Apr 9, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Did W. Mark Felt leak on Watergate out of patriotism—or personal ambition? A new book by Max Holland claims only the latter. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein tell Lloyd Grove why the author is dead wrong.
The legend of Deep Throat—which was the central drama of All the President’s Men, both the bestselling book and the Oscar-winning movie—has achieved sacred-text status in journalism circles; it is the inspiring saga of plucky reporters and their confidential source who risked all to save the republic. Robert Redford, who played Bob Woodward in the 1976 film, is planning to direct a documentary about the affair, lest anyone forget The Washington Post’s crowning moment of glory.
The mystery of Deep Throat, however, has been less enduring. It was ostensibly solved seven years ago, when former FBI official W. Mark Felt revealed it was he who leaked to Woodward in that underground parking garage and helped him and Carl Bernstein unravel the Watergate scandal.
But, nearly 40 years after the fateful June 17 break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex, Felt’s motive for aiding the Washington Post duo remains debatable, if not shady.
Woodward and Bernstein, not surprisingly, argue that Felt, the FBI’s second-in-command at the time of the break-in and an acolyte of the late J. Edgar Hoover, acted out of patriotism—“with remarkable personal courage” when “the nation had become endangered by [Richard Nixon’s] lawless presidency,” as Bernstein eulogized the G-man a month after his death at age 95 in December 2008. “Mark’s great decision in all of this was his refusal to be silenced,” Woodward declared at the same memorial service. “Action is character.”
Now comes a new book, Leak, in which independent journalist Max Holland—drawing on his fresh interviews with Watergate prosecutors and FBI investigators as well as government files, private diaries, the Nixon White House tapes, and other records—claims that Felt was motivated principally by his desire to become Hoover’s rightful heir and calculated his leaks to torpedo Nixon’s handpicked FBI director, L. Patrick Gray III, along with other rivals for the top job.
Far from being a selfless patriot, Felt, in Holland’s portrayal, was a preening, duplicitous Washington player who tried to use Woodward and Bernstein, as well as other journalists to whom he passed (sometimes false) information, to further his egocentric personal ambition. Nixon’s downfall, Holland contends, was the last thing on Felt’s mind; indeed, given its potential negative impact on his chances to rise, it was probably the last thing he wanted.
In reaction to Leak, various Watergate participants and aficionados are lining up on one side or the other on the question of Deep Throat’s motives. Felt’s lawyer, John D. O’Connor, who wrote the July 2005 Vanity Fair piece that outed his client, then suffering from dementia, as America’s best-known secret whistleblower, clings to the Felt-as-hero theory. “The book is well-researched and well-written,” he says, “and dead wrong.”
But John W. Dean III—who repeatedly tangled with Felt while supervising the Watergate coverup as Nixon’s White House counsel, and later became the star witness against the president and his top aides (having pleaded guilty himself to obstruction of justice)—applauds Holland’s book. “Max has got it right—he nailed it,” says Dean, one of the experts Holland asked to read Leak in manuscript form. “Felt was a piece of work.”
If only Nixon had not bypassed Felt in favor of Gray at the FBI, Dean argues, Deep Throat would not have leaked, and Nixon’s presidency would have survived.
Woodward and Bernstein are predictably offended by Holland’s book—especially its claim that their Pulitzer Prize–winning Watergate reporting, albeit praiseworthy and impressive, essentially followed what government investigators were already uncovering about the unfolding scandal. Until last week, they publicly held their fire. But after the two were asked to respond to the assertions in Leak during a Watergate-themed panel April 3 at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention, all bets are off. Now they are blasting the book and vehemently defending not only Deep Throat’s legacy, but their own.
Read the entire article here.
Comments