Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Notwithstanding the article in the Washington Post (from his forthcoming book) about Mark Felt, Bob Woodward, so far, has told us little of his working relationship with Felt. Given Felt's aging memory, which is widely acknowledged to be less than razor sharp, it will be Woodward's story -- not Felt's.
Yet we do know something about the information Felt, as Deep Throat, provided to the Washington Post from Woodward's book, "All the President's Men." Woodward reports some 14 meetings (depending on how they are counted).
Recently, I went through the book again, and pulled out every fact -- or factoid -- that Throat/Felt shared with Woodward, and noted when the information exchange had occurred. For a list of these facts -- and an indication of which of them I believe may well be untrue -- see the appendix to this column.
This summary of what Deep Throat told Woodward and when, according to "All the President's Men," is particularly illuminating now that we know Deep Throat's identity. It, along with a few more clues Woodward has dropped since confirming Felt's role, raises new questions about the Watergate investigations and about Felt's leaking to Woodward.
Here are just a few questions that need to be answered:
In his position as the No. 2 man in the FBI, and the man running the Watergate investigation for the FBI, Felt saw virtually all the raw data from the FBI's field investigations. In the few days since the revelation of his identity, I have not had an opportunity to compare the material from the FBI's Watergate investigation with the information that Felt gave Woodward to see if it is possible to determine how he got it wrong. But such a comparison will doubtless be fascinating.
Woodward, it appears, was seldom in a position to correct information that Felt gave him that was wrong. But when writing "All the President's Men," he did correct one major false statement from Felt. Sometime in early May 1973, Felt told Woodward, "In early February, [Patrick] Gray went to the White House and said, in effect, 'I'm taking the rap on Watergate.' He got very angry and said he had done his job and contained the investigation judiciously, that it was unfair that he was being singled out to take the heat. He implied that all hell could break loose if he wasn't able to stay in the job permanently and keep the lid on. Nixon could have thought this was a threat, though Gray is not that sort of guy. Whatever the reason, the president agreed in a hurry and sent Gray's name up to the Senate right away. Some of the top people in the White House were dead set against it; they couldn't talk him out of it."
It appears that Felt has invented this statement out of whole cloth -- or was seriously misinformed. It never happened this way, as the Nixon White House tapes make clear.
To reflect this, Woodward did add a footnote in this instance, stating that Pat Gray's attorney advised Woodward that the suggestion Gray had pressured or blackmailed Nixon was "outrageously false."
But most of Felt's bad information has never been corrected. In fact, a few writers about the period have quoted Felt's bad information as historical fact. As can be seen from the appendix, some of these inaccuracies are minor (although I doubt not so minor to persons erroneously maligned by Felt). But some are not.
Given the complexity of Watergate, it is not difficult to understand how Felt made some mistakes when meeting with Woodward in the dead of the night. Yet in other instances, it is not easy to comprehend how the No. 2 man in the FBI could have provided such bad information, knowing it could become public. And why has Felt let this bad information sit in the historical record for the past three decades?
My opinion as to which information, provided by Felt, is wrong is based on my many years of reviewing great swathes and stacks of documents about the Watergate investigation. The appendix speaks for itself. But here, allow me to flag just one (of several) particularly egregious sessions where Felt gave Woodward appalling information, apparently to try to manipulate Woodward and the Washington Post.
It must be noted, according to Woodward's reports, that Felt frequently told Woodward -- falsely -- that he and the Washington Post were under surveillance. And based on Woodward's recent article about Felt, it seems Felt equated Nixon with Hitler, and that he saw the Watergate investigation as a Nazi hunt (harking back to his pre-FBI days in the military).
A month before Felt retired from the FBI, he had one of his more remarkable sessions with Woodward. On May 16, 1973 (as reported at Pages 317-18 of "All the President's Men"), Woodward says Felt has become "transformed" by the Watergate investigation, and talks to him almost in a monologue. When finished, Felt departs; Woodward wrote it all down in a notebook, which he later typed out for Bernstein.
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