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

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Thursday June 09, 2005 16:04

by redjade

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

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?