News stories about newly prominent individuals are like the tides — if the individual in question has done something good, the acclaim quickly rushes in, and, then, soon after, the inevitable followup story appears: Hero Not As Heroic As Some Thought.

So I was able to predict with some certainty that the revelation that W. Mark Felt, a former FBI top official, was “Deep Throat” — the source who gave Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein compelling information about obstruction of justice and dirty tricks in the Nixon White House — would begin with a celebration of the guy and quickly follow up with questions about his motives and ethics.

I’m not uninterested in ethical issues, but when the conduct in question led to an unalloyed good — the publicizing of the immense political corruption and misbehavior in the Nixon Administration — does it really do us any good to underscore the extent to which Felt had mixed motives? Hardly anything good that anybody accomplishes is done out of 100-percent-pure motives. So, who cares if Felt, in addition to being appalled at the efforts to politicize the FBI, also may have had a grudge about not being appointed to the FBI Directorship to replace J. Edgar Hoover? Indeed, who cares if he came forward, 30 years later, as part of

a family impulse to cash in a little on the role he played? (Felt himself is now 91.)

What ought to matter to us most is that he did the right thing. We don’t need to canonize Felt in order to recognize and honor him — a flawed human being, perhaps, as we all are flawed, but one who took immense risks to make sure that the truth was told and that the corruption in our institutions of government was rooted out, at least for a while.

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