Keith Olson’s Watergate, published in 2003, provides a concise yet incisive account of that sprawling scandal, a turning point in American political life.
More than a decade later, and nearly forty-five years since burglars were caught inside Democratic National Committee headquarters, the scandal remains a political landmark, the one by which all others are measured. Professor Olson’s history still stands as the best succinct account of the crisis and needs only one amendment because of a remarkable disclosure that occurred in 2005. That was the year the identity of the fabled anonymous source nicknamed “Deep Throat” became public knowledge. He turned out to be an FBI executive named W. Mark Felt.
Opinions differ on the centrality of Felt’s role in the Washington Post’s early Watergate coverage. Yet there is no doubt that this secret source loomed very large in the public imagination. Because so much attention had been lavished on Deep Throat, I wrote a book about Felt after the exposure of his identity allowed a fresh exploration of his motive. His purpose was a missing element that, once understood, promised to complete the story of Watergate.1 What follows is a supplement—a necessary postscript, if you will—to the narrative written by Professor Olson.
Watergate never stopped being a political touchstone, even as it faded from the headlines following President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. The media’s continuing affection for the story was demonstrated by its penchant for attaching the suffix “-gate” to subsequent scandals, no matter how insignificant. The press longed to bask in the reflected glory of the book (and film) that had come to define the scandal for many Americans: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men.
The timing and structure of the book were impeccable, albeit largely accidental. All the President’s Men appeared in the spring of 1974, months before the scandal culminated in the first-ever resignation of a president. Americans were eager to find heroes in what was, for many, a disillusioning episode. Aside from Nixon’s liberal use of expletives and less than lofty talk about the nation’s problems, crimes had been hatched in the Oval Office, including an initially successful effort to obstruct justice following the June 17, 1972, Watergate break-in. Two fresh-faced and persistent reporters from the Washington Post—all the more endearing because of their mismatched backgrounds—filled the void nicely. When the film version of this press procedural appeared two years later, it claimed unusual fidelity to a supposedly nonfiction account. An appealing fable became fixed in the American psyche via the most powerful form of modern media. As sociologist Michael Schudson wrote in his 1992 book Watergate in American Memory:
[The fable] . . . asserts that two young Washington Post reporters brought down the president of the United States. This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end of the street and the black-hatted president at the other, protected by his minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day.2
One accidental element in the success and influence of the book and film was that they hinted at the existence of an even greater protagonist in the shadows who had put his career, if not his life, at risk so that the truth could eventually win out. This mysterious figure was, of course, Deep Throat, a source who had spoken to Woodward on “deep background.” This meant that Deep Throat’s information was not for attribution, and he was not to be quoted in the Post—indeed, his very existence as a source was not to be revealed. All those stipulations, however, were violated when it came time to write the book. And simultaneously, All the President’s Men fostered the notion that Deep Throat had acted out of the loftiest of motives: he was a selfless, high-ranking official “trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” Bernstein and Woodward wrote, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s “neurotically loaded” portrayal of Deep Throat in the film made the depiction practically indelible.3
Bernstein and Woodward were most reliant on Deep Throat as a source for their newspaper articles from June 1972 to March 1973. But making him a central figure in their 1974 book ran directly counter to the authors’ understanding with their secret source. Yet, instead of being roundly criticized for violating the journalistic compact with Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein were, oddly enough, celebrated for supposedly keeping their word—simply because they withheld Deep Throat’s name.4
With the ethical issue cast aside, guessing the identity of Deep Throat became a media obsession and thriving cottage industry over the next three decades. The “parlor game that would not die” kept Woodward and Bernstein in the public eye far longer than they might have been otherwise, meaning they had no incentive to resolve the issue. At the same time, the guessing game had the effect of elevating Deep Throat’s role and perpetuating the shorthand mythology about the Post reporters’ own role in covering Watergate. All this was made possible by a compliant media, which had a vested interest in immortalizing what media scholar W. Joseph Campbell characterized as the heroic-journalist construct.5
Journalism’s “greatest unsolved mystery” came to an abrupt end in May 2005 with the publication of an anticlimactic article in Vanity Fair magazine. Written by John D. O’Connor, the article revealed that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s number two executive at the time of the Watergate break-in. O’Connor, a lawyer and family friend of the Felts, wrote the article because Deep Throat was in no position to pen the disclosure himself; now ninety-one years old, he suffered from dementia. The article was anticlimactic because Felt, in point of fact, had been identified as the prime suspect long ago. Way back in June 1974, just a few weeks after the publication of All the President’s Men, the Washingtonian magazine had observed:
Let’s ignore all of Woodward and Bernstein’s red herrings and look at motive and opportunity and method. . . . Who had access to all the material? Who had the resources to set up a system to leak it?
The FBI, that’s who. Read the . . . presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.6
In August the magazine followed up with an interview of a “former top Justice Department official.” Asked about Felt’s motive, the unnamed source said:
Maybe it was revenge. But I think it was ambition, too. I can see Mark Felt as Deep Throat. He had all the information, and he badly wanted to be the [FBI] director. He had enough contact with the press that he might have tried to use his Watergate information to hurt [interim FBI director L. Patrick] Gray and to curry favor with an important newspaper like the Post. In fact, you ought to look into why Felt left the FBI so quietly in June of 1973.7
Although the Washingtonian had been right on the mark, the articles lacked staying power because of Felt’s prompt and energetic disavowal. “It was not I and it is not I,” he told the magazine’s editor; another denial appeared in the Wall Street Journal.8 Anti-Nixon sentiment was so high that everyone presumed Deep Throat, though perhaps reluctant to step out of the shadows, would be proud of what he had done and would not deny his role if identified independently.
In the summer of 2005 Woodward published The Secret Man, his inside account of Deep Throat and a book he had been working on for three years. Despite being soundly scooped on a story he seemed to own, Woodward’s narrative was awaited with great anticipation. After all, he had promised the “full story . . . with nothing held back.”9 Why had Felt chosen to confide in an untested cub reporter at the Washington Post? What was Deep Throat’s motive? And why had Felt kept his secret for so long when he was bound to be hailed as a national hero?
The Secret Man did not shed much light on these lingering mysteries. As Michiko Kakutani observed in the New York Times, Woodward’s portrait was intriguing but not fully satisfying. “[The] Deep Throat that emerges from this volume is in many ways as enigmatic as the one that appeared in All the President’s Men,” Kakutani wrote. “While Deep Throat’s name has been revealed, the mystery of his identity—his personality, the competing claims of pride and guilt on his conscience—remains.” Kakutani suggested that The Secret Man was so “fuzzy” mainly because Woodward had stuck to his promise of confidentiality for too long. Because of his fidelity to his source, Woodward had never sought an “exacting explanation” from Felt until it was too late—that is, until his memory was severely diminished.10
More shrewdly, the late Christopher Hitchens noted in his review of The Secret Man that the continued obfuscation of Felt’s motive was no minor matter. Watergate, observed Hitchens, “ranks as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.” And the lack of a consensus about that agenda left a gaping hole at the center of the Watergate narrative.11
The possibility of filling that void and rendering Deep Throat objectively—and not exclusively through Woodward’s eyes—started with the sale, for $5 million, of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate-related papers to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in 2003. Four years later, the Mark Felt file was opened. For the first time, Woodward’s verbatim notes from his interviews with Felt could be compared with the version presented in All the President’s Men—although for reasons never satisfactorily explained, the papers document only four of the more than a dozen reported contacts between Woodward and Felt.
Despite the scanty record, an important pattern emerged: there were marked discrepancies between Woodward’s account of the conversations, as published in All the President’s Men, and what the notes actually recorded. Specifically, phrases not enclosed in quotation marks in the notes were presented as direct quotes in the book, leaving the impression that Felt had spoken those exact words. Sentences were moved around, the progression of Felt’s thoughts was rearranged, and occasionally the meaning of his statements was altered. Finally, Felt’s revelations as published in All the President’s Men sometimes contained information not conveyed in the notes at all.
The most striking example of the last had to do with the so-called Canuck letter. This episode involved an allegation during the New Hampshire primary that Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, a leading candidate for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, had referred to some of his constituents as “Canucks,” supposedly a slur. In a Post article dated October 10, 1972, Woodward and Bernstein had identified a White House official who was allegedly directly responsible for the Canuck letter, characterizing it as a “dirty trick.” Subsequently, when they wrote about this important episode in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein attributed confirmation of this allegation to Deep Throat, quoting Felt as saying that the Canuck letter had been “a White House operation—done inside the gates surrounding the White House and the Executive Office Building.” Yet the October 9, 1972, notes of Woodward’s conversation with Felt revealed that Deep Throat had said nothing of the kind.12
Significantly, the notes also confirmed that much of what Felt had told Woodward in 1972–1973 was dead wrong (something Woodward himself admitted on camera during a CBS documentary on the twentieth anniversary of Watergate). Former White House counsel John Dean—the desk officer for the Watergate cover-up—was among the first to point out this phenomenon, and he raised the issue again in 2005 following the disclosure of Deep Throat’s identity. Dean was frankly puzzled as to why, on several occasions, Felt had imparted such “appalling information,” theorizing that it might have been designed “to try to manipulate Woodward and the Washington Post.” The single most egregious falsehood, Dean contended, involved an issue he knew about firsthand, in addition to it being well documented on the secret White House tape recordings: the February 1973 decision to nominate L. Patrick Gray III as FBI director. President Nixon had reluctantly and belatedly settled on Gray when he could not come up with a better candidate; moreover, by that time, it seemed preferable to have Gray testify about Watergate as the FBI nominee. According to Deep Throat, however, Gray had effectively blackmailed Nixon, threatening that “all hell could break loose” if he did not get the permanent nod. Unlike some of what Felt allegedly told Woodward, this false allegation was included in the book and was also present in the reporter’s raw notes, so Deep Throat certainly said it. But Felt’s motive remained murky.13
Another aspect, aside from the discrepancies and falsehoods, that did not quite add up was Woodward’s own explanation for Felt’s behavior. It wavered according to the circumstances. In All the President’s Men, Felt had been depicted as a highly principled whistle-blower protecting the office of the presidency from the likes of Richard Nixon. In The Secret Man, however, Woodward embraced a bureaucratic politics explanation, while simultaneously allowing that Felt had been “disappointed” over not being made FBI director. The bureaucratic imperative had initially been advanced in 1992 by a former Post colleague, James Mann, in a widely read Atlantic Monthly article (Mann opined then that Deep Throat was most likely Mark Felt). In Woodward’s adaptation of Mann’s thesis, Deep Throat leaked information because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from the Nixon White House.14
Woodward amended his explanation again while delivering a eulogy at the memorial service for Felt, who died in 2009. Felt had been “confronted with . . . nothing less than a war—organized, well-practiced, and well-funded by President Richard Nixon—a war aimed at the system of justice. Mark’s great decision in all of this was his refusal to be silenced. . . . He was a truth teller.” The variety of characterizations proffered, from defender of the Oval Office to bureaucratic turf protector to principled truth teller, made Woodward’s shifting interpretations of Felt’s motive appear calculated and expedient rather than explanatory.15
Last, there were two important omissions in Woodward’s account of his relationship with Felt. Both had long been known to students of Watergate, and they were so glaring precisely because they were missing entirely from The Secret Man. In that book, Woodward left the impression that Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, Felt had submitted his resignation in May 1973 after interim director William Ruckelshaus accused him of leaking information to the press. Most of this story had been public knowledge since 1976, when Woodward’s then-colleague at the Post, Sanford Ungar, published a 682-page history of the FBI. More important, after the 2005 Vanity Fair article, Ruckelshaus contacted Woodward to make sure the reporter had the “full picture” about Felt’s departure under pressure. In response, Woodward told Ruckelshaus, “This is an important fact; I’ll make sure that it gets out.” But subsequently, Woodward continued to maintain that Felt’s sudden resignation was not a significant part of the overall story.16
The other curious omission pertained to why Ruckelshaus suspected Felt in the first place. The answer was revealed in several secret White House tape recordings, transcripts of which had been published by 1997. On October 19, 1972, Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, told the president that he had identified the person who was leaking information to the press about the FBI’s Watergate probe. The leak, said Haldeman, is “very high up—Mark Felt.” The president was flabbergasted and wanted to fire Felt immediately, but cooler heads prevailed. Felt knew too many secrets that could prove damaging to the administration. The president, of course, did not know that Felt and Deep Throat were one and the same man because All the President’s Men had not yet been published. But Felt’s behavior was no secret to the White House as early as the fall of 1972, which is why the president warned Ruckelshaus several months later to watch out for Felt.17
Inconsistencies between All the President’s Men and the documentary record, the issue of bad information imparted by Felt, and the conspicuous elision of important facts in The Secret Man—all these elements were instrumental in Woodward’s flattering yet fuzzy and unsatisfying portrait of Deep Throat. Woodward persisted in depicting Felt as the enigmatic icon he had become, even though anonymity no longer shrouded him from close inspection. Felt’s motive seemed as impenetrable as ever in The Secret Man. Every explanation had been offered up, except the only plausible one.
There was a wealth of material to draw on for a new, objective look at Mark Felt. Little if any of it had been plumbed by the journalist widely regarded as one of the best investigative reporters of his generation. Besides Woodward’s own papers, available sources included oral histories from the Nixon Library and the association of former FBI agents; the White House tape recordings; the FBI’s main Watergate file, most of which had been released by the early 1990s; new FBI files (including Felt’s), which were obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act; the papers of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, housed at the National Archives; and interviews with several key actors, many of whom had never been asked about Felt. The list included Angelo Lano, the FBI’s case agent on the Watergate probe, and John J. “Jack” McDermott, the special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office during much of the investigation.
Piecing together information from these sources led to the inescapable conclusion that Felt was neither principled nor turf conscious, and that he was certainly not a truth teller. He leaked information to the media for the sole purpose of damaging his rival claimants to the FBI directorship: first L. Patrick Gray, the interim director appointed by Nixon in May 1972, and then William C. Sullivan, the heir apparent before J. Edgar Hoover threw him out of the Bureau in 1971 due to Sullivan’s overweening ambition. Felt believed that if he could show the president that the Bureau was leaking like a sieve, Nixon would move to appoint an insider—Mark Felt—who could control the FBI as Hoover had controlled it.
Felt’s leaks were calculated to turn Nixon against Gray and, if Gray happened to get the permanent nomination, to ensure that he would not be confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Felt also wanted to ensure that, given Sullivan’s past, he would be too controversial for Nixon to ever consider. In exalting Felt, Woodward had turned a blind eye to the ferocious internal politics at the FBI and to what historian Stanley I. Kutler dubbed the “war of the FBI succession” in his 1990 book The Wars of Watergate. The contest to succeed Hoover was perceived as a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it brought out the worst in both the Bureau and Felt.
If Felt’s primary motivation had been some principle—whether defense of the presidency, respect for the law, or concern about his own institution’s integrity—then presumably he would have informed Woodward, within a month of the break-in, of the White House’s attempt to use the CIA to contain the FBI’s investigation. That failed effort—one of the clearest signs that a cover-up was in progress—eventually became one of the articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee. But Felt revealed nothing about this extraordinary effort to Woodward, even though he was one of the few officials with knowledge of it.
Felt never intended to dislodge the president; in fact, Nixon was Felt’s only hope for achieving his life’s ambition. Felt leaked information to the Washington Post (and, in equal measure, Time magazine) for one self-serving reason: to gain the directorship. Indeed, Felt emerges not only as dismissive of the media’s shallowness and short attention span, as Woodward himself observed in All the President’s Men, but also as someone who held the press in utter contempt. He knew full well the ease with which reporters could be manipulated when they were in search of a front-page story.
Resolving the issue of Felt’s true design recasts not only Deep Throat, of course, but also All the President’s Men. It fractures the fable presented in that influential book and suggests that, in retrospect, All the President’s Men must be viewed in the context of the writing fad known as “New Journalism” that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This technique employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in essays and books that purported to be nonfiction.
Woodward and Bernstein had to be nudged only slightly to adopt the conventions of New Journalism when they wrote All the President’s Men (although they were certainly not permitted to do so in their Watergate coverage for the Post). Woodward once aspired to be a novelist, and Bernstein, according to one of his Post editors, viewed himself as “an unappreciated newspaper pioneer of the ‘New Journalism,’ in which long, dramatic and somewhat subjective narrative recreations of events would replace terse, dry, just-the-facts reporting.”18
The greatest misperception fostered by All the President’s Men, aside from falsely representing Deep Throat, was to suggest that the Washington Post succeeded precisely where the FBI had failed—in tracing the break-in to higher-ups in the Nixon campaign or the White House. In point of fact, months before the Post’s reporting duo contacted the campaign workers who gave them several of their most celebrated scoops, the FBI had interviewed these same employees repeatedly and privately. In real life, neither the FBI agents nor the original federal prosecutors ever learned anything germane from the Washington Post’s stories that they did not already know—although they were certainly mortified to see the many fruits of their investigation appear in print months before the burglars’ trial.
All the President’s Men was not invented from whole cloth, of course, and it would be unfair to characterize it as fiction. Rather, it exemplifies the problematic literary license taken by some practitioners of New Journalism in service of a “higher truth.” On many issues—from what truly motivated Mark Felt to the adequacy and integrity of the government’s investigation to the politico-legal clash that culminated in Nixon’s resignation—the book presents a tidy legend rather than an accurate account. It is a patchwork of truths, half-truths, and inventions that makes for an entertaining read and a compelling story. But apparently the book is even a fairy tale with respect to events that occurred inside the Post’s newsroom.
On the fortieth anniversary of the scandal, former senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who served as the minority counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee, observed that anything that smacked of revisionism when it came to Watergate was “mightily frowned upon.” The story had become “too neat a package to have it messed with.”19 But if the aim was to impart the lessons of Watergate, Thompson suggested, a new and balanced perspective was in order.
If the fable presented in All the President’s Men is not true, then what was the media’s role in the scandal? The key to understanding lies in differentiating the genuine scope and impact of the contemporary media coverage in the latter half of 1972 from the subsequent and self-glorifying account.
The most important accomplishment of the media (and in addition to the Washington Post, one should include Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Newsday) in the first five months after the break-in was simply keeping the story alive through fitful disclosure of fragments that paralleled the FBI’s investigation. Preventing the break-in story from sinking into oblivion may seem rather mundane, but it was not, particularly given the combination of apathy and nonchalance that marked the electorate’s response to the crime. In the predigital age, when the public and political agenda was shaped almost entirely by what author David Halberstam aptly called the media “powers that be,” having the Post or Time follow a story for months invested it with significance.
There was dissonance between what the news media had been reporting from June to December 1972 and the initial paucity of legal results (only the burglars and their direct handlers were convicted in January 1973). And for a time, it looked like the Nixon administration’s curt dismissal of Watergate—a “third-rate burglary attempt” in which it had no involvement or foreknowledge—would be history’s verdict. But because of the press coverage, the Nixon administration created an enormous credibility trap for itself. Persistent questions from the press elicited so many seemingly flat denials that when the cover-up began to fissure in March 1973, the White House was unable to recover from its refusal to be the first source of the truth, harsh as that might have been to admit in June 1972.
The press coverage certainly influenced John J. Sirica, the federal district judge who tried the break-in case. As evinced by his behavior in the courtroom, Sirica did nothing to disguise his disbelief that no higher-ups were involved. Press coverage suggesting that there was more to the story surely played a role in the harsh sentences he meted out to the defendants, but long before Watergate, he was known around the courthouse as “Maximum John.”
Press attention also played an undeniable role in precipitating far-reaching investigations in addition to the massive one undertaken by the FBI. The most significant, of course, was the one conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee in the spring and summer of 1973. Armed with subpoena power, the committee investigated the scandal in a manner not available to the press, obtaining documents and compelling campaign and White House officials to appear and testify under oath. While it might be too much to claim that, but for the press coverage, the Democrat-controlled Senate would not have mounted an investigation, it is undoubtedly true that press attention or the prospect of it—favorable as well as unfavorable—drives politicians like nothing else.
Last, one of the most important consequences of the press coverage concerned what did not happen. The attention devoted to Watergate served as a prophylactic for the three federal prosecutors, Earl J. Silbert, Seymour Glanzer, and Donald E. Campbell, who were investigating the burglary with the help of a grand jury and trying to figure out where it ultimately led. Because the story remained in the news, no one in the Justice Department dared question what the prosecutors were doing, even when they subpoenaed higher-ups such as former attorney general John Mitchell, head of the Committee for the Re-election of the President when it sanctioned and underwrote the burglary. Overcoming perjury and the conspiracy to obstruct justice, these prosecutors slowly closed the legal pincers until the cover-up cracked open. And make no mistake: it was the work of the grand jury and these prosecutors—not the press—that ultimately resulted in the Watergate adage that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” By the time the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was appointed in May 1973, the U.S. attorneys were able to hand Cox a road map to the case that his team would follow almost without exception.
Lawyers would call it an “admission against interest” for the press to acknowledge that it was only one of several actors in the Watergate drama. While its supporting role was essential, after more than four decades, it is past time to apportion credit fairly instead of perpetuating fables. Watergate will always be one of the news media’s finer hours, even if the spotlight on its role is dimmed or at least shared. The Washington Post was proved right in the largest and most important sense: there was a terrific story behind what the White House disdained as a third-rate burglary.
Max Holland