Reason Contributing Editor and Deputy Most Interesting Man in the World Glenn Garvin has a fine piece up at the Miami Herald about a new book by Max Holland called Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat. The upshot? That the image of Felt as a high-minded truth-teller is wrong, wrong, wrong. Excerpt:
The real story is "considerably messier and less than a fairy tale," Holland writes in Leak. Through interviews, declassified documents and Nixon's White House tapes, he demonstrates convincingly that Felt's objectives were covetous rather than civic: He desperately wanted to be director of the FBI.
Less than a month before the Watergate break-in, the top FBI job had come open for the first time in 37 years with the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Enraged that he hadn't gotten the job, Felt saw Watergate as an opportunity to shatter the career of the man who did, Nixon's friend L. Patrick Gray.
Felt began systematically leaking material from the FBI's Watergate investigation. He knew Nixon, whose paranoia about leaks was legendary in Washington, would figure out that the source was somewhere in the FBI. Gray would be blamed, lose his job (he hadn't yet been confirmed by the Senate and was officially only acting director) and Felt would be the logical replacement.
Felt played the Washington media like a mighty Wurlitzer, planting his leaks not just with the [Washington] Post but Time magazine, the Washington Daily News and anybody else who would take them. As his scheme began to work, with Nixon pressing Gray hard to plug the leaks, Felt stood smugly by as other FBI officials were demoted or threatened with the loss of their jobs. […]
Even more damning to the romantic image of Deep Throat as the guy in the white hat standing up to the Nixon Gang at high noon is what he didn't leak. For instance, the unsuccessful but quite genuine blackmail the FBI used against Martin Luther King Jr., using illicit tapes of sexual incidents to try to force his resignation. Or the FBI campaign of burglaries ("black-bag jobs," they were called) against anti-war groups, which were directed by Felt himself.
Charles Paul Freund surveyed the Deep Throat guessing-game as it stood in 2002. Jesse Walker talked about the Felt unveiling when it happened. I compared Bob Woodward to Judith Miller (doh!) in 2006. A conspiratorial passage from the latter:
Woodward met Mark "Deep Throat" Felt not as a reporter but as a visitor to the White House on Navy intelligence business in 1970. At the time Felt led an FBI "goon squad" charged with making impromptu visits to the agency's field offices to make sure they were following director J. Edgar Hoover's dictates, according to Woodward's June 2005 recollection for the Post. "Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world," he wrote. "I turned it into a career-counseling session." Within months, Woodward's career received a surprisingly powerful boost: The Post hired him, despite his glaring lack of journalism experience.
We have a pretty good handle on Miller's motivations: She loves intrigue, is intoxicated by power, and believes Islamic terrorism is the biggest threat to the country. But what of Woodward's?
