Cancer Schmancer

There are very few things that keep me from going first to the puzzle every morning, which often happens at the expense of getting through the news. This morning, though, one of those things came along. It was the chance to read every detail the Times saw fit to print regarding the resolution of a decades-old mystery, one that had gone on for the large majority of my time on Earth. Woodstein confirmed it: “W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat.” What is a crossword puzzle other than a compact little mystery story played out on a 15x15 grid? Here was a mystery that had carried on for 15+15 years.

But what sad details they were, having less to do with the family’s apparent desire to beat Bob Woodward to the profits (“Mr. Felt’s daughter, Joan, spoke of the money it might make to help pay tuition bills for her children”) and everything to do with Felt’s original motive to leak to Woodstein in the first place, which was not to cure the cancer on the presidency as we understood it. After all, Felt himself was convicted for authorizing illegal break-ins to investigate the Weather Underground. No, we're left to conclude that what we have here appears to be a case of spite and/or an attempt to punish the president for grabbing power from the FBI: “Mr. Felt spent more than 30 years at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a protégé of its legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, and was bitterly disappointed after Hoover’s death in May 1972—a month before the Watergate break-in—that Nixon went outside the agency for a new chief.”

It’s enough to drive one to the crossword puzzle.