For once, we agree with Washington Post chief ruminator Hank Stuever: On one level, it’s kind of depressing to know who Deep Throat is. Not because we didn’t want to know, but because what we’ve found out takes a little something away from the parties involved, as well as the myth that has risen around them.
“The hiding of Deep Throat’s identity took on a larger mythic status than any scoop Deep Throat provided, and much of Washington — media, officialdom, even tourists who snapped the Watergate complex — guarded the almost holy belief in Deep Throat,” writes Stuever, in an early retrospective of sorts. “He was the perfect, nameless god. It was the idea that reporters (and their background sources) could save the world, and that trust was still trust, and truth was still true.”
But now we know that Deep Throat — aka Mark Felt — wasn’t acting out of a strictly patriotic impulse. True, he wanted, first and foremost, to keep Richard Nixon from taking control of the FBI, and that can be construed as patriotism of a sort. But he also had a personal motivation: Nixon had decided against promoting Felt, the FBI’s number two man, after J. Edgar Hoover died. Instead, Nixon brought in an outsider, L. Patrick Gray, who, Felt (correctly) came to suspect, was funneling raw and incriminating FBI files to a White House intent on quashing the G-men’s investigation of itself.
So Felt, the disappointed careerist, was left to wonder, “Who else should have this information?” And his answer made history.
The letdown from finding out Deep Throat’s identity was perhaps inevitable — how could reality ever live up to myth? But these revelations were nonetheless deflating. Our “perfect nameless god,” it turns out, is just a man, with motivations both petty and heroic, and that came as a shock to the idealists among us, even if we should have known better.
Two Nixon loyalists had a simpler take. Patrick Buchanan thinks “Mark Felt behaved treacherously,” and adds, “I’m unable to see the nobility of the enterprise, sneaking around in garages, moving pots around, handing over material he got in the course of the investigation.”
And Charles Colson, displaying a naivete that would seem endearing if it didn’t seem so calculated, says that he “can understand that [Felt] may have had some moral reservations about what was happening, but the right way to do it is to look the president in the eye and tell him, it isn’t to go sneaking around dark alleys and talking to reporters. If the president had blown him off, he could have held a press conference and announced what he had done and he would have been a hero.”
Buchanan’s comment is reductive and unfair, and Colson’s is just plain ridiculous. Both men imply that the manly thing to do would have been to deal with this out in the open — not “sneaking around in garages,” but by “look[ing] the president in the eye” — but that’s so simplistic and wrongheaded it’s almost inconceivable that it could have come from people who supposedly understand how Washington works.
As for Woodward and Bernstein, we’re with Timothy Noah: What’s with the claim that Deep Throat was a heavy smoker, which appears in All The President’s Men? “Felt quit smoking in 1943. I suppose Woodstein would call this necessary misdirection. I call it conscious fabrication, however trivial,” writes Noah.
Omitting such fiction from All the President’s Men would hardly have exposed Felt, so one has to wonder why it was included, other than for purposes of false color. To state the obvious, whether you like it or not, once you fabricate in a nonfiction book, it brings your other reporting into question. We understand that Woodward and Bernstein had to protect their prize source, even after the fact, but their decision to invent false details instead of just omitting real ones isn’t an easy one to defend.
So we won’t.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.