Mary Laney is a Craven Opportunist

Few things in life fill my heart with as much acid hate as seeing Mary Laney’s toothy visage peering out at me from the Commentary pages of the Sun-Times. Her insipid grin means S-T readers like me are in for another round of meandering, disconnected logic and ultra-conservative sensibility. Reading Mary Laney one gets the impression she walked into a North Side library one day in 1949, fell through a time hole, and just recently managed to claw her way out into the bright sunlight of the future.

You can draw your own conclusions by browsing her collection of columns, but her June 13 item is a real gem. Her point is that W. Mark Felt, recently revealed as Deep Throat isn’t a hero because he had a personal interest in bringing down the Nixon administration—essentially fucking his new boss who fucked him out of a promotion. Instead, Laney calls Felt a “vengeful opportunist” for using his position as the No. 2 man in the FBI to leak information about wrongdoing in the White House to local reporters, eventually bringing down a president who brought White House corruption into the Modern Era. Nixon also passed over Felt to head the Bureau following Hoover’s death, a job Felt believed was his by all rights, seeing as how he had been Hoover’s supplicant for years.

“It’s always disappointing to get to the end of a mystery novel and find out that the plot was not ending in as exciting a way as you had envisioned,” Laney writes. “So it was with learning who was ‘Deep Throat’ after 30 years of wondering.”

Then, in an attempt to explain why Felt is not a whistleblower, she relates an off-the-wall anecdote about when she used to work at a Chicago radio station and a reporter there let the higher-ups in New York know that the station manager was using station money as his own personal bank account. No names named, of course, because that would be Wrong. But the reporter dude is a whistleblower hero to Laney because he did the Right Thing at great personal risk. That, then, is the definition of a whistleblower for Laney.

Felt, meanwhile, doesn’t measure up, primarily we are to assume, because he had motivation other than doing the Right Thing and he didn’t go through Proper Channels, such as a special prosecutor or a grand jury.

Laney’s reporter hero-stud probably figured he was going to lose his job one way or another. Either the station manager would run the place out of business or he’d be fired for reporting the wrongdoing. It’s also probably safe to assume the reporter in this case thought the station manager was a real asshole, and flipped him off silently with both fingers every time the manager walked by.

What’s the fucking point here? Of course Felt was looking out for his own interests. But he was never appointed FBI director. So if that was his goal he screwed the pooch there. Is it possible he was motivated simply by a pure hatred of Richard Nixon and wanted to see the pig roast in a pit? Sure. But we’ll have to wait for that big book deal to bear fruit before we learn what his true motivation was, and why he chose Woodward as opposed to a special prosecutor or a grand jury. And even then we might not know. Have you seen pictures of this guy on the news? He looks like he thinks he’s in the library with Mary in 1949. There’s nothing there, behind the eyes, I mean. My suspicion is that the guy’s family, once they found out he was Deep Throat, saw the cartoon dollar signs in their eyes and figured it was time to cash in before dad died. If they’d waited, Woodward would have had the story all to himself, and the book and movie deals, too.

So what’s my point? I don’t much care what Felt’s motivation was. And I don’t much care that he went to the press as opposed to a grand jury or special prosecutor. He obviously had a relationship with Woodward and trusted him to handle the material the right way. I’m a realist and I understand that sometimes people commit good acts almost by accident in the course of looking out for themselves. Robert Moses, New York’s master builder and a first-class bastard in his own right offers perhaps the best summation of my feelings on the subject of Mark Felt: “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

In closing, Laney’s labels—and the prominent lack of one label—say as much about her myopic view of the world than anything. There are four action figures in Laney’s story: The station reporter, Felt, the station manager and Nixon. The reporter is a “hero.” Felt is a “vengeful opportunist.” In describing the crooked station manager, Laney says, “I’m talking about a man with an evil greed who almost got away with the worst actions I’ve seen.”

Really? The worst actions she’s seen? The station manager?! What about Nixon? He was possibly the most corrupt presidenet in modern history, yet he escapes without a label, and we are left to presume, without judgment in Laney’s wide eyes.