Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

By Johanna McGeary

He's a confused old man now with a prosaic name, but he will live forever in American history as Deep Throat. The real W. Mark Felt, the FBI bureaucrat unveiled by Vanity Fair last week as the country's most famous anonymous source, will always be obscured by that mythic shadowman who whispered secrets in an underground garage to a young Washington Post reporter, damning the Nixon presidency to its eventual demise.

In the public memory, Watergate is generally summed up like this: the Post and its inseparable reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down President Richard Nixon by unraveling the Administration's cover-up of political espionage in a thrilling journalistic chase led by the spectral figure known as Deep Throat. But if the secret of his identity, held fast by four men for 33 years, is no more, there is still mystery in the nature and meaning of his role in Watergate. Was Deep Throat a villain or a hero, driven by base motives or noble ones? And was he in fact the central player he has become in our minds?

Felt's revelation stunned Washington, including (and perhaps especially) the three other men who had protected his secret for so long. For years, the Post reporters and their boss, Ben Bradlee, who was executive editor of the Post during the Watergate era, had vowed never to expose Felt before his death, and Woodward and Bernstein argued against confirming his identity even after the Vanity Fair story came out. But all three realized Felt had voided their honorably kept pledge to protect him, and his admission effectively backed up their long-standing contention that Deep Throat was neither fiction nor a composite. Bradlee says he never asked for Deep Throat's name until after Nixon had resigned. But he steadily supported his young investigators through months of intense pressure, he tells TIME, on the basis of the knowledge that "it was a highly placed law-enforcement official, and I presumed that he was in the Justice Department"--and the fact that "never once was any information he was responsible for wrong." Yet in retrospect, he adds, "if I did this again, I probably would insist on knowing who the hell it was earlier."

Even now, there are a handful of people, especially among Nixon loyalists convinced the President was wrongfully hounded from power by a vengeful press, who refuse to accept that Felt and Deep Throat are one and the same. "I thought Deep Throat was essentially a composite character" folding in a number of informers, "and I still think it is," says G. Gordon Liddy, the tough-guy White House operative who went to jail for, among other dirty tricks, helping to plan the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington by five men who were caught in the act, carrying eavesdropping equipment. Less partisan players share his theory. David Obst, the agent for Woodward and Bernstein's best seller about Watergate, All the President's Men, told TIME, "There was no Deep Throat. I'm sorry. It was a construct put together to give the book and the movie a dramatic tale" after the authors' first draft of a public-affairs book "didn't work out."

"Total b________," replies Bernstein. It's true the first draft of the book didn't have Deep Throat in it, he says, but it didn't have Woodward and Bernstein either, and that doesn't make them inventions. Scott Armstrong, a former Senate Watergate committee investigator and onetime Woodward collaborator on The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, thinks Deep Throat's role was somewhat distorted by the high drama of shadowy garage encounters with Woodward that were featured in the book's movie version, in which the journalist is played by Robert Redford. Says Armstrong: "Bob gave Redford some s___ once about pulling Deep Throat out of context." Armstrong also notes that Woodward and Bernstein had lots of equally important sources for their stories. "Before this week," he says, "there were at least 10 people in Washington who would have passed polygraphs saying they were the real Deep Throat."

Felt, for his part, had good reason to speak up now, according to Vanity Fair: mortality and money. A leading suspect for years, he had always firmly denied he was Deep Throat, including in his memoir, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside, published in 1979. But at 91, wrote author John O'Connor, a lawyer for the family, Felt, who had a stroke in 2001, is frail and suffers from confusion and memory loss. Members of his family, led by daughter Joan, said they wanted the world to know what Felt did before he died. Although he had admitted his secret identity to intimates and family in recent years, he was still reluctant to disclose it to the public, fearing that others, especially his confreres in the FBI, would judge it dishonorable. But his family argued posterity would regard Felt as a "true patriot" who "did the right thing" and now deserves the credit.

And the money. The Felt family saw how Woodward and Bernstein had cashed in on the Deep Throat mystery in the book and the movie. According to O'Connor, whom Vanity Fair paid about $10,000 for the story, Woodward had deflected the family's efforts to collaborate on a Deep Throat book. Now the Felts wanted their share. "Bob Woodward's gonna get all the glory for this," Joan, a mother of two, told her father, "but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education." Felt's competence to produce a memoir at this point is in question, but he seemed eager to try last week when he cheerfully told reporters besieging his daughter's California house, where he lives, "I'll arrange to write a book or something and get all the money I can." O'Connor and Felt's agent, David Kuhn, met with publishers in New York City last week, but opinion was divided on how large an advance such a book would get. Caught by surprise at the sudden exposure of a secret he had obviously hoped to publish once Deep Throat was dead, Woodward is rushing to print next month with a slender volume recounting his relationship with Felt.

If Felt's reasons for unmasking himself are a mix of high and low, so too were his apparent motives for talking to Woodward in the first place. After all, Felt was a by-the-book G-man, a ramrod-straight protege of J. Edgar Hoover's who made the FBI his life. In their book, Woodstein, as the Post duo came to be called, portrayed their source as a contradictory character who liked gossip and drink and had grown fiercely disillusioned by the "switchblade mentality" of the Nixon White House. But in a long Washington Post piece last week, presumably from his upcoming book, Woodward says, "With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time ... to ask why [our sources] were talking or whether they had an ax to grind."

In a perceptive 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly, former Post reporter James Mann speculated that Felt or another top FBI official was the one who had leaked to Woodward as a way to protect his beloved FBI from Nixon's efforts to use the agency for political purposes. Deep Throat, wrote Mann, probably resented the appointment of outsider and Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray to replace FBI Director Hoover, who had died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and wanted to blunt White House efforts to suppress the FBI investigation of the burglary. Of course, the FBI under Hoover had its problems with autocratic control and operations outside the normal bounds of law enforcement. In 1980 Felt was convicted of approving "black-bag jobs," illegal searches of homes of relatives and friends of fugitive American radicals. (Felt was pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1981.) Mann and others have speculated that Felt became Deep Throat for revenge as well: he had thought himself ready and able to replace Hoover as FBI director and resented being passed over. "That could have figured in it," says Bernstein. "He never told us what his motivations in this were, for the most part."

The journalistic romance of Watergate was built on the irresistible combination of tenacious, enterprising reporters led toward the truth by a fearless whistle-blower bucking the foremost power in the land. In fact, it wasn't nearly that simple, and the credit--or blame, as some still see it--for precipitating Nixon's August 1974 resignation belongs as well to other journalists who doggedly pursued the story; to U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who pressed participants in the break-in to confess Administration involvement; to special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, who stood firm against White House interference; to the Senators and Representatives whose questioning on television brought the Administration's dirty dealings to public light; to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a President was not above the law when he tried to hide damning tape recordings confirming the cover-up he led. Without any of them, the Nixon Administration might well have survived to serve out its second term.

When you go back to the Post's coverage, instead of the movie myth, a more complex picture emerges of what Deep Throat brought to the case--and what he didn't. A review of Post stories and Woodward and Bernstein's book points to a handful of instances in which Deep Throat's leaks advanced the story in specific ways. (See timeline.) But even Bernstein told the Post last week that "Felt's role in all this can be overstated." As the No. 2 man at the FBI, overseeing the agency's daily operations, including the break-in investigation, he conducted infrequent cloak- and-dagger conversations with Woodward from June 19, 1972, two days after the break-in, until November 1973, five months after he quit the FBI. Generally, other sources provided the details while Deep Throat distantly guided the hunt. He corroborated information, tipped the duo where to dig, steered them off side paths and encouraged them to keep pushing the story hard, especially in the early days when Watergate was an inside-the-Beltway tale that might have petered out under the White House campaign to cover things up. Barry Sussman, the Post editor who was in charge of the Watergate story, argued in a 1997 article on the Internet that Woodstein's shoe-leather work was really the key to their prizewinning stories. No editor asked them during the process for Deep Throat's name, he said, "because Deep Throat was basically unimportant to our coverage." It's true, says Bradlee, that Deep Throat's guidance was "invaluable." But he also says the paper did not need Deep Throat to fuel its thirst for the story: "God himself couldn't have slaked it."*

Today Deep Throat's role still stirs both scorn and praise, much as Felt feared. Nixon diehards like former speechwriter Pat Buchanan last week called Felt a shameful "snake" who snitched on his government and betrayed his agency. Others piously complained he should have gone through channels or spoken up publicly, rather than leaking to the press in a dark parking garage in the wee hours. Moreover, John Dean, the White House counsel sent to jail for his deep involvement in the White House attempt to obstruct justice, tells TIME that Woodstein never really got to the bottom of the whole case. "They didn't even crack the case. They couldn't have been further from what concerned us most, the cover-up." Yet the majority of Americans who have come to equate Watergate with the triumph of the common good and the Constitution over a corrupt government probably share the assessment of Felt's grandson Nick Jones: "He is a great American hero who went well above and beyond the call of duty at much risk to himself to save his country from horrible injustice." Felt's willingness to blow the whistle against the highest in the land provides a salient reminder, at a time when journalism's credibility is at a low, of why anonymous sources have a legitimate role to play in keeping the powerful honest.

But the myths of Watergate look a bit different now that we have a name and a biography to attach to Deep Throat. The real man had scores to settle as a thwarted bureaucrat as well as principles to defend. He is at once a narrative hook for a complicated story of political intrigue and a marketable commodity in this age of celebrity. Yet to look at his record is to realize a deeper truth about Watergate: it was less about one character than about the process working the way it should. And as everyone has long accepted, it wasn't the dirty tricks that destroyed the Nixon Administration; it was the White House's sustained attempt to cover them up. That unraveled mainly through official investigations begun at the trial of the Watergate break-in conspirators and pursued in a Senate hearing room.

One question left unanswered last week was whether the white-haired gentleman who waved happily from the Santa Rosa house where he has lived so quietly for the past 15 years can provide rich details to fill out this chapter of history. J. Todd Foster, a journalist who says he spent nearly three years in discussions with Felt's family about bringing his version of the story to the public, thinks not. "It's about five years too late," Foster tells TIME. "Mark Felt doesn't even know who he is half the time." Foster says he turned down a joint project after deciding that Felt's mental capacity was far too diminished. But at least Felt knows Deep Throat will not go down in history as just a shadow in a trench coat. As the Washington Post itself put it, "It's nice to be able to honor him by his real name while he still lives." --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles, Nathan Thornburgh/New York, Chris Taylor/ San Francisco and Karen Tumulty/ Washington

*NIXON SUSPECTED THAT FELT WAS A PRIME SOURCE. IN A CONVERSATION TAPED IN THE OVAL OFFICE ON OCT. 19, 1972, CHIEF OF STAFF H.R. HALDEMAN TELLS THE PRESIDENT THAT THEY KNOW WHO IS LEAKING INFORMATION ABOUT WATERGATE.

NIXON: SOMEBODY IN THE FBI?

HALDEMAN: YES, SIR. MARK FELT. YOU CAN'T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BECAUSE IT WILL SCREW UP OUR SOURCE ...

REFERRING TO FELT AS A "BASTARD," NIXON AGREES THEY CAN'T REMOVE FELT BECAUSE, AS HALDEMAN PUTS IT, "HE'LL GO OUT AND UNLOAD EVERYTHING. HE KNOWS EVERYTHING THAT'S TO BE KNOWN IN THE FBI."

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Nathan Thornburgh/New York, Chris Taylor/San Francisco, Karen Tumulty/Washington