Sunday, June 19, 2005

Memo Minder

A couple of readers of this site have sent me links to sites that suggest the Downing Street Memos are forgeries or fakes. The "evidence" of this appears to be from reports in news items like this one that the copies circulating are not originals...

The eight memos all labeled "secret" or "confidential" were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals. The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Okay, since that "senior British official" is anonymous, I wouldn't trust that endorsement, in and of itself. But as I understand it, these alleged memos are not, like the infamous Dan Rather letter, the work of one dead person who sent it to another dead person. In this case, the memos were written by and circulated among many folks who are very much alive and able to deny their authenticity. If the documents are fakes, one of the named recipients ought to get up and say so. My guess is that the "senior British official" is one of them responding when the AP reporter called up and said, "Hey, did you get copies of these?" It's hard to believe that they weren't asked before any newsperson risked embarrassment by reporting on them.

• Posted at 2:08 PM · LINK

Strip Sleuthing

Dan Tobias does some sharp detective work on the photo posted in the previous item. One of the signs makes reference to "Wednesday, November 27." In the sixties, Wednesday only fell on that date in 1963 and 1968, Dan notes. I'm pretty sure the Pzazz show wasn't open in '63 but was in '68, so that fixes the year for us. So does the fact that the sign advertised a boxing match with "Mac Foster." MacArthur Foster, a heavyweight boxer from California, turned pro in November of '66. Good work, Dan.

• Posted at 1:34 PM · LINK

Vegas Visions

I love old pictures of Las Vegas, especially ones in which you can read the marquees on the casinos. They give you some idea of how wonderful that place must have been, once upon a time.

This photo, which I'm guessing is from some time in the mid-to-late sixties, has a lot of information if you look closely. The Silver Slipper, which ain't there no mo', is offering a show called The Wonderful World of Burlesque with performances at 10:00 PM, 12:30 AM and 2:45 AM. The time clock was different back then. I don't know the last time any Vegas hotel had a regular show that started after 11 PM. (The Luxor currently has a show called Midnight Fantasy. It starts at 10:30 PM.) The $1.57 "World Famous Buffet" at the Silver Slipper was open 'til midnight so you could chow down late, then go catch the 12:30 AM burlesque show, which was probably a pretty good one. The lead comic then might have been either Hank Henry or Tommy "Moe" Raft, both of whom were Minsky's veterans who were said to be among the greatest. Johnny Carson, when he played Vegas back then, never left town without seeing whichever of them was then working.

Also while you were at the Silver Slipper that evening, you could have strolled by the lounge and taken in a "Dixieland Singalong" with George Rock. I'm assuming that's the same George Rock who previously played trumpet for Spike Jones and sang on many of his records, usually doing a baby-like voice, as in "All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth." If so, I'd sure like to have seen him perform.

At left in the pic, you can see a little of a marquee for a show called "Pzazz." That's at the Desert Inn, and it was said to have had the best-looking showgirls on The Strip. The Desert Inn ain't there no mo', either.

Those two shows would probably have made for a very full, fun evening. But if that wasn't enough, you could have gone across the street to the Frontier — which is still there, though probably not for long — and seen the offering in their showroom. The headliner was Phil Silvers, probably with Leo DeLyon as his sidekick and accompanist. And it looks like his opening act was Vic Damone. These days in Vegas, you rarely even get an opening act and when you do, it's always someone you've never heard of before. Vic Damone was a pretty big star back then and it was not uncommon for one big star to open for another. Anyway, those three shows must have offered an awful lot of entertainment for relatively little money, and you didn't even have to get in a taxi.

• Posted at 11:09 AM · LINK

Follow-Up

The other day, I linked to a funny Daily Show spot about the invoking of Hitler in political discussions. Bill Sherman makes a salient point about that spot.

• Posted at 9:54 AM · LINK

Also From the E-Mailbag...

From Mike Kozlowski comes this message about an earlier post here...

I'm a daily reader of your site, and I've been following your Deep Throat posts with some interest. Although I'm a registered Republican, I agree with you for the most part — Mr. Felt did the right thing. He should be regarded, to a great extent as a hero. He exposed, quite literally, "high crimes and misdemeanors," and I most certainly do not believe that he had any plans to profit from it in the future. (Frankly, I don't believe he's the one planning to profit from it now, but that's another story.)

My problem — such as it is — is in his apparent motivation at the time. By all accounts I have seen, there was a considerable personal motivation due to his being bypassed for promotion at the FBI. And there have been some stories in recent days pointing out that at one point he was placed in charge of the hunt for — of all people — Deep Throat. Again, without denying that his actions were instrumental in removing a criminal from the Presidency, that's where I think some people start to get a little uncomfortable. I think the best way to summarize it is that he did the right thing — but for some of the wrong reasons.

Please don't misunderstand — I wouldn't want to change history and not have Mr. Felt come forward; God alone knows what he and the reporters and (in truth) the politicians on both sides of the fence in those days saved us from. I'd just feel a bit better about it had Mr. Felt turned in his FBI badge and then walked up the steps at the Capitol to testify before the Select Committee. Hope this helps explain the misgivings some of us have.

I think there's been a lot of "spin" out there trying to tar Mr. Felt, a lot of it from folks like Gordon Liddy, Pat Buchanan and Chuck Colson, who have been trying for years to sell the idea that their boss, Mr. Nixon, was unjustly ousted from the presidency. (It's amazing how many times lately Liddy and Colson have appeared on interview shows without anyone bothering to mention that they went to prison as an indirect result of the man they are now criticizing. Think that might have a little something to do with their outrage at the guy? Just a little?)

The "spin" they and others have been trying to impose is that Felt leaked tons of confidential information to Bob Woodward. Well, maybe he did...but we don't know that. That's speculation. There's no law against an FBI man talking to a reporter, even in a garage at 3 AM. We know very little of what Felt imparted and it may not have been raw FBI files, as some have suggested. Woodward says "Deep Throat" rarely volunteered information and that he functioned mainly to confirm or deny what the reporters' investigations had uncovered. The conversations quoted in All the President's Men are pretty much in that vein. Unless Woodward gets into more specifics in his forthcoming book, that may be all we'll ever know about what Felt leaked to him.

Another bit of "spin" they're trying to sell is Felt as operating wholly because he was ticked off at not getting a promotion. That sounds exaggerated to me, and I seem to recall that many FBI officials were upset when L. Patrick Gray was appointed as Acting Director. A government agency like that is supposed to operate roughly on succession from within, and Nixon had instead installed not only an outsider but one who was widely viewed as a marionette. Let's remember that Gray is the guy who presided over the Watergate investigation by destroying physical evidence that could have implicated presidential aides. He also made sure that Nixon's aides were briefed on every step of the investigation into the possible criminality of...Nixon's aides. Felt probably believed he was entitled to the job — which he was — but the primary anger may well have been over the fact that it went instead to someone who was there to turn the FBI into a slightly more legitimate version of Nixon's plumbers. Again, we don't know for sure what was on Felt's mind and shouldn't accept the G. Gordon Liddy version of things.

There are things that unsettle me about Mr. Felt's actions but I don't think he should have turned in his badge and then gone in to testify before the committee. For one thing, the committee didn't exist when he started meeting Woodward in the garage, nor was there a Special Prosecutor yet. Somehow, I don't think taking the matter to John Mitchell would have resulted in a thorough investigation.

If Felt's mission was to make sure the abuses of the Nixon boys came to light — especially with regard to the FBI — then he may have felt his job was finished once a Special Prosecutor was appointed and the hearings were convened. (Felt left the FBI about the time both those things occurred.) One could speculate that he didn't quit his position before that because he didn't want to leave Gray unchecked. Also, from all reports, Felt was largely running the bureau's non-Watergate activities and doing a good, important job in that post. As I think we've seen in many years of Washington Watching, quitting one's position of power is a very good way to marginalize yourself and to lose your effectiveness. How many former members of the current Bush administration have we seen testify against current policies and not make much of an impact?

Actually, the more I think about it, the less important I think Mark Felt was to Watergate. Can anyone name one sizzling revelation that he imparted to Woodward and Bernstein that impacted the case? I think the biggest one cited in All the President's Men was that one or more of the Nixon tapes had suspicious gaps...a fact that would have come out anyway. The book details how the reporters obtained and confirmed the important stories they did break, and I think D.T. is only cited for confirmation.

I'll be interested in what Woodward has to say about Felt's motives, and also whether "Deep Throat" was happy with how things turned out. Felt may turn out to be less honorable than I think, but I'd like to make that judgment based on something more than we have. Maybe he did it all because he had delusions of being Mark Twain, and wanted to be portrayed by Hal Holbrook.

• Posted at 1:15 AM · LINK