Behind the scenes with Deep Throat
The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, By Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 249 pp., $23
For three decades, publishers have rolled out books revealing the misdeeds of the Watergate scandal that almost ruined the American presidency, but precious few have helped us to understand how that office was ultimately saved. Bob Woodward's new work, ''The Secret Man," is one of the best at illuminating the backstage battle to bring President Nixon's team to account.
While his retelling is often choppy and adds little to our knowledge about the crimes and betrayals, Woodward's account is eye-opening as he describes the slow and tortuous building of trust between two men -- reporter and source -- who brought the web of deceit into public light. Their relationship was one of the most unusual in American history, played a pivotal role in bringing the country back from the edge of chaos, and should reassure us about the future of American politics.
The ''Secret Man" was, of course, W. Mark Felt, who recently unmasked himself as the famed Deep Throat who talked clandestinely with Woodward in an underground garage during the height of the Watergate crisis, confirming key details of the Nixon administration's illegal campaign to undermine its political opposition. Woodward writes that the two men first met accidentally in the basement of the West Wing in 1969 or '70, when Felt, a powerful FBI official, was waiting for a White House meeting and Woodward, then a naval lieutenant, was trying to deliver a package. Felt was in his mid-50s, Woodward in his mid-20s.
Uncertain of his career path but already accomplished at drawing out information, Woodward peppered Felt with questions, gradually learning his identity and adding him to a network of those who could help him in life. By June 1972, when Nixon's henchmen broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, Woodward had become a hungry, rising metro reporter at The
Woodward had come to see Felt as a mentor and, within 72 hours of the break-in, reached him by phone for valuable guidance. That began a series of cloak-and-dagger conversations over the next two years in a commercial garage across the Potomac River in Rosslyn, Va., and in other secret locations. Woodward was the ever-prying, ever-nagging reporter, startled by what he was learning, while Felt often played cat and mouse, gradually handing Woodward bits of information to chew over. Within three months, Felt had provided such a clear road map to the myriad crimes of the Nixon operation that Woodward and partner Carl Bernstein became convinced -- hush-hush, not to be shared in the Post newsroom -- that Watergate would bring Nixon's impeachment. That was fully two years before Nixon was forced to resign. Because of Felt, these two young reporters could already foresee the denouement. No one else in Washington did, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon himself.
Why did Felt put his career, and possibly his life, on the line to spill information to Woodward? What was his motivation? What was he trying to achieve? Woodward says that as he was reporting the story, he was swimming upstream so fast he didn't much care -- he just knew he could rely on Felt for the truth. But ever since Nixon's resignation, Woodward has tried to figure out Felt's underlying motivation. Despite repeated attempts, he's never pinned it down, and with Felt now 91 and his memory almost gone, we're unlikely ever to know.
Woodward concludes that Felt was courageous and patriotic but does not go so far as to call him a national hero. Some observers have argued recently that Felt must have been acting with a high purpose, morally offended by the mendacity of the Nixon operation, and that Felt went to the press to talk because he believed that Patrick Gray, the FBI's director, was already working hand in glove with White House aide John Dean.
That is not the picture Woodward paints. Felt ''never really voiced pure, raw outrage to me about Watergate or what it represented," Woodward writes. Moreover, Felt started talking to Woodward in June 1972, and Gray apparently didn't start turning over documents to Dean until October. Before talking to the press, Felt could have gone to Gray or to the US Attorney's office, but he chose to act on his own. Even while talking with Woodward, Felt was authorizing black-bag burglaries at the homes of friends and family members of the militant Weathermen -- again, acting without Gray's approval. (A jury eventually found Felt guilty of conspiracy in those burglaries; a pardon from President Reagan got him off the hook.) Clearly, Felt was no altar boy in the land of the wicked.
What, then, was his motivation? Woodward speculates that Felt saw himself as leader of the FBI in a power struggle with Nixon's White House. Like his earlier boss J. Edgar Hoover, Felt viewed the bureau, Woodward writes, ''as a pillar that stands to protect law-abiding citizens and, if in that process the FBI had to become a law unto itself, so be it." Nixon's aides, whom Felt thought obnoxious, were trying to take over the FBI from the top by appointing Gray as director, and also tried to block FBI agents from conducting a full Watergate probe. Felt probably went to Woodward because he wanted to generate the publicity that would stop Nixon's men -- perhaps he wanted to bring them down -- and in that he succeeded.
Woodward remains torn in his final evaluation. While he admires Felt's courage and appreciates the importance of the road map to conspiracy that Felt provided, Woodward also finds the philosophy of power embraced by Hoover and Felt ''frightening."
More important than the purity of Felt's action, however, is what his relationship with Woodward represents and its place in the larger mosaic of the Watergate scandal. From the perspective of several decades, we can see Woodward and Felt as the most celebrated partnership of reporter and source in the 20th century. But when Woodward placed his first anxious call to Felt on June 19, 1972, and Felt told him the third-rate burglary at Watergate was going to ''heat up" (before abruptly hanging up), they were warily testing each other. Neither knew if he could rely on the other -- one for truth, one for protection. Felt desperately wanted to stay hidden, but he also wanted the story out. Tentatively, cautiously, Felt let Woodward into the inner sanctum of knowledge, and Woodward began tenaciously keeping Felt's identity a secret -- even from Bernstein at the start.
Woodward and Felt's relationship, as the author describes it, was ''neurotic and paranoid." But gradually they built up trust. In Woodward's eyes, they became nearly father and son. And it matters greatly that Woodward fought to keep faith with Felt. One of Woodward and Bernstein's most important contributions to American journalism was to protect Felt's anonymity for all these years -- until Felt himself broke the story. That fierce commitment not only allowed Woodward unparalleled access to more than a generation of top American officials since Watergate but also lifted the credibility of hundreds of other investigative reporters whose work has kept the power elite more honest. For all its flaws, the press is a better watchdog today because of Woodward and Bernstein.
When Nixon was finally forced out of office -- a tragic but necessary end -- critics concluded that ''the system worked." And so it had: The courts, Congress, and a free press had served as checks and balances against the excesses of the executive, just as the nation's founders had planned. But behind ''the system" were individual citizens who stood up to resist and found strength in one another. Woodward found a partner he could trust in Ben Bradlee, the Post's editor, as well as in Felt. He and Bernstein learned to trust each other, too. US Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker, men of different parties, found they could trust each other during their investigations. The country found it could trust men like Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, and Judge John Sirica, who demanded that Nixon release tapes of White House conversations.
In the end, that is the most important and reassuring part of the Watergate saga. Some men may misuse power and sabotage institutions in the name of some alleged higher good, as Nixon did. But a free society encourages others to rise against them, and in the process to find unexpected partners -- people whose motivations are mixed but whose joint efforts protect us from tyranny. That is the heart of the relationship between Bob Woodward and Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt.
David Gergen served in the Nixon White House from 1971 to 1974, heading up the speechwriting and research team beginning in 1973. An adviser to three other presidents, he is now a professor and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School. 
