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'All The President's Men' - Watergate DVD Easter Eggs?

category international | arts and media | news report author Thursday June 09, 2005 16:04author by redjade Report this post to the editors

Recently I rented 'All The President's Men ' for the umpteenth time....
water.jpg

Recently I rented the 1976 movie All The President's Men ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074119 ) about Watergate with Dustin Hoffman, as Carl Bernstein, and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward.

This movie is an old favourite of mine - not only does it illustrate why Watergate was a crime but the journalistic process of uncovering the crime. I have seen the movie a number of times but wanted to see it again since the world now knows that 'Deep Throat' was Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI.

Would there be clues in the movie?

Short answer, yes. Or rather, with 20/20 hindsight vision that we have now, yes.

We know from the film that he is high ranking and we see Deep Throat warn 'Woodstein' their phones are tapped and may be in personal danger. And we also learn that the Intelligence establishment is involved in Watergate through out the ranks.

This gives us a peek into the possible motive of why Mark Felt 'betrayed' his President and the system he served for so long - there was no other place but a free press for him to go to end the abuses or bring justice.

Not in the movie, but now that we know who Deep Throat is, we see other connections.

Mark Felt was leading COINTELPRO-type operations against the US Left and was also involved in illegal break-ins himself - searching homes of Lefties without warrants and so on. Felt was later charged with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of American citizens in 1978. And in 1981 Reagan pardoned Felt and his co-Conspirators.

In the Americas today Liberals are saying Felt is a hero and Conservatives accuse him of treason, Lefties outside the Mainstream Media bubble are realising they were also a victim of the man who brought down Nixon.

So why did Felt rat on his President?

My own rather uneducated guess is that gained some sort of conscience when he saw the COINTELPRO machine that he helped to manage redirected inward towards America's Two-Party System - like a snake eating its own tail. Or maybe he saw that Nixon's drug and alcohol fueled paranoia would wreck the system he served - and since the system had been 'hacked' by Plumbers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Plumbers ) from the top and couldn't self-rectify without public exposure?

Wikipedia offers over 20 possible candidates for who Deep Throat was ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_%28Watergate%29#Other_suspected_candidates ) including many reasons why Felt would *not* be Deep Throat.

Watching 'All The President's Men' again for the umpteenth time I could see how it could be Felt - but in the case of the DVD maybe Occam's Razor was an Easter Egg ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(virtual) )

'When multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred.' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor )

In the Special Features section of the DVD it offers a history and speculation of who Deep Throat might be - first on the list was Mark Felt.

Easiest place to hide is out in the open?

Mark Felt first on the list
Mark Felt first on the list

water2.jpg

water3.jpg

author by redjadepublication date Thu Jun 09, 2005 16:31author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA
By JIM HOUGAN
As anyone who marched in the Sixties knows, these were secret and unconstitutional counterintelligence programs targeting the Left and a handful of white supremacists. As head of the FBI's Inspection Division, it was Felt's responsibility to maximize the effectiveness of the program in the field. Lest there be any doubt about this, it should be emphasized that Felt's brief was not to ensure that anyone's civil liberties were protected, or even that the law was adhered to, but to make certain that Hoover's attack on the anti-war movement ran smoothly.

http://www.counterpunch.org/hougan06082005.html

- - -

Mark Felt and the Power of Myth
By Alicia Shepard
The Hollywood Deep Throat is credited with offering the famous sage advice to Woodward: "Follow the money." In fact, those words were made up by screenwriter William Goldman -- a fact that even surprised even Woodward, who over the years had come to think they were written in his book.

http://tinyurl.com/bt23n

- - -

Watergate Weighs on Today's White House
Los Angeles Times
By Peter Wallsten

For the current president, Watergate reinforced a set of feelings that already ran deep in his family, said Peter Schweizer, co-author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty."

"They have always believed that secrecy and privacy were important for leadership, because they allow decisions to be made without fear of leaks or outside influences," said Schweizer, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

To the Bush family, Watergate was "a personal failing by Nixon, not an institutional failing," Schweizer said. "Their view is that weakening the executive was the wrong solution to the problem."

As the revealing of Felt as Deep Throat became a kind of political Rorschach test — with some liberals celebrating the FBI's former No. 2 official as a hero for spilling his secrets and some conservatives branding him a villain — several people noted that President Bush's first public words on the matter drew attention to Felt's relations with the press.

"I'm looking forward to reading about it, reading about his relationship with the news media," Bush said, though he also noted that he did not think it appropriate to express an opinion on Felt's place in history.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20050607/ts_latimes/watergateweighsontodayswhitehouse

author by :-)publication date Thu Jun 09, 2005 16:57author address author phone Report this post to the editors

check out "the house of spirits" the dramatisation of Isabel Allende's "casa de los espiritus", set in an unspecified south american country at the turn of the last century it charts the drama of a family, whose daughter loves the peasant leader rebel, and whose head is the ranching senator, who herds in a military dictatorship who will torture his own daughter, and when he protests they point the days of his oligarchy are gone and his daughter had a child with the rebel, whom in a hollywoodesque finalé he brings to the canadian embassy and asylum.
cast:-
Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons
Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, Vanessa Redgrave.
director Bille August 1993.

author by redjadepublication date Thu Jun 09, 2005 17:29author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Naomi Klein compares the soon to be released (by court order) Abu Ghraib photographs to Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers and Col. Mathieu to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

→ Naomi writes:
' When the next batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib appear, many Americans will be morally outraged, and rightly so. But perhaps some brave official will take a lesson from Col. Mathieu and dare to turn the tables: Should the United States stay in Iraq? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.'

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0607-21.htm

. . .

→ The Pentagon's Film Festival
A primer for The Battle of Algiers.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087628/

→ The Battle of Algiers
Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041010/REVIEWS08/410100301
'Col. Mathieu does his job well. His chart of FLN cells has squares that are gradually filled in until, with the final defeat of Ali and three others, trapped in their hiding place, he declares victory. The FLN has been eliminated. Two years later, the film notes, "for no particular reason that anyone could explain," the uprising began again as mobs poured out of the Casbah and overwhelmed the police. In 1962, the French granted Algeria its freedom.'

→ Col. Mathieu in 'The Battle of Algiers'
script: http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/scripts/The-Battle-of-Algiers.htm

The result is that in the last two
months, they have reached an average of
4.2 assaults per day, including
aggression against individuals, and the
explosions. Of course, the conditions of
the problem are as usual: first, the
adversary; second, the method to destroy
him ... There are 80,000 Arabs in the
Casbah. Are they all against us? We know
they are not. In reality, it is only a
small minority that dominates with
terror and violence. This minority is
our adversary and we must isolate and
destroy it ...

author by redjadepublication date Thu Jun 09, 2005 18:05author address author phone Report this post to the editors

http://www.nixonfoundation.org/Research_Center/Nixons/speeches/Resignation_Speech.shtml

btw, the resignation speech plays in the background as Brad and Janet get lost on the country road on the way to Dr. Frank-N-Furter's castle in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (made in 1975).

author by redjadepublication date Sat Jun 11, 2005 14:25author address author phone Report this post to the editors

''Erlichman revealed that a contact of his in the Justice Department had told him that Felt had to testify before a Grand Jury in 1975, and struggled with the direct question of whether he was Deep Throat before the U. S. Attorney let him off the hook by saying he didn't have to answer the question. Felt then rushed to make a phone call, and Erlichman's contact heard directly from Woodward that this call was made to Woodward. Erlichman, who had believed that Felt couldn't be Throat because of the issues involving what Felt could have known, was thus convinced that Felt had to have been one of Woodward's sources.''

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/06/colodny-and-erlichman-and-felt.html

author by redjadepublication date Sat Jul 02, 2005 16:03author address author phone Report this post to the editors

For more than 30 years, Watergate sleuths from Nixon White House official John Dean to University of Illinois journalism professor Bill Gaines pointed out reasons why W. Mark Felt couldn't have been "Deep Throat," the most famous anonymous source in U.S. history.

Felt said he didn't smoke, but Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward said Deep Throat did. And Felt was no longer the No. 2 man at the FBI when Deep Throat gave Woodward a key piece of information. How could Felt have known anything that important?

[....]

Felt may not have been a "regular smoker," Woodward writes, but he could have been the type of person who lights up a cigarette "in times of immense stress." Regardless, Woodward repeats that Felt did smoke during some of their clandestine meetings.

Related Link: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/2005-06-30-deep-throat-book_x.htm
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