Washington ? The outing of Deep Throat rousted some of the Nixon era’s best haters from their crepuscular calm and set them off in Full Throat to denounce Mark Felt as a traitor. But what about the Hater in Chief? What would Richard M. Nixon have made of this orgy of pent up sound and fury?

Would he have mouthed the same fulminations coming from Pat Buchanan and other embittered acolytes set on fire by the news that an FBI official was The Washington Post’s prize source?

I talked with Nixon only once, a year before his death in 1994, so I don’t want to guess. Instead, I called Bill Safire, the writer who once worked for Nixon and who channeled the former president’s voice from the grave so effectively in op-ed columns.

Hearing anything on that frequency, Bill? Pause. Sound of throat clearing. And then in a gravely baritone comes a pitch-perfect recreation of that self-pitying, self-justifying rumble of the man who divided my nation and even my family with his paranoia and ambitions.

“Well of course I suspected it right from the start, didn’t I, Bill?” said the ghost speaking into Safire’s telephone. Felt “just wanted to keep Hoover’s domination of the White House and Capitol Hill intact, while I was determined to reassert executive authority over that nest of power.

“All these hypocritical liberals forget how they felt about what the FBI was up to then. The right thing for him to do of course would have been to come to me and tell me what he had discovered. Or he could have gone to Congress. But not to The Washington Post, Bill. Harrumph. Mumble.”

Safire, a conservative libertarian contrarian colleague whose retirement earlier this year left The New York Times op-ed page a less literate, less surprising and less newsy arena of enlightenment, chafed at the idea of Nixon as Hater-in-Chief.

“I was on his side. So make that Counter-Hater in Chief,” Safire argued, suggesting subliminally that Nixon believed in persecuting only his persecutors.

“Nixon didn’t hate Hoover. But he probably didn’t fear him either. They were both vigorous anti-communists, so Nixon could hold his own against Hoover. But he couldn’t fire him in that first term.”

The Nixon who went to China couldn’t fire J. Edgar Hoover? “Well, I never knew if Nixon thought Hoover had something on him in all those files or not. It was always clear that Hoover would die with his boots on,” said Safire, who left his post as a White House speech writer before the Watergate scandal erupted.

Sooner is always better than later in my business. But the disclosure of Deep Throat’s identity and its renewed validation of the judicious, monitored use of anonymous sources by news gatherers comes at an auspicious time for journalism and for the nation.

Like a 5 o’clock shadow, a stubble of the vindictiveness and abuse of power that marked the Nixon era sprouts again as national security fears dominate the political landscape.

You can see that stubble growing in the nonsensical federal prosecution by Patrick Fitzgerald of Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine for shielding sources in the Valerie Plame case. And the FBI’s attempts to break and then use Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin in national security sting operations look to be truly Nixonian in character and method.

There is a difference in the present context of such excesses. President Bush does not have the same baggage or temperament that Nixon brought to the White House. But neither does Bush do enough to counter the demagogic assaults on the independence of the judiciary – without which the Watergate conspiracy would not have been broken – or to spotlight and punish abuse of power when it occurs in his administration.

To end on a personal note, the Deep Throat retrospective season would not be complete without a mention of the finest of the many fine examples of leadership that Ben Bradlee has given us at The Washington Post over the years.

Many of us have probably begun to forget some of the details of the scandal, which broke while I was overseas for the Post. But I still remember Bradlee’s first orders to the news staff as White House heads started to roll as a result of Watergate.

“Don’t gloat,” this brilliant editor instantly ordered. “Do not gloat.” And so not even my mother – whom I happened to be visiting and who happened to be weeping at the news – ever saw a smile cross my face on Aug. 9, 1974, the day that Nixon quit.