Via Drudge:
The Washington Post today confirmed that W.
Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep
Throat," the secretive source who provided information that helped
unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the
resignation of president Richard M. Nixon.
The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two
Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their
former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt's
family and Vanity Fair magazine identified the 91-year-old Felt, now a
retiree in California, as the long-anonymous source who provided
crucial guidance for some of the newspaper's groundbreaking Watergate
stories.
Money quote:
Bradlee, who was the Post's executive editor
during Watergate, said today, "The thing that stuns me is that the
goddamn secret has lasted this long."
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once
said:
Publicity is justly
commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is
said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient
policeman.
I've heard investigative
reporters invoke that quote to justify their jobs. So I have a
question: Why doesn't that apply to journalistic sources? Why should we
trust stories based on unnamed sources, when there have been so many
prominent cases lately of journalists just making stuff up? Why
shouldn't journalists have to name their sources?
Update: Timothy Noah points out that Felt had
parochial bureacratic reasons to serve as Deep Throat:
Hoover had died. Hoover loyalists at the bureau
were frantic that President Richard Nixon would get his mitts on the
FBI, which Hoover had kept independent of political control through a
variety of nasty methods, including blackmail. The Hooverites'
bureaucratic anxieties were well-founded: After the Watergate break-in,
Hoover's acting successor, a Nixon loyalist named L. Patrick Gray,
routinely passed FBI files about Watergate directly to White House
counsel John Dean, who was a party to (but eventually would expose) the
White House's illegal coverup. In effect, the White House ended up
knowing everything the FBI knew. (That's why it seemed so plausible
that, if not Felt, Deep Throat might be Deputy White House Counsel Fred
Fielding, a theory that, I regret to say, undermined in recent years my previous rock-solid
conviction that it was Felt, or at least some other high-ranking G-man?
case closed.) Felt pushed back by helping Woodward and Bernstein
discover that high-level White House aides were in up to their necks in
Watergate, up to and including Nixon.
DC
turf wars make the story a lot less romantic, don't they? At the very
least, as Glenn Reynolds notes, "I
don't mind Nixon going -- I think he was a pretty lousy President for
all sorts of reasons aside from Watergate -- but it's obvious that the
simplistic Woodward & Bernstein hero-tale is a bit, um,
incomplete." But it also speaks to my point about anonymous
sources: Might we not have evaluated Woodward and Bernstein's work with
a more informed eye if we knew they were being fed stories by somebody
with a bureaucratic axe to grind?
And speaking of journalists just making stuff up, Noah
catches Woodward and Bernstein in what look like outright lies about
Deep Throat, not just omissions:
I have a few bones to pick with Woodward and Bernstein. One
is that, in All the President's Men, Deep Throat is described
as a heavy smoker. But Felt quit smoking in 1943. I suppose Woodstein
would call this necessary misdirection. I call it conscious
fabrication, however trivial. Also, a November 1973 Woodward and
Bernstein Post story sourced anonymously to "White House
sources" is described in All the President's Men as being
sourced to Deep Throat. Yet Felt was not a "White House
source." It's conceivable that Deep Throat was an additional,
unacknowledged source on the story, but it's also possible that
Woodward and Bernstein were misleading readers about where they got
their information. Which was it, gentlemen? Finally, why did Woodward,
in a 1979 Playboy
interview with J. Anthony Lukas, flatly deny that Deep
Throat was anyone inside the "intelligence community"? The
FBI, where Felt worked, is most definitely part of the intelligence
community.
What Noah fails to consider is
the possibility that those discrepancies might reveal a deeper truth:
Maybe Deep Throat was really a composite character all along. We don't
know because we tolerate a culture of anonymous sourcing and
journalistic dissembling.
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