Ben Stein bats for Nixon.
The famous Ben Stein excoriates the recently decloaked Deep Throat, Mark Felt. (*) Stein is terribly put off by how his old boss, Richard Nixon, was knocked off his pedestal by people telling the truth about him. Stein’s suggestion that deputy FBI director Felt should properly have had a higher loyalty to a foreign country is spurious. Felt swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States.
Even if it really were Nixon’s fall that directly led to communist darkness enveloping southeast Asia, as Stein suggests, it wasn’t Felt that brought the President down. The discrediting of Nixon and his subsequent swan dive into the mud pits of historical remembrance were all his own doing. It would have happened anyway.
It’s true that the Felt revelation is banal, and thus cause for popcorn throwing amongst the adolescents in the theater. Nevertheless, so it is with another recently revealed secret of the 70s, how Darth Vader went over to the Dark Side, and you don’t get much except appreciation for that. And so we see the advantage of writing fiction.