I once complained that Deep Throat didn’t go to prison. I wasn’t to learn what I’d done for several decades, though.

When Mark Felt—not Henry Kissinger, or Alexander Haig, or L. Patrick Gray, or any one of a number of other suspects—was revealed three years ago to be Deep Throat, the man who helped bring down Nixon, the first thing I thought was—”Wait a second! I know that name!”

And I did, but not from a Watergate context. It’s because I sent the following letter to the White House on April 20, 1981:

Dear President Reagan:

I must write this letter to strongly protest your recent pardoning of W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, both of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of whom were convicted in a court of law of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans in the early 1970s.

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, we, the victors, introduced the important Nuremberg Principle—”I was only following orders” was determined not to be an allowable defense for the commission of a crime. With your pardon you have canceled our this important principle, telling employees of the United States Government, in effect: “Go ahead and do what your bosses tell you. Don’t bother your head about whether it’s moral or not, or whether it’s legal. Just do it. If you do something wrong and you’re found out, someone will come along with a pardon to haul your ashes out of the fire.” And you have done just that, sir, like a Mafia don springing his faithful henchmen.

This is supposed to be a democracy—one citizen, one vote—and no man, not even a President, should be allowed to overrule the wisdom of a jury’s democratic verdict with a capricious pardon.

I must strongly urge you not to make similar misuses of your pardoning power in the future.

Sincerely yours,

Scott Edelman

I know, I know. Not only was the tone of my letter over the top, but its message was unlikely to be heard. Plus, letters like these— of which I wrote many in the early ’80s to various elected officials—probably got me an F.B.I. file. But at the time, it seemed important to let the emperor know that he wore no clothes.

If anyone had told me back then that someday we’d have a president who’d make me long for Reagan—or even Nixon—I’d have called them mad!

Anyway, farewell to Mark Felt. Whatever your other sins, it turned out that you deserved kudos after all.