If only this were the whole of the matter. It's not. Deceit happens to have been a specialty of some previous presidents, especially Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. Many Nixon critics behaved as though Nixon had invented deceit in his castle laboratory and then flung it into an innocent world.

 Moreover, national crises went unattended on account of Watergate: stagflation; a growing scarcity of conventional energy sources; and most damagingly, in terms of human life, the fall of South Vietnam, whose protection post-Nixon America longer was willing to essay.

 Love or hate Richard Nixon (not many Americans fall in the first category), there's ample room for ambiguity in such a tale: the same ambiguity that oozes through the accounts of Mark Felt's perfidious patriotism -- or patriotic perfidy.

 Was Felt a hero or a common snitch -- indeed a lawbreaker -- for circumventing legal channels as he sought to get his story out? He may have been a bit of both. And what's to do about it at this remove, with Watergate 30 years in the past? There isn't much at all to do about it, except to listen and learn and try harder than ever to grasp the complexities of human nature and the constant need for the virtue of, yes, forgiveness.