We usually reserve our tips of the hat for reporters who have pulled off first-rate examples of journalism with teeth, but just this once we’ll break with our young tradition to give a nod of respect to Mark Felt, the FBI deputy director who, it’s now known, was Deep Throat, the anonymous source who helped bring down the Nixon administration.
Felt didn’t always funnel new information to reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; that wasn’t his specialty. But he did confirm their hunches when they were on the right path in uncovering the machinations of President Nixon, and he steered them away from more than one dead end.
His motivations will be discussed elsewhere; for us, it suffices to say that no man is an unalloyed example of noble intentions. But what’s not in doubt is that Felt, operating from inside an investigative bureaucracy that found itself stymied by a White House trying to quash a criminal inquiry, took it upon himself to resort to extraordinary measures — measures that may have saved the Republic.
What’s also not in doubt is that the entire Deep Throat saga takes on new relevance at a time when the debate over anonymous sources has never been more spirited — and when at least two reporters may face jail time for protecting their sources.
As Richard Ben-Veniste, Watergate special prosecutor, told the New York Times yesterday, “whistle-blowers play a very important role in uncovering government abuses, particularly where the executive exerts a level of authority that borders on arrogance and where there is little by way of checks and balances to uncover these kinds of abuses.”
David Halberstam, speaking to James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times, put it this way:
“This is a perfect example of why, sometimes as a reporter, you would be willing to fly in the night — perhaps a little in the dark — with someone because you take them very, very seriously. Sure, anonymous sources can be abused. But every once in a while they are simply mandatory … for a democracy to work.”
And Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher shares our sentiments on the matter: “While it is obviously preferable to have as much news on the record as possible, and the trend toward tightening anonymous sourcing can only lead to more reader confidence in news, the reminder of what … ‘Woodstein’ and Felt accomplished through detailed, methodical, and multi-sourced reporting about a high-government scandal is important. For a generation of readers who were not even around when Watergate occurred and [who] view [all] anonymous sourcing of today as merely bias, laziness, or cheap shots, a fresh look at Deep Throat’s accomplishments, power, and positive contribution to U.S. history, is welcomed.”
John D. O’Connor writes in his Vanity Fair piece breaking the Felt story that, “[d]eep in his psyche, it is clear to me, he still has qualms about his actions, but he also knows that historic events compelled him to behave as he did.” O’Connor’s conclusion: ”I believe that Mark Felt is one of America’s greatest secret heroes.”
That may be spreading it on a little thick. But it’s abundantly clear that W. Mark Felt, a secret no more, will at the very least go down as one of journalism’s greatest heroes.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.