Max Holland

Deep Throat Vitriol

By Steven Lagerfeld

A new book recasts the heroes of Watergate.

When the manuscript of contributing editor Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat came my way last year, I searched in vain for an excerpt that could run in the WQ. Now I’m doubly sorry it didn’t work out, because Leak’s reconsideration of the myths surrounding Watergate is stirring useful controversy about how the scandal came to light and its lessons for today.

Leak is really two books. One is a dramatic retelling of the story of Mark Felt, the top FBI official who became Deep Throat, the famous anonymous source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein penetrate the secrets surrounding the Watergate scandal. In the mythology surrounding Watergate, Deep Throat (Felt’s identity wasn’t revealed until 2005) was a public spirited official whose revelations helped save the country from a lawless administration. But in Holland’s persuasive telling, Felt emerges as a villain worthy of Shakespeare, his only goal to win the top spot at the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s death. Felt talked to the two reporters only to make his rival, acting director L. Patrick Gray, appear incompetent and to convince Nixon to put the veteran Felt in charge. (And, ironically, Felt was forced out of the FBI by the machinations of another canny rival.)

The second book in Leak looks at the larger mythology surrounding Watergate and its central story line that two intrepid reporters prevailed against all odds in revealing high level malfeasance. In fact, Holland says, Woodward, Bernstein, and other reporters did excellent work, but they didn’t do much that official investigators in the FBI and elsewhere weren’t already doing. “The main effect of Deep Throat’s leaks was merely to accelerate the scandal by perhaps six months or a year.”

That’s where the shooting starts.

 

Read the entire article here.

Former Special Agent Gary Harter Reviews Leak

 

"Deep Throat" Blowback:

Trying To Run a Wily, Venal Intelligence Source Who Is Running You

 

By Gary E. Harter

    In January 2009, a funeral service was held for former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt in Santa Rosa, California. Among the many in attendance were journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. As Deep Throat, Felt had been instrumental in furthering their careers as reporters  with the Washington Post.[1] Both were eulogists. During his remarks and perhaps swept away by emotion of the moment, Woodward described his former source as a "truth teller."[2] That statement was at variance with what Woodward wrote just a few years earlier. At that moment of clarity he pointed out that his "truth teller" lied to his colleagues, friends and family.[3] Such is the state of modern journalism.

    Oh, and to set the record straight, Woodward's "truth teller" didn't spare him from his veil of prevarication.

    Richard Nixon once observed the verdict of history depends upon who writes it. While the president was referring to himself and his political legacy, this also applies to Mark Felt. Woodward assigned Felt the noblest of motives for his actions.[4] After his public identification as Deep Throat, his motives were tailored to include saving the FBI from President Richard Nixon, and by inference, Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.[5] Thus began the "Felt is a hero" nonsense. Then came the publication of Woodward's The Secret Man, closing the book on the Felt/Deep Throat saga.[6] Or did it?

    By 1974, the media template was set with the publication of Bernstein and Woodward's book on
their Watergate reporting.[7] Two years later, a movie by the same name was released. In the movie, Felt/Deep Throat, brilliantly portrayed by Hal Holbrook, was always in shadow, cigarette in hand, gently guiding the young Robert Redford/Bob Woodward.[8] With the passage of time, the importance of Felt/Deep Throat in the story seems more myth than reality.[9]

   Enter a new book examining the role, and possible motivations, of Mark Felt. Max Holland challenges the media template in Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.[10] The author opines Felt w8s motivated by little more than spite for being passed over for the top job in the FBI. The careful reader will discover Felt saying much the same thing in his 1979 memoir.[11]

    In his reminisces about Mark Felt, Bob Woodward believes him to be a wise teacher, committed
to seeking the best version of the obtainable truth.[12] That said, the Felt record of duplicity is impressive in scope. A short chronicle includes the "Canuck Letter" authorship, Donald Segretti's overall importance to the 1972 presidential campaign, Gray's knowledge of FBI wiretaps against journalists and White House staff members, and perhaps the grandest howler of all, the president was pressured to keep Gray at the FBI.[13]

    The strength of Leak is its quality of research. The author utilizes a wide variety of sources, including interviews with former executives and agents of the FBI, other US government officials, reporters, including Bob Woodward, oral histories, Nixon Library materials, Woodward/Bernstein Watergate Papers, selected US government records, and, of course, Watergate/political books, papers, studies. Out of this archival stew, the author weaves a likely and believable case for Felt's subterfuge and underlying motivation.

    For Watergate aficionados this book is a must. It's also instructive for others interested in how some members of the press conveniently distort the truth to fit their ideology, to support some of their prior claims, and to sweeten future book deals. Felt's many leaks to the press were a naked attempt to distort reality in the Nixon White House with the ultimate goal of removing Pat Gray. His behavior exhibited little concern for those charged with investigating Watergate-related crimes; they were expendable pawns in his drive for power. And Felt realized his actions were shameful, and perhaps unlawful. This was a prime reason he declined the media spotlight.[14] Felt understood his media-generated shelf-life would be brief. Mark Felt was clearly no hero, no savior of the republic, or custodian of the FBI flame. He was nothing more than a self-serving bureaucrat, consumed by career angst and envy, who believed the rules everyone else followed didn't apply to him. This is the underlying story of Leak, and why it is the unvarnished, definitive account of Mark Felt and his twisted relationship with the press.

 

Former Special Agent Gary E. Harter joined the FBI in 1972 and focused on counterintelligence issues and spy cases for much of his career. His appointment letter was signed by legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He retired after more than 30 years with the Bureau and works for BearingPoint. He is a frequent reviewer for AFIO publications. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the FBI.

 

[1] Felt never met with Bernstein during the Watergate investigation. Felt's first and only meeting with Bernstein occurred in November 2008. At the time Felt was in home hospice care. The visit, described as a "family reunion" by the reporters, lasted two hours.

[2] Michelle Locke, "Deep Throat Regarded at Memorial as Truth Teller," AP, 17 January 2009.

[3] Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 5.

[4] "In brief, he knew there was a cover-up, knew higher-ups were involved, and did not trust the acting FBI director, Pat Gray. He knew the Nixon White House was corrupt. At the same time he was disappointed he did not get the directorship." From Bob Woodward's website, http://bobwoodward.com/question-answer.

[5] L. Patrick Gray, appointed acting director upon the death of J. Edgar Hoover in May 1972, was a Nixon loyalist working in the Justice Department at the time. Grey antagonized many of the "old guard" at the Bureau for relaxing standards on personal grooming, weight, and hiring women to become special agents. These and other assorted topics were covered in Felt's original memoir, The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside (New York: Putnam, 1979), 351, and its makeover, Mark Felt and John O'Connor, A G-Man's Life: The FBI, Being "Deep Throat," and the Struggle for Honor in Washington (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), 321. Pat Gray was a decent, if somewhat naive individual when it came to dealing with the Nixon White House as well as senior FBI officials. Fortunately, he has chronicled his eventful 361 days as acting director in his splendid memoir, In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate (New York: Times Books, 2008), 321. The book was written with his son, Ed Gray, in large measure as a response to Felt's identification as Deep Throat.

[6] The following year, Felt's autobiographical remake, A G-Man's Life, was released to little fanfare. While it was a better presentation than its predecessor, it added little to the Deep Throat discussion.

[7] Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All The President's Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 349. This book features Woodward's best writing about Deep Throat/Felt.

[8] Theatrical release of All the President's Men was 9 April 1976.

[9] Barry Sussman, editor for the Washington Post, has continually disputed Felt's importance in the Post's Watergate reporting. During most of the scandal, Sussman was the Post's special Watergate editor. See "Why Deep Throat Was an Unimportant Source and Other Reflections on Watergate," Nieman Watchdog, 29 July 2005.

[10] Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence, KN: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 275.

[11] FBI Pyramid, 226.

[12] The Secret Man, 183; All the President's Men, 131. Woodward believes Felt not only helped with his Watergate reporting, but taught him how to develop trusted relationships with future targets of opportunity. Woodward learned this lesson well.

[13] Leak, 93, 127. The FBI never investigated the Canuck Letter. According to Felt, this alleged discussion [to pressure Nixon] occurred during a meeting between Gray and President Nixon in the Oval Office in early February 1973. This record for this meeting is not found on Richard Nixon's official schedule.

[14] Sussman, "Why Deep Throat Was an Unimportant Source and Other Reflections on Watergate." Sussman believes Felt stayed in the background because his contribution was unimportant.

First published in Winter/Spring 2012 issue of The Intelligencer: Journal of US Intelligence Studies

Adapted with permission.

 

LSU Manship School of Communications

‘Inside Watergate’ Retrospective Details Scandal

By Ferris McDaniel

Contributing Writer

 Tuesday, April 24, 2012

AUSTEN BENNETT / The Daily Reveille

From left: Director of the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs Robert Mann, former city editor of the Washington Post Barry Sussman, Watergate federal prosecutor Earl Silbert and author Max Hollard discuss the political ramifications and significance of the Watergate scandal Monday in the Journalism Building.

A scandal many students know only through history books invaded the Journalism Building on Monday night during the Reilly Center’s “Inside Watergate” retrospective.

The panel discussion featured Barry Sussman, the Watergate editor for The Washington Post; Earl J. Silbert, the first Watergate federal prosecutor; and Max Holland, the author of “Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.” The trio provided insight into the scandal, Deep Throat and Richard Nixon.

“It started off as a break-in, and almost immediately and endlessly the scandal was peeled like an onion,” Sussman said.

Silbert said most people shallowly perceive Watergate as an investigation of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, but it goes deeper.

“It turned into an investigation of a mammoth, extensive and incredible cover-up,” he said.

Holland said the scandal, as told in the book and movie “All the President’s Men,” is the story of two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and a whistleblower, Felt, who helped bring order to the chaos. But Holland revealed that there is more to this “fairy tale.”

Felt, who was Woodward’s prized source, the mysterious Deep Throat, was persistently called a truth-teller by the journalist, but Holland suggested that’s not the case. Holland said Felt often provided the Post with misleading information. According to Holland, Felt’s intention was to destroy his rivals and claim the FBI directorship.

Sussman said two main factors eventually led to Nixon’s resignation — Nixon’s tax fraud and public opinion. Nixon was paying income taxes at a rate equal to a janitor’s, which in turn enraged the public’s opinion, he said.

Congress decided it was riskier to keep Nixon in office than to impeach him, Sussman said.

 

----

Contact Ferris McDaniel at fmcdaniel@lsureveille.com

Read entire article here

Erik Wemple in the Washington Post

 

 

When can you identify your confidential source?

By Erik Wemple

(Alex Wong - GETTY IMAGES) Max Holland’s rollicking new book “Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat” has stirred up some discussions. Did Felt have patriotic motives for his clandestine disclosures to Bob Woodward? And were the Watergate journalists breaking new investigative ground or following the course of a federal probe?

Fun stuff.

Now for a subsidiary chatting point: When do confidential source agreements expire? Holland encounters this question early in his book, and not with respect to the famous relationship between Woodward and Felt, as Deep Throat. At issue was a story by New York Times reporter John M. Crewdson in May 1973. It contained critical details that led Felt to resign his FBI post, according to Holland.

For reasons that would require 23 blog posts to explain, Holland wanted to discover who served as Crewdson’s key anonymous source for the story. So he pressed the longtime reporter on the matter. Here’s Holland’s explanation of how that went down, from Page 8 of “Leak”:

When I asked [Crewdson] in 2008 if the passage of time might allow him to divulge his source, Crewdson initially responded that “it has always been my position that confidential source relationships are to be protected, even after the source in question has been dead for many years.”

The next line alone is worth “Leak’s” price of admission:

But he later wrote to say that he “continue[d] to respect confidential source-reporter relationships even in cases where the source was killed in a hunting accident years ago.”

Aha! Holland writes that such a “description can mean only one thing: Crewdson’s source was William Sullivan, who famously died in a 1977 hunting accident in New Hampshire.” Reached by phone, Crewdson said he had “nothing further to add” — both on the question of what he’d revealed to Holland or on the larger issue of how long confidential-source agreements should last.

 

Read entire article here

Reponse to Barry Sussman

 

 

Deeper into Deep Throat

Posted by Michael Miner 16 April 2012

• Barry Sussman

The Watergate scandal turned the names of Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, editor of the Post, and reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into household words — or as close to that as print journalists can hope to become. What the scandal itself could not accomplish in celebritizing this quartet was done by the movie, All the President's Men, based on the book Woodward and Bernstein wrote about how they got that story.

And of course Woodward's mysterious source "Deep Throat," introduced in the book and played to high dramatic effect in the movie by Hal Holbrook, attained equal standing—and then some.

One key Post figure never caught the spotlight. Barry Sussman was the editor who quarterbacked the coverage, worked intimately with Woodward and Bernstein, and might have collaborated on a Watergate book with them. But at the suggestion of Robert Redford, who'd direct the movie, Woodward and Bernstein wrote their book about the reporting process and Sussman wrote his own, The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, about the crimes. There was no role for Sussman in the movie and perhaps too small a role in the book. In his book The Powers That Be, David Halberstam called Sussman "the perfect working editor at exactly the right level. Sussman was not simply encouraging, he brainstormed the story, trying to put the pieces together, fitting them and refitting them until finally, slowly, there was the beginning of a pattern. More, he believed in the story, he was sure there was something there." And in the story's aftermath, when the "bitch goddess" stardom had touched some and not others, "Barry Sussman, who had once befriended the young Woodward and Bernstein, felt betrayed by his two former proteges, left out of their book. He no longer talked to either of them."

Recently the investigative reporter Max Holland wrote a book, Leak, about Deep Throat, revealed in 2005 to be Mark Felt, deputy associate director of the FBI at the time of Watergate. Holland argued that Felt's motives were self-serving—he wanted to run the FBI, which meant telling tales that would discredit the acting director President Nixon had put in place above him, L. Patrick Gray. Earlier this month I wrote about Leak, and followed up with a story relating what Woodward and Bernstein had to say about Holland's book and what Holland said in response.

Unless you're someone Watergate still holds spellbound (a lot of people fit that description: the scandal was recently turned into a fat novel by Thomas Mallon and I'm in the middle of it), you might be thinking that a little Deep Throat is quite enough. So it is. But Barry Sussman's opinion of Leak is one that counts, and the other day he published a long critique. "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," Sussman writes. "Deep Throat probably was a conniver— must have been, a reader concludes because of the case Holland builds."

And then the but. "But he is way off base when it comes to the Post."

Holland had written, "Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post 'uncovered' Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI's investigation." Sussman responds, "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."

Now Sussman assails not only Holland but his two long-estranged former Post colleagues: "Deep Throat wasn't an important source at all. He was nice to have around, helpful on occasion, especially in October, 1972, when he confirmed and added to a story in which the Post introduced Donald Segretti as a political saboteur against the Democrats. But that's about it. Woodward and Bernstein have blown up Felt's importance for almost four decades or nodded in assent when others did, and instead of pricking this big balloon, Holland pumps more air into it."

At the conclusion of his long, detailed critique, Sussman makes this observation: "For decades Felt denied he was Deep Throat. Perhaps, because he gave out so little to Woodward and Deep Throat was reputed to have given so much, he really didn't know that he was."

Sussman's review first appeared on NiemanWatchdog.org (he's editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project), but when it showed up April 12 on the vastly more trafficked Huffington Post site, Holland decided to respond on the record.

Here's that response:

Barry Sussman and I agree that the role of Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat) has received too much emphasis. Indeed, my book Leak ends by stressing that the real Watergate whistleblowers were named Penny Gleason, Judith Hoback, and Hugh Sloan, all of whom worked for the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CRP).

Nonetheless, Sussman and I disagree on the role Felt played during a period of 4½ months in the latter half of 1972 (mid June to November). This is a debate that properly, ought to be conducted between Sussman and Woodward/Bernstein. They all worked at the Washington Post then and I didn’t. Nonetheless, I do have an informed opinion after closely analyzing the coverage, juxtaposing it with revelations in All the President’s Men and The Secret Man [Woodward's book on Felt after Felt was identified], and researching the Woodward/Bernstein Papers at the University of Texas.

Sussman told me that he purposely did not read All the President’s Men when he was writing his 1974 Watergate book, The Great Cover-up, because he did not want his account to be influenced in any way by Bernstein and Woodward’s. I can understand and even sympathize with that impulse. At the same time, not reading the relevant books (putting aside the archives) suggests that Sussman may not be aware of how many times, and in how many ways, Felt figured in.

Even so, in 1974 Sussman did note that,

. . . while the White House and various politicians accused the Post of overplaying the story, [Deep Throat] always assured Woodward that there was more, much more, and not to be misled. When so many members of the press were ignoring Watergate, this was no small succor.

I agree, but would still go further.

 

Read the entire article here

Barry Sussman Reviews Leak

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

Pat Buchanan: Leak a "Hellfire missile"

 

The Outing of Deep Throat 

Pat Buchanan shares premise of new book stripping "hero" label from Watergate leaker

Published: 9 April 2012

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Buchanan served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of nine books. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

As the 40th anniversary of Watergate impends, we are to be bathed again in the great myth and morality play about the finest hour in all of American journalism.

The myth?

That two heroic young reporters at the Washington Post, guided by a secret source, a man of conscience they dubbed “Deep Throat,” cracked the case and broke the scandal wide open, where the FBI, US prosecutors and more experienced journalists floundered and failed.

Through their tireless investigative reporting, they compelled the agencies of government to treat Watergate as the unprecedented constitutional crisis it was. No Pulitzer Prize was ever more deserved than the one awarded the Post in 1973.

These young journalists saved our republic!

However, the myth, fabricated in All the President’s Men and affirmed by the 1976 film of the same name, with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, has a Hellfire missile coming its way.

Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat is an exhaustive study of the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein and the leaking by the FBI’s Mark Felt, whose identify as Deep Throat was revealed in 2005.

Leak author Max Holland zeroes in on the last great unanswered question of Watergate: Why did Felt, an FBI No. 2 on the short list to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, risk reputation and career to leak secrets to the Post?

Woodward and Bernstein paint Deep Throat, writes Holland, as a “selfless high-ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House.” But this is self-serving nonsense.

The truth was right in front of Woodward. His refusal to see it made him a willing or witless collaborator in the ruin of the reputation and career of an honorable pubic servant, Patrick Gray.

Read the complete article here

 

Daily Beast on Controversy Over Leak

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.

Woodward and Bernstein Respond to Leak . . . and a Rejoinder

 

By Michael Miner 04.04.12 at 10:30 AM, in the Chicago Reader

 

• Hollywood's Deep Throat

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were on a panel talking about Watergate Tuesday at the meeting of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. In the course of the conversation, they were asked about Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, a new book by Max Holland that deconstructs Felt's contribution to Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate coverage in the Washington Post. As I reported a few days ago in a long Bleader post on Leak, Holland's conclusion was that Felt's role as Deep Throat was more important than the two reporters have made it out to be and and considerably less virtuous.

According to Leak, Felt wanted to run the FBI, but President Nixon gave the job of acting director to L. Patrick Gray instead. And so, Holland writes, Felt set out to get it by “trying to prove to the White House, through anonymous leaks to the media, that Gray was dangerously incompetent and incapable of running the Bureau. Felt was supremely confident that because of his extensive counterintelligence experience, he could keep his hand invisible.”

Woodward, with whom Felt had a series of secret meetings, was a means to that end.

Woodward and Bernsten told the news editors Tuesday that Holland got it wrong. Here's a transcript of their remarks on Leak:

Moderator Alicia Shepard: There are a lot of myths about Watergate. One is that the two of you single-handedly took down the POTUS [president of the United States]. Is there one that bothers you?

Carl Bernstein: That’s certainly one! I mean this was about the system working! About the judiciary, as I said, the legislature . . . everybody . . . it worked. I think that’s the principal myth that I find . . . it’s an oversimplification. And the other one, I mentioned, is this idea that this was a “caper.”

Bob Woodward: And if I . . . just the idea that what we were writing, was just following what the FBI or the prosecutors were chasing. In January of ’73, the prosecutors put on the first Watergate trial and said, “Gordon Liddy was the mastermind.” And we had written a couple of dozen stories saying the people behind Watergate were Haldeman, the chief of staff; John Mitchell, the former attorney general; Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer; that Nixon’s appointments secretary, right there in the Oval Office, was running part of the sabotage campaign. It was a completely different picture from the sources we had. So that’s one of the myths that’s out there.

Shepard: So as you know, there’s a new book out called Leak. And in 1976 you talked in one of these old videos about describing Deep Throat as a “conscience-stricken man who crossed the lines for the best of reasons.” This new book says that Felt was cynical [and] opportunistic rather than noble. What do you think?

Woodward: I did a book called The Secret Man in 2005 when Mark Felt came forward and identified himself as that source. There’s nothing in that book that isn’t . . . I mean, I’ve said, there was an ambition, there was a manipulation. He disliked the press. One of the things you discover as a reporter [is] that people’s motives are not just unitary. They generally have . . . sometimes, particularly with somebody like Mark Felt and a complex mind, three or four or five layers. One of them was his disappointment at not being made FBI director. I knew him and dealt with him. He was troubled by what was going on in the Nixon White House. He was also trying to protect the FBI and people forget about this: he was not a volunteer. He didn’t come to us. We went to him, and I actually was . . . you used the term stalker . . . to get him to talk.

Bernstein: There’s another fundamental flaw in this book . . . I mean, Bob maybe won’t be as forthright as I am about it. And that is the idea that somehow Felt played us. That he tricked us into something. Nonsense. We obtained information all over the lot. It was rare that he volunteered information. He would occasionally confirm it. But certainly the idea that he played us is utter nonsense. Because the stories turned out to be true. The people who got played were the prosecutors. And they really got played, partly because the assistant attorney general [Henry Petersen] and the attorney general of the United States [Richard Kleindienst] were in on the play!

I asked Holland by e-mail to respond. He wrote back:

I think the record will show that the prosecutors' private understanding of the case in Jan '73 was not that different from Woodward's at the time. But publicly, the prosecutors had to present a case in court that was provable, NOT what they thought might have happened. They wanted the book thrown at Liddy, McCord and Hunt so that facing the prospect of serious prison time, one of them would crack. And one did . . . McCord.

Sandy Smith, who, in retrospect, broke just as many Watergate-related stories as Bernstein and Woodward, said it best: "There's a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes. . . . It's bunk. The press didn't do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than two percent that was truly original investigation."

In his remarks Woodward started to say, "There's nothing in that book [Leak] that isn't . . . ." But then he stopped himself before completing the sentence, because it's palpably untrue that Leak simply reiterates what he wrote in The Secret Man. Then, Woodward reverted to his current formulation about the supposed triad of motives that drove Felt, the many-layered no. 2 man at the FBI. Woodward asserts that besides being disappointed at not being made FBI director, Felt was "troubled" by what was going on in the Nixon White House, and was also trying "to protect the FBI."

Actually, in The Secret Man, Woodward wrote, "He [Felt] never really voiced pure, raw outrage to me about Watergate or what it represented." I believe that to be an accurate reflection of Felt's true behavior back then. For Woodward to underscore now that Felt was "troubled," well . . . I can't dispute that, not having been with them in the garage. It strikes me as a bit convenient though and at seeming odds with the 2005 sentence.

I will say that if Felt gave Woodward that vague impression, one has to wonder if it was part of Felt's act; or perhaps Woodward was projecting because that's what he wanted to think, or because it seemed plausible.

But the only thing that ever genuinely troubled Felt was that Richard Nixon didn't make him FBI director in May '72, or a year later.

As for the notion that Felt had to act to "protect" the FBI . . . that sounds profound, but upon close examination, there's no there there. Protect it from what? Presidents always want the FBI to act in accordance with their interests (see Bill Clinton), and Nixon was no different in this regard. But the Nixon administration's one ham-handed effort to attenuate the FBI's investigation into Watergate flopped miserably, and very quickly. As Mark Felt himself later wrote, "No one could have stopped the driving force of the [FBI's Watergate] investigation without an explosion in the Bureau—not even J. Edgar Hoover."

Re Woodward and Bernstein initiating the contact with Felt—that's true, of course, and no one is suggesting otherwise. Yet that has no actual bearing on whether Felt would or wouldn't try to use Woodstein subsequently for his own ends.

Re Bernstein's remarks, they subtly misrepresent what I wrote and believe. Towards the end of the book, despite everything, I defend their use of Felt as a source in summer/fall of '72. When the no. 2 man at the FBI is willing to talk, any journalist worth his or her salt listens. And the information or guidance or corroboration (or whatever you want to call it) that Felt supplied then was instrumental in the Post's (mostly accurate) coverage, and its clear lead over the rest of the press pack (with the notable exception of Time magazine, which had equivalent access to Felt). Nor do I ever suggest that Woodstein and Bernstein were mere stenographers, taking down what Felt told them and sticking it in the newspaper. To their ever-lasting credit, they did an enormous amount of legwork.

It is also indisputable, however, that Felt supplied Woodward with a lot of bad information. It seldom appeared in print. So what is the standard here? What Felt actually told W/B, as evinced by Woodward's typewritten notes? Or the articles as published? If only the latter, CB is right—except that one still has to keep in mind always that Felt's purpose was to have information traceable to the FBI appear in print, so as to incite White House. Bernstein is being disingenuous in making this supposed point.

The real problem here starts in 1974, when Woodward and Bernstein abrogate the deep background agreement unilaterally in All the President's Men. Simultaneously, they depict Felt as a principled and honorable source. Then it's a question of Woodward and Bernstein playing us, the reading public.

And now that Bernstein has raised the issue of who played whom, the more I think about it, the more I think it's probably owing to W/B's editors in 1972 (besides Bradlee . . . Barry Sussman, Harry Rosenfeld, and Howard Simons) that they weren't played by Felt. One thing that has been lost in the entire fairy tale is that it was a Post triumvirate, really, during the summer/fall of '72. Watergate editor Barry Sussman worked as closely with W/B as an editor possibly can. The only thing he didn't do was leave the newsroom to conduct interviews, or make the necessary telephone calls.

 

Michael Miner, Chicago Reader's media critic, on Leak

What Made Deep Throat Cough Up?

Posted by Michael Miner at 11.28 AM, 2 April 2012

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Journalists aren’t the only ones who know how to remember the worst of times as the best of times, but it’s a rare reporter of a certain age who doesn’t think of Watergate as pretty damned sweet. The story gave and gave and kept on giving, and when it was over the press could claim to have exchanged a corrupt president for a new national hero with an unbearably romantic nom de guerre. Who was Deep Throat? It was like asking, who was that masked man?

Or, perhaps, who shot Liberty Valance? “Deep Throat” was the mysterious source introduced by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All The President’s Men, a book that was celebrating their Watergate reporting for the Washington Post even before President Nixon resigned. We’ve known since 2005 that Deep Throat was the late Mark Felt, deputy associate director of the FBI at the time of Watergate. Now there’s a book, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, by investigative journalist Max Holland, that speculates shrewdly on Felt’s motives for leaking to Woodward (and not only Woodward), finds them cynical and opportunistic rather than noble, judges Woodward to be a shade obtuse and opportunistic, and leaves me (if no one else) wondering if we’d all have known years earlier than we did who Deep Throat was if we’d really wanted to know. As the newspaper man says at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” One measure of America’s reluctance to surrender the Deep Throat legend might be that the publisher Holland finally found for Leak was the University of Kansas Press.

In 1999 William Gaines—a former investigative reporter who won two Pulitzers at the Tribune before turning journalism professor at the University of Illinois—set out with his students to learn the identity of Deep Throat. They made one assumption—that Woodward and Bernstein had written about Deep Throat honestly and accurately. It was the wrong thing to assume. In 2003 Gaines and his students announced (at a Washington, D.C., news conference) that Deep Throat had been Fred Fielding, a White House lawyer. Among their reasons for ruling out anyone in the FBI—a quote attributed to Deep Throat in All the President’s Men had been attributed to a White House official when it first appeared in the Washington Post.

Gaines approved of the deception. "I'd said at one time that I thought they were rather careless in giving out a whole lot of information about Deep Throat," he told me in 2005. "When you have a confidential source you don't say anything about him. But as it turned out, they didn't do that. They fooled us. They were not giving up clues after all. The clues we saw deceived us."

But Gaines would have second thoughts. He joined forces with Max Holland, proprietor of the online newsletter, “Washington Decoded,” and together they took a long, close look at the Woodward-Felt relationship. In 2007 they jointly posted, on Holland’s website, a long critique of it. “It’s fair to say," said “Deep Throat 3.0,” that although All the President’s Men had portrayed Deep Throat as someone who merely confirmed or denied leads Woodward and Bernstein had developed, the truth was 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." What’s more, Woodward had been a lot less protective of Felt than he later made himself out to be. "At several pivotal moments," said “Deep Throat 3.0,” "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." Holland’s best example: the decision while writing All the President's Men to reveal that a Deep Throat existed at all.

But what were Felt’s interests? This is the question Holland continued to wrestle with, and Leak provides his answers. Holland believes Felt was not driven by a patriotic passion to expose lawlessness at the highest levels of government. Nor was he determined to focus culpability on the White House in order to protect his FBI from being dragged down by the scandal. And he wasn’t avenging himself against Nixon for having passed him over as J. Edgar Hoover’s successor by instead naming assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray as acting director of the FBI.

Holland argues that Felt still wanted Gray’s job, and set out to get it by “trying to prove to the White House, through anonymous leaks to the media, that Gray was dangerously incompetent and incapable of running the Bureau. Felt was supremely confident that because of his extensive counterintelligence experience, he could keep his hand invisible.” Felt was wrong. Gray could not imagine that Felt, his loyal right-hand man, was actually undermining him, but at the White House it became apparent someone in the FBI was leaking and that someone was probably Felt. According to Holland, Nixon shrank from firing him because Felt knew too much about the government’s illegal operations to alienate. Even so, in May 1973, just 11 months after the Watergate break-in, Felt resigned under fire.

“The portrait of Felt that emerges when we follow this thread,” Holland writes, “does not resemble any of Bob Woodward’s depictions. Felt held the news media in contempt and was neither a high-minded whistle-blower, nor was he genuinely concerned about defending his institution’s integrity. He was not even hopelessly embittered—just calculating.”

A point Holland is making here is that while the White House tried frantically to figure out who the leaker was, journalists who knew who the leaker was were not asking themselves, why's he doing it? Woodward is not the only famous journalist in Leak whose balloon Holland pops. Another is the late Sandy Smith. Smith was a legendary Chicago mob reporter for the Tribune and Sun-Times who by the time of Watergate had moved on to Life magazine and then to Time. “Smith’s relationship with the FBI had been instrumental to his success,” Holland writes. “With the knowledge of Bureau higher-ups, agents in the field would leak him raw information about public corruption, for example, from the files. The information might not constitute legal proof, or it might have been acquired by illegal means and thus be inadmissible in court. But the agents preferred to see it used in some way rather than simply gather dust.”

Smith was a stand-up guy who would never compromise a source in the slightest (unlike Woodward, we are invited to think). And Felt leaked to Smith as well as to Woodward, sometimes preferring the “tried-and-true” Smith to the “relatively untested” Woodward with important information. But like Mark Antony hailing Brutus, as Holland praises Smith he cuts him down to size: we see Smith as being what great reporters willing to take a bullet for their sources should most fear being: manipulable. Holland offers us Smith, armed with information stealthily acquired from Felt, writing a story for Time in 1973 that describes Patrick Gray “as deeply partisan, blatantly political, and bent on ‘turning the FBI into an arm of the administration.’” There is one “sensational disclosure”: from 1969 to 1971, on orders from the Nixon White House, the FBI had wiretapped both journalists and aides to national security adviser Henry Kissinger in an effort to find out who was leaking what to whom. “What was particularly egregious about this leak was that Gray had nothing to do with these wiretaps—they had ended well before he took over, and he didn’t even know about them,” Holland writes. But Felt thought that through Smith he could tar Gray with them, and he was right. “This leak underscored again Felt’s basic contempt for the media, his willingness to manipulate, if not deceive, Sandy Smith as well as Woodward.”

Looking back at Watergate, I’m a little astonished at how quickly Bernstein and Woodward became celebrities. In the fall of 1972—more than a year and a half before Nixon resigned—they signed a $55,000 contract to produce a quickie book on the scandal. And when they couldn’t figure out how to tackle such a volatile subject, Robert Redford suggested they write about themselves reporting it. This was not only a good idea, it was a movie Redford wanted to make; but it put Woodward in an awkward spot. What to do about Felt? They couldn’t write an honest book and leave him out. They couldn’t write him in without acknowledging the existence, if not the identity, of a high-placed anonymous source. So they both flattered Felt and exposed him; he became Deep Throat, scrupulous whistle-blower swaddled in mystique, played in the movie by Hal Holbrook as an enigmatic beacon of truth.

Holland tells me he’s sure that Woodward at some point stopped believing Felt was any such person, even though he kept up to the pose to the end—in his eulogy at Felt’s funeral and in the book he then wrote about him, The Secret Man. To Holland, this book is most interesting for everything Woodward found it necessary not to know—in particular the details behind Felt’s sudden resignation from the FBI—in order to draw his “flattering, if fuzzy and unsatisfying portrait of Deep Throat.” Holland concludes with the observation that “Felt’s success at manipulating the media is a cautionary tale.” In Holland's version of the Felt-Woodward relationship, there was less honor on either side than the book, or the movie, or certainly the legend would have it.

But try denting a legend!

 

Read the article online at the Chicago Reader