THROAT CLEARING
Deep Secret?
With Watergate's mystery solved, legend gives way to ambivalence.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY LEONARD GARMENT
Saturday, June 4, 2005 12:01 a.m.
It seems only civilized that every expiring political secret should get a decent burial. But the death of Deep Throat--via the recent announcement that this prime source was W. Mark Felt Jr., acting associate director of the FBI at the time of Watergate--does not deserve a state funeral.
The secret was, while it lasted, one of the wonders of American politics. Researchers scoured Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book, "All the President's Men," which brought Deep Throat to literary life, for identifying clues. Nixon insiders joined the hunt. Edward L. Morgan, assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of the Secret Service during the Nixon administration, wrongly named me--a former counsel to President Nixon--as Deep Throat. I took justifiable umbrage. I wrongly named former Nixon official John Sears as Deep Throat. He took justifiable umbrage.
Now it turns out that the linchpin of the structure supporting so many ideas about the nature of American government was a man who acted out of complicated motives. More, his words of encouragement to Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein--which were crucial to the reporters' consequential reporting on Watergate--were probably based on some things Mark Felt actually knew firsthand and others he did not.
Mr. Felt, now 91, was near the top of everyone's list of Deep Throat suspects from the time when "All the President's Men" was published. His high position in the FBI gave him extensive access to the Watergate investigation that the Bureau conducted after the break-in. Also, Mr. Felt, a former FBI special agent, knew about clandestine operations; after Watergate he was convicted for authorizing illegal break-ins in the early 1970s. (In 1981, Felt was pardoned by President Reagan.)
More, after the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, Mr. Felt thought he was the leading candidate to succeed Hoover as FBI director. But he was passed over in favor of L. Patrick Gray, a novice at law enforcement but a Nixon loyalist.
Finally, from the beginning of the Nixon presidency, relations between the White House and FBI career personnel were uneasy. The Bureau refused some requests for wiretaps and terminated others without consulting the White House. For its part, the White House acted to lessen its dependence on the FBI for intelligence by hiring its own investigators. After the break-in, the White House tried to block the FBI's investigation of the event. It was during the post-break-in pressure by the White House that Deep Throat began meeting with Mr. Woodward.
So why did many Deep Throat researchers--especially insiders--reject the idea of Mr. Felt? Because much information that Deep Throat provided was a matter less of specific facts about the Watergate investigation than about the nature of the Nixon White House. Deep Throat talked about the clockwork craziness the White House had become, about the sound of Nixon angry and the character of individuals involved in the coverup. These insights were presented with the certainty of personal experience. But they were not within the firsthand knowledge of an FBI official, even a senior one.
It may yet turn out that there were composite elements in Deep Throat and that some of these insights came from sources other than Mr. Felt. Or it may be that Mr. Felt presented to Mr. Woodward as authoritative information some things that were firsthand observations, some that were reliable secondhand gleanings, and some that were more or less informed surmises.
It might not have mattered. While Deep Throat was talking, Watergate burglar James McCord was mitigating his probable sentence by spilling the beans to the federal grand jury under the direction of Judge John Sirica. In this drama, which led directly to the exposure of the Watergate coverup, Deep Throat was a marginal player.
If Deep Throat was not critical to the unraveling of Watergate, then what was his importance? Perhaps it was to foster in American politics the idea that the central feature of our government is the secret knowledge held by those at the center of power, and that only through the bravery of whistleblowers like Deep Throat can the polity gain the keys to the secrets and the ability to reassert democratic control.
This idea has had consequences since Watergate, many of them problematic. In fact, it is an idea about which Mark Felt himself was, until this year, ambivalent. Against the arguments of his family, he resisted identifying himself as Deep Throat, saying that he feared he might be seen as a turncoat rather than a decent man. This ambivalence and the mixed motives that gave rise to it are now on public view, replacing the legend created by "All the President's Men." In this display of very ordinary human impulses, Deep Throat is laid to rest.
Mr. Garment, former counsel to President Nixon, is author of "In Search of Deep Throat" (Basic Books, 2000).
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