recuperating from the foot surgery. Kent wound up telling me himself when he phoned me in the hospital to wish me well after my own stroke. Even then he made light of his condition and told me — practically ordered me (he has always been a strict son) — not to worry about him.

I seem to be bouncing back all right; my speech is no longer slurred, and more often than not my fingers hit the right keys when I type. My army of therapists finds my improvement encouraging, and friends are rallying round, God bless them. And I thank you all for any prayers you can spare.
 
Olivier and the Old Testament

One of the problems of convalescence, of course, is occupying the mind while the body is confined and idle. Happily, I’ve rediscovered an old recording of Laurence Olivier reading from the Old Testament.

The great actor was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and did he know how to read Scripture! If you think he was pretty good with Shakespeare, wait until you hear what he could do with the King James Bible.

I never knew how thrillingly beautiful the Psalms could be until I heard Olivier’s majestic delivery. Though he was most noted for his physical magnetism in the theater, not for his voice, he brought amazing vocal power to his dramatic readings of the biblical narratives as well.

I don’t know whether the set (on six Epic/Legacy compact discs) is still available, but if it is, I urge you to grab it.
 
The End of the Story

One of Washington’s great mysteries has finally been solved. Mark Felt, 91 (and ailing after a stroke!), has been revealed as the murky source Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein nicknamed “Deep Throat” in their book All the President’s Men, recounting their sensational reporting of the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. At the time Felt was the Number Two man at the FBI and, some say, chafing after having been passed over for promotion.

The revelation came not from the Post, but from a magazine, Vanity Fair. Felt himself had decided to step forth at last. Ironically, he had been the recipient of a presidential pardon from Ronald Reagan, long after Watergate, for one of his own legal transgressions.

People under the age of 50 may hardly remember all the Watergate uproar or understand what it was all about. To me it always seemed overblown anyway; Nixon’s conduct, if not admirable, was no more scandalous than that of Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Franklin Roosevelt. But he was the target, or victim, of a powerful new mythology.

People in high places were corrupt! They lied to us, then tried to cover up their crimes! But fortunately we had the press, heroically ferreting out the truth, and vindicating the people’s right to know, through investigative reporting!

A new mystique of journalism was born, with Woodward and Bernstein — “Woodstein” — as its chief symbols. Their book was filmed with two of Hollywood’s hottest young stars, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, underlining the glamour of it all. Hal Holbrook played the unknown informant who now turns out to have been Mark Felt.

In those days, speculating about his identity was Washington’s great guessing game. Everybody took a stab, but few got it right. Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post weren’t talking, or even hinting. “Confidentiality of sources” was sacred, and they’ve honored it scrupulously ever since, for more than 30 years!

Woodward went to the top at the Post, where he is now an editor (as well as the author of many best-selling books), while Bernstein’s career has more or less dribbled off.

Meanwhile, Nixon and most of the other principals have died. Only Chuck Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, and a handful of others are still visibly around, having made new careers. H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman (“the Berlin Wall”), John and Martha Mitchell, Archibald Cox, John Dean, Howard Hunt, Leon Jaworski, John Sirica, Rosemary Woods, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and other leading figures in the great story are gone and/or forgotten.

Even the cliches and catchwords of the era have faded — “twisting slowly in the wind,” “modified limited hangout,” “third-rate burglary,” “a cancer growing on the presidency,” “Saturday night massacre,” not to mention the silly habit of tagging every scandal with the suffix “-gate.”

The press, though still powerful, has lost much of its prestige, having had too many scandals of its own to remain synonymous, in the public mind, with integrity.

And yet as remote, quaint, and even baffling as it now may seem, the Watergate era was, and still is, a formative moment for this generation, for better and worse. Insofar as it contributed to skepticism about politicians, it was all to the good; but it also gave the press a frightfully swollen head.

In the end, it hardly matters whether Felt’s motives were noble or vengeful; either way, he helped terminate presidential immunity to critical scrutiny.


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Joseph Sobran