Deeply disturbing. That’s the best description for the character assassination that is aimed at W. Mark Felt, now identified as the famous anonymous source called “Deep Throat.”

President Nixon’s crew of henchmen, tricksters, crooks and liars are pulling out all the stops to discredit a person who told the truth.

Felt has been called a traitor. He’s been blamed – in an op-ed appearing in the Wall Street Journal on June 2 – for the Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia and for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.

It’s amazing that this debate is even happening.

Nixon authorized criminal activities, he tried to cover them up, he paid hush money and used the full power of the U.S. government to punish his enemies and distort the truth. While Felt was telling the truth to The Washington Post, the president’s spokesmen were standing in the White House lying to the world.

Nixon is responsible for his own downfall. It was his actions, and the actions of his cohorts, that damaged the country and the presidency, not the information that was leaked, the stories that were written or the congressional hearings that followed.

Only a presidential pardon spared the former president from criminal prosecution after his resignation.

Felt was the No. 2 person at the FBI and helped to point the reporting tandem of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the right direction as they investigated Watergate for the Washington paper. His motivations were not entirely pure. He felt like he had been passed over for promotion by a corrupt president, who was capable and willing to subvert the law to further his own ambitions. At the same time, knowing that the attorney general, the top guy at the FBI and a host of other White House officials were in on the cover-up left Felt no real alternative to work within the system.

While much of the country recognizes the courage it took for Felt to act and considers him a hero, Nixon’s hitmen are out in force to denounce him.

G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson? Who are they to talk about Felt’s ethics? They’re felons who participated in the misdeeds that Felt helped blow the whistle on. At least indirectly, Felt helped put these guys behind bars.

The nation owes Felt, and the reporters and editors at The Washington Post, a great debt. It took incredible courage to stand up to the power of the president and to do what was right.