CORRESPONDING WITH NOAM CHOMSKY

I was so excited by my speculation about Mark Felt in the final paragraph of yesterday's post, that I just had to email Noam Chomsky and ask him what he thought:

Dear Professor Chomsky,

First off, I'm a great fan of your writing--you've been quite influential to me and my political and intellectual development these past ten years or so. For that, I am truly thankful to you.

Now, onto my question.

I've been recently re-reading a collection of interviews with you, Understanding Power, and in a weird instance of synchronicity I read a section titled "Rethinking Watergate." The synchronicity is, of course, because "Deep Throat" finally outed himself a couple of days ago. What was weird about it is that, in the book, you compare the Watergate scandal to the COINTELPRO scandal, noting that the FBI's misdeeds around that time were much, much worse than the third rate burglary of a Democratic Party office: Mark Felt, A.K.A. "Deep Throat," was the number two man at the FBI at the time, and was quite probably involved with the COINTELPRO misdeeds. Because the two scandals were exposed at around the same time, do you think that Felt's leaking to the press about Nixon was perhaps motivated in part by a desire to see the COINTELPRO story drowned out of the headlines by a Presidential scandal? I mean, it seems that this is the same kind of manipulation of the press in which the current White House engages all the time. Why wouldn't Felt have done the same thing? Of course, I know that many other factors were in play here, but this comparison you made with the FBI, and the fact that Felt was so highly placed in the FBI, has really made me wonder.

What do you think?

Thanks very much.

Ron

Lo and behold, he responded. Actually, I had a feeling that he would: several years ago after I showed a public speaking class that I was teaching the Canadian documentary film about Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (not to be confused with the Chomsky book with the same title), a student of mine sent Chomsky a letter and got back a reply pretty quickly--I think Chomsky takes his role as a political educator quite seriously, which includes responding to letters and emails. My good luck.

Here's Chomsky's response:

I doubt that COINTELPRO was in Felt's mind at all. He surely knows that the entire intellectual community, and the media, have completely suppressed the COINTELPRO story, as they did right away, because it reveals so much about state crimes. Watergate, a tea party by comparison, is safe. The reaction, near universal, teaches a very powerful lesson: the guiding moral principle is that you can do anything you like to the poor, weak, dissidents,... -- but you have to be very polite to the powerful. There could hardly be a more dramatic illustration, but we can be confident it will be kept rigorously in the shadows, as it has been for 30 years.

Noam Chomsky

So my speculation about Felt's motivations crash before they even get a chance to take off. Ah, well. I have to admit, however, that hearing from Chomsky is pretty darned exciting. And the point he makes is poignant: Nixon pissed off powerful people, including (but not limited to) the financial interests and bankers screwed by his abandoning of the Bretton Woods system of international economic management, so he had to resign in order to avoid impeachment; Felt pissed off powerless people, and is celebrated as a "hero" today.

Still, I wonder just what, exactly, motived Felt to leak the Watergate story to the press? Maybe it was a simple sense of patriotism, but if that's the case, it shows such a profound use of "doublethink" on his part that one has to wonder if we haven't all been living in 1984 since 1972.

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