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reepadeep throat
Jul. 6th, 2005 08:57 pmBob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat
Every once in a while there's a book I want to read but know I don't want to buy, and don't want to wait for a library copy. It's time to read it standing up in the bookstore, something I'm equally apt to do without conscious intent. And the bookstore that lets me get away with this gets my custom when I do decide to buy books.*
So it was with Bob Woodward's new book telling the full history of Deep Throat (from which his long article in the WaPost on how he met the man was excerpted). As an old Watergate junkie I had to know the whole story.
It begins with a scene of Woodward, twenty years after Watergate, reading newly-released FBI files, hoping to get a sense of Felt's POV. He's startled to find a memo from Felt demanding investigation into possible FBI leaks behind a Woodstein article on Dita Beard. Deep Throat is investigating himself? What is going on? Then Woodward remembers - he'd never talked with Deep Throat about Dita Beard. Clever Felt! Instant deniability.
I'm amazed at how well the secret kept over the years, especially considering - and this I had not known - how many people fingered Felt immediately. Nixon and Haldeman had always thought Felt was leaking. The concept of a high-placed anonymous source called Deep Throat hit the public awareness with the publication of All the President's Men in April 1974, and in the June issue of Washingtonian magazine, Jack Limpert fixed on Felt as the most plausible candidate. Washingtonian magazine isn't easy to find, but Woodward also points you to the front-page feature article in the Wall Street Journal for 25 June 1974, which also fingers Felt as the most likely suspect. With, needless to say, his denial. (I promptly photocopied this article from the library.) Still, it's amazing, and even more amazing how many subsequent researchers never guessed.
Woodward makes clear how tentative his relationship with the prickly, skittish Felt always was. When he and Bernstein were writing All the President's Men, they asked several of their anonymous sources if they'd now consent to be identified. Some, such as Hugh Sloan, said yes. But Felt said absolutely not. Woodward decided he could, and should, use the story with the silly nickname anyway. After publication he called Felt to get his reaction to all this. Felt hung up the phone, apparently not untypical behavior. Several years later Woodward asked again: still a definite no. After that Woodward left Felt alone for many years.
Then about 2000, Woodward began to hear that Felt had been talking. Contacting him, he found a man who'd mellowed dramatically, but was also suffering from dementia so severe he sometimes couldn't remember anything about Watergate at all. Woodward decided that consent from Felt would now be meaningless. When the Vanity Fair article was published a month ago, Woodward was at first inclined to decline comment, but his editor convinced him the story was now out of his hands. He pulled out the manuscript he'd written against the day, added an epilogue by Bernstein about the story's unveiling, and here the book is.
And on this very day, Pat Gray dies. He doesn't come off well in Felt's version of Watergate, or indeed in any version except his own.
UPDATE: The Washingtonian's speculative 1974 articles are online here, and match the WSJ's quotes from them.
*Actually, this is most of them. The only bookstore that ever actively objected to my reading on its premises died a slow and lingering death soon thereafter. And I wasn't even reading a whole book, just a short story, and was carrying under my arm several other books which, up until that moment, I had been intending to buy.
Every once in a while there's a book I want to read but know I don't want to buy, and don't want to wait for a library copy. It's time to read it standing up in the bookstore, something I'm equally apt to do without conscious intent. And the bookstore that lets me get away with this gets my custom when I do decide to buy books.*
So it was with Bob Woodward's new book telling the full history of Deep Throat (from which his long article in the WaPost on how he met the man was excerpted). As an old Watergate junkie I had to know the whole story.
It begins with a scene of Woodward, twenty years after Watergate, reading newly-released FBI files, hoping to get a sense of Felt's POV. He's startled to find a memo from Felt demanding investigation into possible FBI leaks behind a Woodstein article on Dita Beard. Deep Throat is investigating himself? What is going on? Then Woodward remembers - he'd never talked with Deep Throat about Dita Beard. Clever Felt! Instant deniability.
I'm amazed at how well the secret kept over the years, especially considering - and this I had not known - how many people fingered Felt immediately. Nixon and Haldeman had always thought Felt was leaking. The concept of a high-placed anonymous source called Deep Throat hit the public awareness with the publication of All the President's Men in April 1974, and in the June issue of Washingtonian magazine, Jack Limpert fixed on Felt as the most plausible candidate. Washingtonian magazine isn't easy to find, but Woodward also points you to the front-page feature article in the Wall Street Journal for 25 June 1974, which also fingers Felt as the most likely suspect. With, needless to say, his denial. (I promptly photocopied this article from the library.) Still, it's amazing, and even more amazing how many subsequent researchers never guessed.
Woodward makes clear how tentative his relationship with the prickly, skittish Felt always was. When he and Bernstein were writing All the President's Men, they asked several of their anonymous sources if they'd now consent to be identified. Some, such as Hugh Sloan, said yes. But Felt said absolutely not. Woodward decided he could, and should, use the story with the silly nickname anyway. After publication he called Felt to get his reaction to all this. Felt hung up the phone, apparently not untypical behavior. Several years later Woodward asked again: still a definite no. After that Woodward left Felt alone for many years.
Then about 2000, Woodward began to hear that Felt had been talking. Contacting him, he found a man who'd mellowed dramatically, but was also suffering from dementia so severe he sometimes couldn't remember anything about Watergate at all. Woodward decided that consent from Felt would now be meaningless. When the Vanity Fair article was published a month ago, Woodward was at first inclined to decline comment, but his editor convinced him the story was now out of his hands. He pulled out the manuscript he'd written against the day, added an epilogue by Bernstein about the story's unveiling, and here the book is.
And on this very day, Pat Gray dies. He doesn't come off well in Felt's version of Watergate, or indeed in any version except his own.
Thus spak the Patryk Gray, a baldyng guye,
"Ful wel I loved to serv the FBYe,
But shame, I burned the fyls and sore hav synnd
And dizzy-grow from hangyn slow, slow in the wynd."-- Judith Wax, The Waterbury Tales
UPDATE: The Washingtonian's speculative 1974 articles are online here, and match the WSJ's quotes from them.
*Actually, this is most of them. The only bookstore that ever actively objected to my reading on its premises died a slow and lingering death soon thereafter. And I wasn't even reading a whole book, just a short story, and was carrying under my arm several other books which, up until that moment, I had been intending to buy.
