A hero? Perhaps. Also possible: He was an FBI man with an axe to grind against Nixon because he didn’t get the top job at his agency after J. Edgar Hoover’s death. He used the Washington Post not because he wanted to reveal the “truth” but in a classic petty score-settling vendetta — in which he represented not the forces of progress and change, but the forces of Hooverism. Only in Felt’s case, he didn’t merely threaten to destroy elected politicians using classified FBI information — he actually went ahead and did it.