In April of 2010, Carol, Ben’s secretary, called to tell me that somebody had yet again located a couple of stray Bradlee boxes at the Post’s storage facility. In one of the boxes were two of the interviews that Ben had done with Barbara Feinman for his memoir in 1990. Like me, Barbara had worked for Bob before working for Ben, and she had been roughly my age when she and Ben sat down for their interviews. Unlike me, she caught Ben while he was still the editor of the paper, and much of the material that surfaced during those interviews—and nearly all of the good stuff—went wholesale into Ben’s memoir.
The first of the two interviews was dated May 16, 1990, slugged “Watergate for memoirs.” From the first question on, it sizzles:
BF: Did you read the transcript?
[of his interview with Woodward and Bernstein in 1973 for All the President’s Men]
B: I read it but I haven’t read it as thoroughly as I should. But I mean it’s almost better to talk about it from my own point of view rather than from Woodward’s and Bernstein’s. Well, you know, Watergate in retrospect, it’s hard to believe that people were that dumb, were that insane to do that. And it’s achieved a prominence in history and in my life that it doesn’t really deserve.…
I mean the crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation it would be really a blip in history. The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate. Watergate really was dirty tricks and arrogance and people thinking that they were all-powerful and could ride roughshod over civil liberties, but it wasn’t dealing in smuggled arms and buying foreign nations and shit like that.
I wish I had gotten the chance to interview that Ben.
Later I came across a longer section that told me more about what it felt like to be Ben during Watergate than anything else I’d seen:
B: None of the recreations that I’ve seen do justice to the absolute passion this city had for that story. I mean, every night before you went home, before Williams and Califano for instance, or before Clark Clifford, or before Katharine or before Oz Elliott in New York went home from work they would call up and say, “What have you got?” They had to have a fix, they could not go out to dinner. Kay would drop down on the way home and say something, “Jesus, what have we got tomorrow?” “Jesus, you sure you’re right?” The interest in the community and in the newspaper community around the country was extraordinary, just extraordinary.
BF: Was that what was always on your mind during that time?
B: … [A]fter the Pentagon Papers was out of the way, until I met Sally, I don’t consider I did anything but Watergate. And after that, after meeting Sally, I mean that was another year or so before Watergate was over. Anyway, dealing with Woodward and Bernstein became—as they became more skilled in subterfuge, as they became more skilled in double meanings and triple meanings and quadruple, it became quite hard to deal with. They probably put us all a little bit on the defensive. Their great habit was to come around about seven thirty at night to say they had a helluva story.
BF: Did they do that on purpose?
B: Of course they did it on purpose. Because they thought the guard would be down and they could slip it into the paper without the usual sort of grilling.
BF: That’s pretty ballsy.
B: Yeah. And it ruined a lot of dinners and nights because the first few times we said okay, stopped, unpacked and went back to work and would stay there until we got it that we could print it or we didn’t print it or waited a day, but at least we—and it was we—Simons and myself and Harry Rosenfeld, Sussman, looked at it, worked it over, made decisions. And then finally we just said, “To hell with it, don’t [come] around here at quarter of eight or seven thirty, if you can’t explain what you’re doing, if you can’t do it—terrific that you’re doing it, but let’s do it in an orderly fashion.”
BF: Were they scared of you at all?
B: They say they were but I’m not sure.
The interview continued along that track, branching off in a few different directions but then returning to the movie. At a recent panel discussion, facing questioning about Deep Throat, Ben had said that he didn’t want to be held to a Hollywood portrayal of Woodward’s secret garage meetings with his source.
“You know I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” Ben told Barbara.
B: I know who they identify as—Bob identifies as Deep Throat. Did that potted palm incident ever happen? That seems like a dumb (inaudible) to me. 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.
BF: And you haven’t pressed him because it’s irrelevant?
B: There came a time when I pressed him for his name. But I had a long conversation with Bob in the middle of it as to the source and I said at that time that I didn’t have to know the name of the person but if I didn’t know the name I had to know everything about him—age, sex, place of work, high, low, what kind of access, who he knew. I suppose after that conversation if I had—
BF: When did you find out?
B: I don’t know exactly, some years later.
BF: Do you get sick of it, the Deep Throat part of it, people always asking you who it is?
B: I mean they always sort of, “Who’s Deep Throat,” that’s sort of a standard. No, I can say this to you, there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.
BF: And do you think that’s partially because of the Janet Cooke thing? I mean I know that you trust them but do you think that that fear—
B: You can’t argue with success. I mean, one way or another they were right. Whether they’ve embellished that or not.
I read it over a few times, just to see if it meant what I thought it did. Later, unprompted, Ben amplified it:
B: I mean, the movie Deep Throat was out and it was just too perfect to have some sort of porn movie figure to describe some role in the Nixon thing was just wonderful.
But whether—I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes … I mean, I can see that would be a terrific place to meet—once—but you know, I just don’t know. But I have a feeling that that’s a fight still to be fought. If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed—they—the fuckers out there, if they could prove that, that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post, never mind that Nixon resigned but it’s the Post’s version would be called into account. It would be devastating, devastating.
In any case, you know, I’m a great believer in playing the cards that you’re dealt, and I’d been dealt that hand and I gotta play. Time and time and time again the reports that they brought back were proved right. Over the long haul you can’t argue with that. Most of them from Woodward.
The interview took place in 1990, long after history had vindicated the facts of Woodstein’s reporting. Ben has always stood so firmly behind Woodward that the doubts—the residual fear—surprised me. He makes no mention of them in his memoir, or anyplace else.
The first thing I had to do was ask Ben about it. That was going to be tricky. By that time I was comfortable asking him tough questions, but he was quite good at identifying shaky branches and could rarely be lured into stepping out onto one of them. In that interview in 1990 he had been speaking to Barbara knowing that she was a trusted friend, that she wouldn’t (couldn’t) repeat a word of what he was telling her. I wasn’t bound by those ground rules, but I wanted to handle the subject with care.
It took me a couple of months to find a good moment. One day in early October, just before his son Quinn’s wedding, I finally felt like he might be in the right mood. After twenty minutes of talk about Bob and Watergate, I edged my way there. “The only other question I have about it is a little bit of a trickier question,” I opened, and then I just laid it all out for him. I wanted to be sure that it was real, I said. Did he still have those doubts?
“Well, I mean, if you would ask me, do I think that he embellished, I would say no,” Ben said. “But was he—he did nothing to … to play down the drama of all of this. I mean, whether, what was it, flowers in the …”
“A flag in the flowerpot and all of that.”
“You know, I’m sure they had a signal, and I’m sure it was that way, but whether it was roses or something else, I don’t … who knows.”
He wasn’t going to go any deeper, but he hadn’t backed away from it, either.
One of the things you learn as a reporter is that you always get your best information at the end. You put all the pieces together, and then you go back to your sources. The more information you have, the more power you have. And so I sat on Ben’s doubt about Deep Throat, because I didn’t know how Bob would react to it and I didn’t want to upset him before I needed to. There would be other questions that I would need his help with first.
But then the grand jury discovery occurred, and suddenly I found myself chasing two strands of the Watergate story, strands that had unexpectedly led me toward bigger questions than I had ever thought I would ask. Of the two, the Deep Throat piece felt like significantly smaller beans. The grand jury episode involved decades of dissimulation and possible illegality. Ben’s doubts about a small piece of Deep Throat’s spycraft seemed to me to pale in comparison. I wrote Bob to set up what I described to him as a “final interview,” hoping this wouldn’t be the case but fearing that it might be. Two days later, I went over to Q Street for the interview.
We spent the first forty-five minutes or so on Watergate. I had just undertaken my story-by-story analysis of it, and Bob’s memory is like a trap, so he was able to discuss the details of each story and give me bits of color about many of them. I could tell that he was mildly amused by the small-bore nature of my questions, but he humored me.
When I was through with my prepared questions, I slid the three relevant pages of Ben’s interview with Barbara across the table toward Bob, with two pages from my follow-up interview with Ben stapled to the back. Bob asked for the date of Ben’s interview with Barbara, and then he read silently for a while.
When he got to the second page he spoke for the first time. “Where he’s saying, ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,’ what’s …” He trailed off. He knew the news peg as soon as he saw it.
“That’s what I was curious about,” I said.
“Yeah. And, you know, was there one meeting in the garage, were there fifty meetings in the garage …”
“I ask him to clarify,” I said, pointing to my follow-up interview. “You’ll see where I …”
Bob lapsed back into silence and continued reading. “He’s mixing up some things here, even,” Bob said. I could see, already, his mind trying to find the escape hatch. Ben was confused, Ben was just kidding around. Then he read silently for a while longer.
Seven minutes after he’d started reading, he put the pages down and looked up at me. He was visibly shaken. It was not a look I was accustomed to seeing from him. “I’m not sure what …” he said, all vigor drained from his voice. Then, quietly: “What’s the question?”
“There is no question,” I said, uncertainly. “When I read it, I was surprised. I thought it was a little strange, and I wondered whether you had ever had a conversation with him about it. Whether he’d ever conveyed any of this to you.”
“Well, you know, what you need to—I mean, I don’t find this, I mean he’s saying at some point, he’s talking about flowerpots and garage meetings and so forth … and ‘there’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ ”
He paused. “You know, I can understand,” he began. “He wasn’t there. I mean, the whole thing has a … you know, as we now know, the whole thing is kind of, a series of accidents and persistent pressure by me. You know, that’s one thing … I was the asshole that kept, you know, showing up and nudging [Deep Throat] and so forth. So, you know, I think that’s a strength that he would have a residual fear about what he doesn’t know about.”
“But that the information was always good,” I countered. “To me, it’s a real indication of what a newspaper editor does, in a fundamental way. And I thought he clarified it in the interview with me by saying, ‘I don’t think he embellished, I think they did nothing to play down the drama of it.’ And my sense is, that’s his basic—”
“Yeah, but this is 2010,” Bob interrupted, referring to my interview with Ben. Ben’s doubts as the editor of the Post in 1990 meant more than any doubts he might have now, as an eighty-nine-year-old man. I conceded the point.
“Look, he’s got to be—you’ve got to understand his strength as a skeptic,” Bob said. “And that he would say, ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,’ and then, you know, ‘You can’t argue with success.’ ” He laughed. “I mean, that’s Ben. That’s—it was right, it worked, but ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ ” I could tell from the repetition of that one phrase that Bob wasn’t quite convincing himself.
He acknowledged that a lot of what happened in Watergate was implausible at first. “That, you know, ‘H. Hunt, W. House,’ I mean … is that possible? You know, so, I mean I kind of like the line. ‘There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.’ … [I]t’s kind of Ben’s skepticism.” I thought this was a smart route to take, and also the truth. A few moments later he said, “You know, the residual fear in his soul that something isn’t quite straight, I would embrace that thought.”
BW: You know, what don’t you have a residual fear about? You have a residual fear that you hear it wrong. You know, I’ve told the story about when Tenet said the WMD, “It’s a slam dunk,” that, you know, maybe he said “slim dick”.1
[laughter]
BW: Right? Maybe I didn’t hear it right. And so you have … a process—you know this—of vetting. Did we get this right, do we have the context right? … [Ben] was always kind of nudging me a little about it … but, you know, and this again is this, that there was a zone of interaction between a reporter and a source where there is, you know it’s kind of hallowed ground, and you don’t step in there.
BW: Isn’t that right?
Q: Absolutely.
There is a zone between a reporter and a source that editors cannot tread in without breaking the terms of the compact. That really is what Ben had been talking about, in one sense. If you trust somebody, as Ben trusted Bob, you have to take some things on faith, even if you wouldn’t swear to them yourself.
We talked a little bit more about Deep Throat, and how he had hidden in plain sight:
Q: People have put so much pressure on it over the years. And the Deep Throat thing just magnifies the mystery of it in this way in people’s minds. And I think that pressure—I mean, I remember when I worked for you … I was here when you went and saw him. It was February of 2000. I remember coming into the office and you said to me, “So have you figured out who it is yet?”
BW: Yeah.
Q: And I said, no. And I think you were just fucking with me.
BW: Yeah.
Q: I said something like, “I’m not sure I want to know, I’m not sure I would trust myself with that kind of secret.” And you said, “Well, I just saw him.” No—you said, “I just talked to him on the phone last week” or something. It was before you saw him. I maybe didn’t know you saw him. But you said, “I just talked to him on the phone last week, I may go see him,” or something like that. And I had forgotten about that until The Secret Man came out, and then I remembered, because I was here.
BW: That was very indiscreet of me.
Q: No, but it wasn’t … I think you were trying to say, “It’s a real person” …
BW: But the, here’s the question … that “the residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” what is the natural transaction between an editor and a reporter? Hmm? When he questioned, you know, “What’d they say?” “What were the words?” “What were, the exact language?” There’s doubt that we’re getting it right or that we’re, you know, the whole Haldeman thing.
Q: Or Bernstein on the phone with his source, you have to hang up in ten seconds and all of that.
BW: Yeah, all of that nonsense. And so I think that’s a state of … I think that applies, doesn’t that, to any …
Q: To any interaction you have.
BW: You know, look, when you worked, when we worked together, I trusted you.
Q: Right.
BW: No question about it.
Q: But I could screw something up.
BW: You could …
I reminded Bob of our interview three and a half years earlier, when he had said that with Ben, as with one’s father, “you never close the deal.” In The Secret Man, Bob makes the same point about Deep Throat. By the time Bob wanted to air everything out with Mark Felt, to understand why Felt had cooperated in the way that he had, Felt had lost his memory of the events in question. Bob never got any solid answers about Felt’s motivation, or even how he executed some of the spy tradecraft—checking Bob’s balcony for the flag in the flowerpot, or accessing Bob’s copy of The New York Times in order to draw a clock face inside of it—that people over the years had called into question.
Bob said that many reviewers of that book had felt that it was “incomplete,” that it didn’t resolve anything. “You don’t get a window into somebody’s motives,” he said. “You know, what was Nixon’s motive?”
Toward the end, Bob pulled the transcripts I’d brought toward him and said, “Let me keep this. I’ll put it in my Bradlee file.” I told him that was no problem.
“Whatever you make of this …” he said, portentously.
“I’m interested to hear your reaction, because that’s essentially my reaction,” I said, wanting to reassure.
“How do you operate in a realm of doubt and lack of 100 percent certainty? That’s the newspaper business. His philosophy is always you don’t get the full story any day. You take a piece and you take a piece and you take a piece. So you’re not going to be 100 percent certain that it’s an authoritative account in any story, really.”
“On anything,” Bob said.
A minute later we turned the tape recorder off, and Bob asked if I wanted to stay for lunch. Rosa Criollo, Bob’s cook, brought out a perfect tomato soup and sandwiches while the two of us shot the shit for a while. It was a fun, pleasant lunch. Bob didn’t seem agitated at all, and I figured that the evolution he’d gone through in the interview—from being stunned by Ben’s doubt to absorbing it and even appreciating it—was the perfect trajectory. It would make for an interesting byway in the book, nothing more.
When I got home later that day and listened to the recording of the interview, my heart sank. I hadn’t fully realized that Bob had repeated that one phrase—“There is a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight”—fifteen times in twenty minutes. I had a bad feeling. When my wife got home and asked me about it, I said it had gone well but that I suspected I hadn’t heard the last of it.
1 In Bob’s book Plan of Attack, which described the run-up to the Iraq war, he quoted CIA director George Tenet as having told President George W. Bush that it was a “slam dunk” case that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.