Max Holland

C-SPAN Features Leak

C-SPAN Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service.
Max Holland on Watergate
July 2, 2012, 9:00 PM EDT

Historian and researcher Max Holland critiques the view of the FBI 's Mark Felt presented by Bob Woodward. Using the Woodward and Bernstein papers at the University of Texas, Holland claims that Felt's motivations were selfish: that he wanted to become FBI director and his leaks were intended to get J. Edgar Hoover-successor Patrick Gray fired—not to get Nixon impeached. Holland also compares the Woodward and Bernstein book All the President's Men to their original reporting notes, and he argues that they changed key information.

Here's an excerpt.

July 2 at 9:00 PM EDT - C-SPAN3 (58 MIN)

Watergate: The Director's Cut

 

What Director Alan Pakula’s Papers Reveal About Watergate

Jun 12, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Ben Bradlee isn’t the only one raising questions about All the President’s Men. Max Holland probes director Alan Pakula’s papers and finds more evidence of literary license.

The New Journalism wave was cresting when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward published All the President’s Men in 1974. Yet the book, curiously, was not considered an outstanding exemplar. The two were hailed, rather, as New Muckrakers, befitting the emphasis on them as Washington Post reporters rather than Simon & Schuster authors. 

Affixing ATPM in the New Journalism firmament however, even at this late date, explains a lot about the book and the controversy it still generates 40 years after the “third-rate burglary” that brought down a president. Just last month, the revelation (in Jeff Himmelman’s new biography) that Post executive editor Ben Bradlee harbored a “residual fear in [his] soul” about the accuracy of some Deep Throat–related details in ATPM provoked a major media flap.

The basis for evaluating ATPM against the backdrop of the New Journalism comes from an unimpeachable source: the Alan J. Pakula papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. This is mildly surprising because no one was more responsible than Pakula, director of the eponymous 1976 movie, for turning "Woodstein" into the heroes of a mythic Hollywood Western (albeit one set in Washington).

Yet Pakula also sought to inject well-researched verisimilitude in his film. He obtained a heretofore unseen copy of Woodstein’s typewritten notes from a September 1972 interview with a key Watergate source. He interviewed Woodstein in 1975, as well as Harry Rosenfeld and Barry Sussman, the editors who directly supervised their work, and many others. All this occurred well before memories had become distant or gauzy. The Watergate duo had yet to become icons. Their recollections, and recollections about them, were not yet fully scripted.

*    *    *

From left to right: Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Dustin Hoffman, director Alan J. Pakula, and Martin Balsam, in 1976. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

Before delving into the papers, it’s useful to recall what the New Journalism was all about. The technique employed literary devices that were normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in essays and books that purported to be nonfiction. New Journalism apostle Tom Wolfe asserted the style was not only not fiction, but had “already proven itself more accurate than traditional journalism.”

Wolfe identified the four tools New Journalism practitioners used to such great effect:

• Using scenes as much as possible to tell a story rather than a chronological narrative
  
  
• Dialogue in full rather than the use of quotes or statements
  
  
• A point of view (scenes always presented through the subjective eyes of a participant)
  
  
• Attention to everyday details, such as habits, possessions, and friends or family.

Woodstein only had to be nudged to resort to these devices when they wrote ATPM (although they certainly hadn’t used them in their 1972 Watergate coverage for the newspaper). Woodward once aspired to be a novelist. He crafted an entire book before graduating from Yale, only to be devastated when a publisher responded with a boilerplate rejection. Bernstein, according to the 1976 book The New Muckrakers by Len Downie Jr. (Bradlee’s eventual successor), saw 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”—a form Bernstein regarded as mere “stenography.” After covering the 1967 march on the Pentagon, the subject matter of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Armies of the Night, Bernstein had been so “bowled over” by Mailer’s technique, according to Woodstein biographer Alicia Shepard, that he pushed for ATPM to use the same third-person voice in a firsthand account.

The New Journalism was not without its detractors. The critic Dwight MacDonald argued it was actually a bastard form—“parajournalism” he called it—for the style was trying to have it both ways: “exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.” In the hands of a less-than-scrupulous writer, the shifting of gears could be so casual that a reader would have no way of knowing, at any given moment, which end was up.

If ATPM owes a debt to the New Journalism, what model of it did Woodstein embrace? Answering this question is where the Pakula papers come in particularly handy.

*    *    *

Pakula conducted one of his frankest interviews in 1975 with Barry Sussman, a city editor at the Post at the time of the break-in. He became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, when managing editor Howard Simons decided to go after the story full-bore. Thus in reality, a troika—not a duo—was responsible for the summer/fall 1972 coverage that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, according to Pakula’s notes, Simons and metro editor Harry Rosenfeld thought Sussman himself should have been put up for a Pulitzer.

Read the entire article here.

Very Short List

• Today’s VSL
• About Us
• My Account
• Archive
• Subscribe
• Search

• 12 Jun 2012  culture  Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat

Forty years after the Watergate scandal, my new book, Leak, investigates the motivation behind one of history’s most successful anonymous sources. [1 of 3]   today’s Very Short List: culture 12 Jun 2012 by Max Holland, a journalist and author who also edits the website Washington Decoded. WEBSITE  WASHINGTON DECODED  BOOK Subscribe Forward Share   This week, The Washington Post hosted a panel on how we remember Watergate. The storied paper is a captive of Woodward and Bernstein’s fairy tale. [2 of 3]   John Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is one of the best films on journalism, as it shows how a legend can trump the facts. [3 of 3]   Images (in order): cover of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat; photo by Florian Hirzinger via Wikimedia Commons; still from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.		very short list is a delightful e-mail that shares cultural gems from a different curator every day. Subscribe Forward My Account Unsubscribe tech 11 Jun 2012 Paul Ingrassia On Real Fictional Cars food 8 Jun 2012 Annia Ciezadlo On Lebanese Chef Barbara Abdeni Massaad design 7 Jun 2012 Dylan Lathrop On The Shape Of Design

PREVIOUS VSLs •

• Today’s VSL
• About Us
• My Account
• Archive
• Subscribe
• Terms + Conditions
• Privacy Policy

very fine print: ©2012 Observer VSL LLC. 321 West 44th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10036 USA. All rights reserved. Questions? (212) 755-2400.

Washington Times Reviews Leak

 

Revealing Snitch's Motivation

 

By Wes Vernon

As America approaches the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, which brought down the Nixon presidency, no historical discussion of the scandal will be complete without including the extensive research done by author Max Holland.

Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat centers on a little-known but significant factor that drove much of the drama: the pure personal pique of one man. Mark Felt, then the FBI’s No. 2 official, was miffed that President Nixon had not appointed him to replace the legendary J. Edgar Hoover upon the latter’s death nearly seven weeks before the break-in.

Washington has long been a magnet for those imbued with the worst instincts of the Machiavellian back-stabber. Even by that standard, Felt’s deceitful maneuvering against the man the president had picked for the job, the decent but altogether too trusting L. Patrick Gray, leaves one breathless.

As a veteran of the FBI, the somewhat obsequious Felt had ingratiated himself to Hoover. With a feigned transfer of that loyalty to the newly appointed Gray, the man who would become “Deep Throat” actually set out to destroy his new boss. It rankled him that Gray had been selected from outside the bureau’s ranks for the top job (pending confirmation).

Felt accomplished his destructive goal in several ways, the centrality of which was leaking to the media details of the FBI’s ongoing Watergate investigation. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were among the chief beneficiaries of that steady stream of information.

Because the specifics of the probe had not yet been made public, spreading the incomplete findings to the public would make it appear to the White House that Gray was incapable of controlling the agency—and also leave the impression that the FBI was complicit in a cover-up. Felt’s goal was that Gray would be denied the permanent appointment as director and, while making his exit, would recommend his “loyal aide,” Mark Felt.

Read the entire review here.