For William F. Buckley, it's personal:
On January 5, 1973, Howard Hunt, an old friend and my sometime boss in the CIA, came to see me, accompanied by one of his daughters (my goddaughter, as it happened). He told me the appalling, inside story of Watergate, including the riveting news that one of the plumbers was ready and disposed to kill Jack Anderson, the journalist-commentator, if word came down to proceed to that lurid extreme.I took what I thought appropriate measures. I do not believe Jack Anderson's life was actually imperiled, but meanwhile, in an adjacent theater, Mark Felt, posing as an incorruptible agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was advancing his own drama. And now he wants some money for it.
I have no love for Richard Nixon but this seems to be the smartest take on it: heroes pierce a villain's heart from the front. Face the man who promotes his convictions, for profit or for loss, against the other man, who slides them under a door; and you find that it couldn't possibly be a match. A shame that Firing Line is long off the air, Mr. Buckley is long since retired from public life and recently divested from executive commentary in National Review, and Deep Throat past one enfeebling stroke. If he could be on the televised receiving end, Mr. Felt's secondhand canonization would not last much longer than his abruptly and artificially shortened interview.