Washington Decoded

The Nixon Precedent

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Nixon’s FBI: Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis
Melissa Graves
Lynne Rienner Publishers. 246 pp. $85

 

 

By James Robenalt

 

    Exactly one thousand twenty-five words comprise Article II of the Constitution, and most of them are devoted to how to select a president of the United States.

    The two hundred or so left over describe a president’s substantive powers. That the key phrase—“executive power shall be vested in the president of the United States”—has been interpreted generously is an understatement. It has become the basis for vast power since it confers unenumerated powers. By contrast, Article I, which governs the Congress, only vests all legislative powers “granted herein”—a limiting qualifier.

    Add sweeping clauses like “commander in chief,” and “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and you arrive at the dilemma posed in Melissa Graves’s new book, Nixon’s FBI, Hoover, Watergate, and a Bureau in Crisis. What are the limits of a president’s control over federal law enforcement, especially when the crimes at issue may involve the president in either his/her private or elected capacity? This issue, in turn, raises the question of the government’s power to surveil its citizens, including citizens who may be considered political dissidents and not seditious criminals. That question is at the heart of the present danger posed by domestic extremists or terrorists who have grown exponentially during the Trump administration.

    This makes Nixon’s FBI an important read.

    An assistant professor in the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, Melissa Graves started out to write about the fundamental conflict between the FBI’s duties, as the premier federal investigative agency, and the fact that it answers to the president while also investigating said president from time to time. Her focus was the Nixon administration, when this conflict was in sharper relief, owing to the Watergate scandal, than at any other time save for the past four years. Eventually her research encompassed the courageous FBI agents who pursued the Watergate investigation despite all the headwinds from higher-ups to constrict the search for the truth—including, as it turned out, a higher-up named Richard M. Nixon. Special agents like Angelo Lano, John Mindermann, Daniel Mahan, Paul Magallanes, and John Clynick are profiled in an important chapter about the investigation of the break-in by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. These agents are depicted, correctly,  as being many steps ahead of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. While Woodward and Bernstein are celebrated in history as the “intrepid” reporters who cracked the Watergate case, in reality it was the hard work of these FBI agents who simply would not be waylaid.

John O’Connor Jumps the Shark

 

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Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism
John O’Connor
Post Hill Press. 286 pp. $28

 

Read John O’Connor’s response to the review here.

Read Mark Feldstein’s reply to O’Connor here.

 

 

By Mark Feldstein

 

    Some people don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

    In 2002, John O’Connor, a San Francisco trial lawyer, got lucky. He discovered that a young acquaintance was the grandson of W. Mark Felt, the FBI executive long rumored to be “Deep Throat,” the anonymous Watergate source of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. O’Connor asked to meet the 89-year-old retired G-man and tried to get him to open up about his still-secret role in Watergate. But Felt had dementia and denied being Deep Throat: “An FBI agent doesn’t act like that.”

    Undeterred, O’Connor lobbied Felt’s daughter, who prodded the old man. Eventually, Felt relented after being persuaded that going public could “help raise some tuition money” for his grandsons. O’Connor revealed Deep Throat’s identity in a 2005 article for Vanity Fair and then spun his article into a 2006 book, A G-Man’s Life, which borrowed heavily from Felt’s 1979 memoir, ghost-written by Ralph de Toledano.[1]

    That would have been the end of the story for most people. But the whole exercise left O’Connor nursing a grudge against Woodward, and the litigator is now displaying it for all to see in a new book, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.

Nixon’s Overreach—and an Author’s

 

Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration
Ray Locker
Lyons Press. 339 pp. $29.95

 

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By James Robenalt

 

    Ray Locker’s book is a disappointment. He obviously invested a great deal of time reading primary documents and listening to presidential recordings, the kind of basic research that is critical to any insightful account of the Nixon presidency. Unfortunately, Locker then mixed primary source material with highly dubious secondary sources, thereby casting doubt on the integrity of the entire work.

    Nixon’s Gamble begins promisingly. Locker accurately describes Richard Nixon’s proclivity for secrecy and his divide-and-conquer strategy to marginalize institutions that he did not trust: the State Department, in particular, but also the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Nixon’s mishandling of these stakeholders caused an unprecedented reaction, particularly in the Pentagon. For more than a year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s liaison office at the National Security Council purloined documents containing information that was not being shared by the president and his equally secretive national security adviser.

    Little about this story of secret back-channels and severe institutional jockeying is particularly new, though Locker does a commendable job of pulling together the strands and putting it all in context. Nixon had good reason, of course, to worry about leaks and their impact on his bold but surreptitious initiatives with respect to China and the Vietnam war. The clandestine negotiations that led to the China breakthrough, and the back-channel meetings in Paris with the North Vietnamese, could have been endangered by an unregulated flow of information to the press. And, of course, there is nothing really unique about presidents keeping secrets, especially in the realm of national security. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt famously said that he never let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. Given that Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the national security advisor, were trying to end U.S. involvement in a war and simultaneously triangulate relations with the Soviet Union and China, they cannot be blamed for obsessing, to a degree, over the secrecy of their initiatives.

Nixon Reiterated

 

One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Tim Weiner
Henry Holt and Co. 384 pp. $30

 

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By Melvin Small

 

    Tim Weiner, winner of a National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes (2007), a history of the CIA, and a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, has turned his attention to Richard Nixon in the scathing One Man Against the World. Because of the continuing release of tape recordings, telcons, and other primary sources—a gift to historians that keeps on giving—Nixon books remain a flourishing cottage industry. Just this publishing season, Weiner has been joined by Evan Thomas (Being Nixon) and Irwin Gellman (The President and the Apprentice) who also promise new interpretations in part because of recently declassified or underused sources.

    Whereas Thomas’s biography is balanced and Gellman’s history of Nixon’s vice presidency tilts toward a favorable conclusion, Weiner’s view of Nixon’s presidency is a Shakespearean horror story of mendacity, criminality, and paranoia. It is well-written and often thrilling, but for many it will be overkill. Allowing the main characters to speak for themselves, thanks in good measure to the tapes, the author appears to have mined his sources, many of which have been released over the past decade, for the most inflammatory and shocking conversations. Indeed, virtually all of his endnotes refer to the rich collections of primary sources—he rarely cites secondary sources and there is no bibliography. (Disclaimer—I am one of those who enjoys seeing his books cited).

    Despite Weiner’s ostensible reliance on primary sources, and notwithstanding the publisher’s extravagant claims for the book, there is little or nothing that is new here. Most of his seemingly original findings have appeared elsewhere, though uncredited.

Naftali Reconsidered

 

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    His turn as director of the Nixon Library has given him

    credibility, but is it warranted?

By Max Holland

 

    Since late April, Reuters, the Orange County Register, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker have published articles lamenting the lack of a director at the Richard M. Nixon Library (RMNL) in Yorba Linda, California.[1]

    All the articles (excepting Jeffrey Frank’s slightly more nuanced New Yorker piece) have the same narrative, almost as if they were part of an orchestrated campaign. The uncommon delay in finding a new permanent director (going on three years) is the fault of Nixon partisans, so the story goes, who are holding out for a congenial person to rehabilitate the only president to resign in disgrace. And the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is being stymied in its admirable effort to present Nixon in an objective, unvarnished light.

    As proof, the articles reprise the conventional, heroic narrative about the tenure of Tim Naftali, who headed the library from 2007 to 2011. Naftali “presided over the installation of a new, historically accurate Watergate exhibit,” The Nation article said, which Nixon loyalists “vehemently objected to,” according to Reuters. That left Naftali “fiercely at odds with the . . . [Nixon] family and close supporters of the 37th president,” the Orange County Register reported. The Register also quoted Naftali to level the allegation that Nixon loyalists are consciously stalling so they can allegedly “write the text” for a pending $15 million renovation of the museum, which is the public face of the library, since most visitors to Yorba Linda do not use the archives. The Los Angeles Times article dispensed with a reporter and made these points in an article written by Naftali himself.

    As the late Alexander Cockburn liked to observe, “The First Law of Journalism is to confirm existing prejudice, rather than contradict it.”[2]

    There are serious issues up for debate here, not the least of which is whether presidential libraries should be shrines, places that debunk their namesakes, or something in-between. There is also the question of whether Nixon deserves special handling. Before considering such issues though, it might be well to reconsider Naftali’s tenure. As the cliché goes, there are two sides to every story—even one involving Richard Milhous Nixon.[3]

    In a widely-noted remark at Richard Nixon’s funeral service in April 1994, then-President Bill Clinton said, “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” Naftali was supposed to hasten and facilitate that day as the first NARA-appointed director. Yet the portrait of Naftali that emerges after taking a closer look at his directorship is not as flattering as the above clippings. The former RMNL director is skilled at public relations, knows how to use the press to advance a case, and has a talent for self-promotion. But through acts of commission and omission, he failed to enrich and preserve the historical record. In one particularly egregious instance, he even helped falsify that record.

Truth in a Lie: Forty Years After the 18½ Minute Gap

 

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By James D. Robenalt

    On the afternoon of October 1, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon and his chief of staff, Alexander M.  Haig, Jr., slipped away from the White House and went for a rambling, nearly two-hour car ride through the Washington countryside.

    Nixon and Haig left the White House because they did not want to risk anyone overhearing them talk about a sensitive matter. Or perhaps they feared that someone might use remnants of the White House recording system, though it was supposedly disconnected, to capture their words. Given all the leaks to the press, and the exposure of just about every administration secret up to and including the existence of the White House tapes, paranoia wasn’t entirely unjustified.

    Just prior to this unscheduled outing, Nixon’s long-time personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had come to the president in a panic. She breathlessly told him she had accidentally caused a four to five minute buzz on a subpoenaed tape she had been transcribing. And the recording appeared to be a crucial one: it encompassed meetings on June 20, 1972 between the president and his top aides, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, on what was Nixon’s first day back in the White House since the Watergate break-in, which had occurred three days earlier.

    Nixon told Woods not to worry, as he didn’t think the specific portion of the tape she accidentally altered had been subpoenaed. Still, he immediately called Haig, according to Nixon’s memoir RN, and told him what happened. The two men then left the White House for their impromptu car ride.[1]

    Two months after Woods’s private admission, the discovery of an 18½ minute gap on that tape caused a national furor, second only to the public’s reaction to the Saturday Night massacre. Public disclosure of a two-toned buzz or hum that caused the gap in conversation supercharged calls for impeachment and finally unraveled the landslide electoral victory Nixon had achieved just two years earlier. It left the political landscape scarred, even four decades later, and plagued by culture wars that persist to this day. Nixon’s term could not have ended in a more devastating way for the office of the presidency or the nation.

    Yet more than 40 years later, the infamous gap remains one of Watergate’s most enduring and tantalizing mysteries. Technological efforts to recover what was erased (or obscured by the humming noise) have all failed, although on fleeting portions of the tapes faint, almost ghostly, human voices can be detected. In 2009, it was thought that a forensic examination of Haldeman’s handwritten notes might reveal the substance of the conversation. That experiment by the National Archives failed too.

    Recently released testimony from Nixon himself just might hold the key to unscrambling what happened forty years ago. And it turns out that answering two of the three main questions about the gap—who caused it and why—not only solves most of a historical mystery, but is also critical to understanding Nixon’s downfall.

Watergate: The Director’s Cut

12 June 2012, The Daily Beast

Ben Bradlee isn’t the only one raising questions about All the President’s Men. Max Holland probes director Alan Pakula’s papers and finds more evidence of literary license. 

By Max Holland

    The New Journalism wave was cresting when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward published All the President’s Men in 1974. Yet the book, curiously, was not considered an outstanding exemplar. The two were hailed, rather, as New Muckrakers, befitting the emphasis on them as Washington Post reporters rather than Simon & Schuster authors.

    Affixing ATPM in the New Journalism firmament however, even at this late date, explains a lot about the book and the controversy it still generates 40 years after the “third-rate burglary” that brought down a president. Just last month, the revelation (in Jeff Himmelman’s new biography) that Post executive editor Ben Bradlee harbored a “residual fear in [his] soul” about the accuracy of some Deep Throat–related details in ATPM provoked a major media flap.

    The basis for evaluating ATPM against the backdrop of the New Journalism comes from an unimpeachable source: the Alan J. Pakula papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. This is mildly surprising because no one was more responsible than Pakula, director of the eponymous 1976 movie, for turning "Woodstein" into the heroes of a mythic Hollywood Western (albeit one set in Washington).

    Yet Pakula also sought to inject well-researched verisimilitude in his film. He obtained a heretofore unseen copy of Woodstein’s typewritten notes from a September 1972 interview with a key Watergate source. He interviewed Woodstein in 1975, as well as Harry Rosenfeld and Barry Sussman, the editors who directly supervised their work, and many others. All this occurred well before memories had become distant or gauzy. The Watergate duo had yet to become icons. Their recollections, and recollections about them, were not yet fully scripted.

    Read the entire article here.

All the President’s Editors

1 May 2012, The Daily Beast

New Questions About Deep Throat in All the President’s Men: Watergate Revisited

By Max Holland

    For several decades following the 1974 publication of All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have had to fend off critics of their bestselling account. For the most part, they have succeeded wildly, sloughing them off as ill-informed skeptics, untrustworthy revisionists, and plain sore losers.

    But now comes a criticism from perhaps the one person capable of putting All the President’s Men in its place by poking holes in the Deep Throat saga. That’s because the voice of dissent is Ben Bradlee, The Washington Post editor made equally famous by the book and eponymous movie.

    In a 1990 interview conducted by Barbara Feinman, who was then helping Bradlee compile his memoirs, the Post’s executive editor during its fabled Watergate coverage volunteered the observation, “You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat.”

    Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? ... and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage ... There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.

    Nothing akin to this sentiment appeared in Bradlee’s memoir, A Good Life, when it was published in 1995. The “residual fear” remark was discarded (an “outtake, Woodward would later call it), and the only discordant note Bradlee sounded was that in retrospect, he was “amazed” that he had accepted Woodward’s desire to keep Deep Throat’s identity secret from him. “[Given the high stakes] I don’t see how I settled for that, and I would not settle for that now,” Bradlee wrote.

    Read the entire article here.

Richard Nixon's Own Deep Throat

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The Washington Post’s supposedly best-kept secret during its Watergate coverage—the identity of its inside source—was no secret to Richard Nixon

By Max Holland

    When W. Mark Felt unmasked himself as Deep Throat, in May 2005, the ballyhoo was dampened by a distinct feeling of anticlimax. As the FBI’s number two man in 1972, Felt was the first real suspect: speculations that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s über-source appeared in print as early as 1974. And despite 30 years of denials, he never lost his status as the most likely leaker in most observers’ eyes. His eventual admission was less a thunderbolt than a confirmation of what was already widely believed.[1]

    Much more surprising is that the Nixon White House knew about Felt, with a degree of certainty far beyond mere suspicion, almost from the start. On  October 19, 1972, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, told the president that Felt was the Post’s primary source. This conversation was revealed in November 1996, when the National Archives released the so-called “abuse of governmental power” tapes.[2] In hindsight, it should have been seen as an important clue about Deep Throat’s identity. However, it received little attention, probably because it conflicted with the popular narrative of the scandal, which holds that Felt was both principled and incognito.[3]

   Haldeman, of course, turned out to be right, which begs the question: how did he know? The answer is that the White House had its own secret sources, including one who had access to The Washington Post’s inner workings. We might think of him as Nixon’s Deep Throat.

    Uncovering the identity of this Deep Throat is a thornier matter. While it was one of the lawyers working for or in proximity to the Post on Watergate-related matters, apart from that fact, it may be that nothing more definitive can ever be said. Even so, exploring the possibilities one by one helps illuminate how Washington worked then, and probably how it still really works. As Benjamin Franklin once observed about keeping confidences, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

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What Haldeman Knew

   On October 10, 1972, The Washington Post published what Woodward would later describe as “perhaps [the] most important” Watergate story he and Carl Bernstein ever wrote.[4] Stretching over three columns on the upper right quadrant of the front page, the piece began,

FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

    Until then, the Post’s coverage had been piecemeal and inchoate: a steady drip of articles with intriguing information but unclear implications, whose ins and outs could be followed only by dedicated lawyers or political junkies. The October 10 story was the first to put the break-in in context. With it, Watergate became a story of national import.[5]

    Nine days later, Nixon and Haldeman had a desultory but revealing afternoon conversation about Watergate coverage. Nixon had sensed for weeks that someone, somewhere, was supplying the Post with its incremental but relentless scoops.[6] The FBI was high on his list of suspects, even though several factors argued against its involvement. L. Patrick Gray, the acting director since J. Edgar Hoover’s death in May 1972, was beholden to Nixon for his appointment, and the Bureau had  a reputation for discipline insofar as sensitive White House matters were concerned. It seemed especially hard to conceive that the FBI would leak information contrary to the interests of a president who seemed certain to win  re-election a month hence. But Haldeman’s information, captured on the president’s voice-activated tape recorder, left little doubt.

The Secret That Wasn’t: Deep Throat Exposed in 1973

Editor’s Note: This week marked publication of a new book by Bob Woodward. The War Within is the fourth installment of his quartet on the Bush administration. And, as has been the case since 1974, when All the President’s Men was published, Woodward’s latest book contains headline-making revelations.

Washington Decoded first examined the Watergate roots of the phenomenon that is Woodward in a May 2007 piece entitled “Deep Throat 3.0.” The article below draws from newly-found evidence.

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By Max Holland

    Of all the legends about Watergate, perhaps the most enduring is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein religiously protected the identity of W. Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat.” In fact, they did more to expose their fabled secret source than has ever been appreciated.

    One big fat clue escaped all notice during the many years of guessing. It appeared in The Washington Post on June 17, 1973, a year to the day after the break-in and 10 months before Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 best-seller, All the President’s Men, introduced the American public to Deep Throat. If this clue in plain sight had been remembered, it’s unlikely that “Who Was Deep Throat?” would have ever surpassed “Whatever Happened to Judge Crater?” as the national guessing game. It all but pointed the finger at W. Mark Felt because it indicated where Deep Throat worked in the federal government: the FBI.

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    In the late spring of 1973, just as Watergate was bursting open, a distinguished Washington Post reporter named Laurence Stern got it into his head to write what turned out to be a most insightful article about the all-consuming scandal. Stern’s idea was simple: to juxtapose the first year of Watergate with what had been one of the most traumatic years ever at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Such a thoughtful approach was second nature for Stern, who had been “winning awards and cutting a wide swath in both American and international journalism” since joining The Washington Post in 1952. He had started off just as Bob Woodward had—on the metropolitan staff—and for nine years worked his way up through local, suburban, and state news beats. By the time of the Watergate break-in, Stern was the Post’s so-called “Dulles airport correspondent,” meaning he was available 24/7 to cover the latest cold war crisis anywhere in the world.[1] As the biggest home-grown star in the Post’s firmament, Stern had almost a free rein at the newspaper and moved effortlessly between national and international stories.

   During the latter half of 1972 and into 1973, as the Watergate story slowly gained hurricane force, Stern was preoccupied with other, seemingly bigger stories: the ongoing war in Vietnam and agonizing peace negotiations in Paris; the presidential election, including George McGovern’s ill-fated choice of a running mate; and the involvement of the IT&T Corporation in Chilean politics. 

    By late April, however, as Watergate began destroying the reputations of men and institutions, Stern’s involvement became inevitable. In May, he took charge of one of the story’s hottest elements: was the Central Intelligence Agency complicit in the June 1972 break-in? And had the Nixon White House attempted to circumscribe the FBI’s investigation by falsely invoking CIA equities? It already seemed as if the reputation, if not fate, of the Nixon presidency might hinge on that question.[2]

    Stern died from a heart attack in 1979, at the age of 50, so his reasoning cannot be retraced. But the idea for a story about the FBI and Watergate seems to have come out of Stern’s dozen or so articles about CIA involvement in the scandal. He interviewed several top CIA officials, including Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time of the break-in, for these stories, and it is highly likely that the one FBI article Stern wrote was inspired by something he gleaned from these conversations.

    The leaks to the media right after the break-in had been the subject of intense speculation among top CIA officials, and for good reason. Many of the disclosures kept pointing to some kind of CIA involvement, and that left the agency in the difficult position of trying to prove a negative. As Helms suggested in his 2003 memoir—published two years before Felt was unmasked as Deep Throat—CIA officials in 1972 thought that someone in the FBI was the likely culprit. Wrote Helms, “One question arose repeatedly: were the leaks coming from the FBI? In J. Edgar Hoover’s day this would not have been the case. But what about the new bureau administration? Was discipline as strong as it had been? We did not know.”[3]  

    During his career, Helms was widely regarded as an incisive analyst, a detached observer of men, institutions (including his own), and what was really going on behind newspaper headlines, out of the public’s eye or ken. And few officials were shrewder students of the FBI than Helms, owing to his first-hand exposure to the bureau’s machinations under long-time director J. Edgar Hoover. Helms considered Hoover “the most accomplished American bureaucrat of the twentieth century . . .  with a superb grasp of how things are done in Washington.” That description was not intended to be ironic.[4]

    One of Stern’s CIA articles, dated May 16, quoted Helms to make a penetrating and under-appreciated point about the bureau from an insider’s point of view. The break-in had occurred just one month after Hoover’s death in office, which had hit the FBI like the death of dictator: utterly predictable and incomprehensible at the same time. “Can you imagine the predicament of a new FBI director,” Helms said, “coming into office and having this thing break over his head?”[5] This remark suggests that the former CIA director shared with Stern his educated conjectures about what had really been going on. 

    The gist of Stern’s June 17 article on the FBI was that the Watergate scandal had “brought egg to [the FBI’s] face and demoralization to its ranks.” L. Patrick Gray III, the acting director who had the misfortune of succeeding Hoover, was only the most obvious victim of the wreckage. The bureau’s reputation and image, long the most unsullied in Washington, was in tatters. It stood accused of “leaking like a sieve, relaxing surveillance of domestic subversives, and turning its back on the rest of the intelligence community.” Bereft of Hoover, whom Stern aptly described as the “Compleat Bureaucratic Infighter,” the FBI faced more questions and uncertainty about its future than at any time since 1924, when Hoover, then 29 years old, inherited an agency steeped in scandal, political intrigue, and illegal activities.[6]

    Stern traced the stunning estrangement that had developed between the bureau and the Nixon administration. No president had seemed more likely to get along with Hoover than Nixon, who, 20 years earlier, had exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Instead, Hoover’s advancing age, caution, and territoriality had been a continuous source of frustration for the Nixon White House, which felt itself (and the nation) under siege from violent radicals, shrill anti-war protesters, and black militants.

    This portion of Stern’s article was not exactly novel, as similar accounts had been published elsewhere. Rather, it was the rest of the article that was the real gem. It provided exactly the kind of insight that had given Stern a deserved reputation for writing about the news in a way that was unusually profound.

Outing Deep Throat

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By Max Holland

            

    In an editorial written a few days after W. Mark Felt was unmasked, The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus perceptively opined that Felt had given every indication of preferring to take his secret to his grave. “I am glad, I suppose, to finally know the secret of Deep Throat,” Marcus wrote on June 5, 2005. “I am less confident that Mark Felt wanted me to know.”

    Marcus suggested that Felt’s family euchred him into revealing what he had labored so hard to keep secret:

To comprehend how thoroughly Felt believed that it wouldn’t fit for him to be both Mark Felt and Deep Throat, consider how insistently he kept his secret hidden from his own family. The more you read of Vanity Fair’s account of the outing, the sorrier you feel for a failing old man prodded and even tricked by his relatives into telling all—to get “closure,” as his daughter put it, perhaps finally to profit from what the family, if not Felt, viewed as his heroism.

    In point of fact, decades before Felt’s family sought profit from the secret, Bob Woodward irrevocably compromised Felt’s clandestine role by revealing Deep Throat’s existence in 1974, and benefited greatly from doing so. Two years later, Woodward compounded that betrayal by unilaterally deciding that he would identify Deep Throat by name at a time of Woodward’s own choosing, i.e., after Felt’s death. The first person, in other words, to disrespect Felt’s consistent behavior and exploit Deep Throat was the reporter entrusted with the secret.

    The end to Washington’s favorite guessing game in 2005 meant that history and perspective could finally displace a fixation. And with the benefit of hindsight comes the clarity to ask some long-neglected questions about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s protection of the most fabled confidential source in journalism history.

    When a newspaper reporter negotiates an understanding with a source, does that agreement extend to only the newspaper medium? If the reporter wants a change of terms, is he or she honor-bound to obtain the source’s express permission? Or are silence and the absence of protest sufficient? And finally, what is the effect of the passage of time? Does it give license to a reporter to re-interpret an understanding unilaterally?

    At several pivotal moments, Woodward amended the terms of his “deep background” agreement with Mark Felt to suit his, Bernstein’s and The Washington Post’s best interests, but not necessarily Felt’s. Woodward’s situational adherence to his arrangement with Felt does not rise to the level of Janet Malcolm’s controversial remark about journalists. But it might be best not to hold up the famed journalist’s treatment of Deep Throat as an exemplar to budding reporters.

     It certainly makes for an interesting case study though.

Deep Throat 3.0

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By William Gaines and Max Holland

    June 17, 2007 will mark the 35th anniversary of a “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate office complex that burgeoned into the downfall of Richard Nixon. If past were prologue, the anniversary would surely have sparked off a whole new round of speculation about the identity of the fabled secret source known as “Deep Throat.”

    But two years ago, the “source to end all sources” was unmasked after three decades of more or less successful anonymity.[1] Deep Throat turned out to be W. Mark Felt, the number two man in the FBI hierarchy at the time of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.[2] And with the guessing game over, the 35th looms as the first major anniversary where the thrill is gone. The Watergate scandal is now relegated to history, where it firmly belongs. Perspective can finally displace a national fixation.[3]

    Some recently available documents, as well as older ones, when taken together, paint a far different portrait than the one Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have long propagated about Deep Throat’s role in the investigation that brought them accolades, fame, and fortune. Mark Felt was far from being just one of many sources, and an ambivalent, reluctant confirmer of information. At critical junctures, he provided vital guidance, knowledge, and leads. He sharpened and expanded upon information reported to him by Woodward. On occasion, Felt would even supply raw information, known only to the FBI, which could be popped into The Washington Post virtually unchanged. All of these contributions were instrumental to Post's leading coverage of the Watergate break-in. It’s fair to say that but for Deep Throat, in 1972 the Post would have been just another groping member of the press pack rather than its crucial, and mostly solo, leader.

    A revised look at Deep Throat also raises some long-neglected questions regarding Woodward and Bernstein’s protection of the most fabled confidential source in journalism history. When a newspaper reporter negotiates an understanding with a source, does that agreement extend to only the newspaper medium? If the reporter wants a change of terms, is he or she honor-bound to obtain the source’s express permission? Or are silence and the absence of protest sufficient? And finally, what is the effect of the passage of time? Does it give license to a reporter to re-interpret an understanding unilaterally? At several pivotal moments, Woodward amended the terms of the “deep background” agreement to suit his, Bernstein’s, or the Post’s best interests, but not necessarily Felt’s.

The Making of Two Myths

    During the 31 years Washington’s favorite parlor game lasted, Woodward and Bernstein stoutly maintained that for all the sound and fury, Woodward’s über-secret source was far less important than everyone believed. Deep Throat’s contributions were famously described in 1974, when All the President’s Men was published and revealed the existence of the source dubbed Deep Throat for the very first time. In the book it was claimed that Woodward’s discussions with Deep Throat were “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.”[4]

    That formulation or some variant of it would be repeated endlessly for the next three decades, despite the fact that any careful parsing of the text would have revealed many internal inconsistencies.[5] As recently as 2005, Woodward would tell a C-SPAN interviewer that Deep Throat “was one of many sources. He provided a context and explained that Watergate was much larger and much more abusive. Others hinted at that but didn’t quite have the concept of the scope and magnitude.”[6]

    The hyperbolic counter-myth about Felt’s role seemingly had its origins in the taut film version of All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and written by William Goldman. Actor Hal Holbrook’s menacing portrayal of Mark Felt dramatized the secret source all out of proportion to his actual significance. Deep Throat became a mythic figure, to the point where the popular mis-impression was that Woodward and Bernstein had only one source. Or as one critical Post editor put it, it was as if Woodward “did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies.”[7] That Felt had been dubbed with a “sexy moniker,” borrowed from a pornographic 1972 movie that was the first crossover X-rated film, didn’t hurt the myth-making either.[8]

     But while the popular fable about Deep Throat was obviously wrong-headed, the account offered up by Woodward and Bernstein also needs revision.

Bradlee’s “Especially Privileged Seat at the Parade”

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By Max Holland

    Ask the nation’s most celebrated newspaper editor the burning journalistic question of the day – whether or not to publish the Unabomber’s manifesto – and the response from Ben Bradlee is uncharacteristic avoidance: “The wisdom of the ages cries out for silence from Bradlee,” he says.

    Now, Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee is not your shy, retiring type, so the question must be an awkward one for him. It’s not because when he faced a similar situation, he decided differently. Rather, it’s because he has just written a memoir suggesting that newspapers should not turn over their pages to political extortionists.

    The episode Bradlee recounts in A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (Simon & Schuster, 1995) occurred in 1976. Croatian terrorists had hijacked a TWA 727 en route from Chicago to New York, and were threatening to kill all passengers unless five newspapers printed a screed demanding Croatian independence from Yugoslavia. One of those papers was The Washington Post, which Bradlee had been more or less running since 1965.

    “The idea of anyone . . . telling me that I had to run something in the paper that I didn’t want to run, much less that I had to run it on page one, was inconceivable to me.” Bradlee writes. “Yet I followed their instructions meek as a lamb. Once. I’m not sure I’d do it twice.”

    Whatever private doubts Bradlee, who stepped down in 1991, nurses about the Unabomber cave-in, you will never find him publicly second-guessing his old publisher, Donald Graham, or his successor as executive editor, Leonard Downie. In the Bradlee firmament of values, where courage, grace and honesty are prized, no quality is held in higher esteem than loyalty.

    And it was the Post, after all, that gave Bradlee the opportunity to preside over a powerful newspaper in the nation’s capital, a city where information is almost as prized as currency. The Post was also the vehicle that enabled Bradlee, during the 1972 Watergate scandal, to reach a pinnacle of professional recognition (and mass celebrity) that most editors can only dream about. Finally, it was the Post and Graham who stood behind Bradlee during his hour of mortification in 1981, when a Pulitzer Prize-winning front-page story turned out to be an utter hoax.

    To the degree that Bradlee has enjoyed “an especially privileged seat at the parade,” as he puts it, he owes nearly everything to The Washington Post and its owner for the past 60 years, the Graham family. But they owe him, too. It’s largely due to Bradlee’s stewardship that the Post is considered one of the nation’s best newspapers.