Did Mark Felt Even Know He Was Deep Throat?
COMMENTARY | April 12, 2012
A new book makes the case that Felt, the No. 2 man in the FBI during Watergate, fed information to the press to make his boss look bad and get his job. No idealism there. Barry Sussman, who was the Washington Post’s Watergate editor, has a close-in view on all this.
By Barry Sussman
bsussman@niemanwatchdog.org
In his new book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, Max Holland takes on chief aspects of the Watergate myth: that an idealistic, well-placed and mysterious source fed information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, thereby leading the American press to one of its greatest achievements, the overthrowing of President Richard M. Nixon.
The legend is that it was Deep Throat’s disgust over the scandal that moved him to such risky, noble actions. Far from it, Holland writes. Felt’s motive, he says, was personal gain only, a means of making the acting director of the FBI appear a failure, and thus getting the directorship for himself, playing Iago to Patrick Gray’s Othello.
Holland would strip from the Post a lot of the credit lavished on it. He writes: “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.”
Holland does a service in debunking parts of the Watergate myth and clarifying some relationships. He is good on the perverse office politics at the FBI, making old, high-placed J. Edgar Hoover assistants come to life. And he must have spent long hours putting the Nixon tapes in the context of events that are now almost forty years old. Deep Throat probably was a conniver – must have been, a reader concludes because of the case Holland builds.
But he is way off base when it comes to the Post.
I was the editor in charge of the Watergate investigation for the Post; that was my assignment from the day of the break-in and for the following 15 months, the period that includes all the Post’s main Watergate contributions. I never knew Deep Throat’s identity until it was released in a 2005 Vanity Fair article. But there are some things I know first-hand.
Day in and day out, the Post did a solid reporting job, and several times it did more than that – it had great stories with major impact, including one story that by itself set in motion the government investigations that eventually forced Nixon out of office.
Holland accepts a key part of the Watergate myth that really is hokum – that Deep Throat was an important, sine qua non source for the Washington Post. He not only accepts it; it is his basic premise. This is where his book runs into trouble.
Here is what Holland writes: “Felt provided vital guidance, imparted knowledge, suggested leads, and gave Woodward (and by extension, Bernstein) confidence that they were on the right track. He sharpened and expanded upon information they had already gathered, and, on occasion, supplied raw information, known only to the FBI, that could be popped into a piece virtually unchanged. He nurtured one front-page story after another, allowing the Post reporters to replicate the FBI’s investigation in several respects.”
This sounds, perhaps, like the story as told by FBI agents and indeed, Holland lists several FBI and Justice Department figures as people he interviewed. The FBI did a very good job in investigating Watergate, but this is a bit much, fellas. It didn’t happen.
Read the entire review here
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