Mark Felt and Watergate - the Real Agenda



Much has been written, and will be written, about the disclosure that W. Mark Felt, deputy director of the F.B.I. at the time, was the anonymous source known as "Deep Throat" during the Watergate crisis. The debate is now - is Mark Felt a hero or a wrong-doer?

But a more fundamental mystery may been unraveled. After Watergate, Woodward has become America's foremost chronicler of internal elite debate and discussion, in books like "The Commanders," "The Agenda," etc. I have always been curious about Woodward's journey from intrepid investigative reporter to stenographer for the ruling class.

The mechanism for this transformation is no mystery. In the form of Deep Throat, Woodward established his ability to find credible sources deep inside the federal government, sources he knew how to both use and protect. After Watergate, when Woodward put his phone calls into high government officials, those officials faced a very stark choice -- talk to him, feed him information off the record, or don't talk to him and wait for their political enemies feed him information. I doubt Woodward ever had to say a threatening or cajoling word to his high government sources -- Woodward's history as the guy who found Deep Throat and bought down Nixon was enough to get his foot in the door.

No, how Bob Woodward became the stenographer of the ruling class is not a mystery. The mystery has always been why. Why would someone who made their name as a revolutionary journalist so quickly join the elite, chattering class?

As it turns out, Woodward's Watergate career is not at all different from his later activities. I submit for your inspection the following passage from Woodward's piece in today's Washington Post, describing his first meeting with Mark Felt in 1970:

"This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale, where I had a Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam War.

During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international relations.

When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining -- and this is the first time he mentioned it -- the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator -- his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.

So we had two connections -- graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.

Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned that this was called the "goon squad."

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. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter -- one of the most important in my life -- I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.

I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly, and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most ways a product of Hoover's FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number, and he gave me the direct line to his office."

In other words, from the very beginning Bob Woodward's goal was to connect to the Washington power structure. It was his good fortune to connect with Felt - it gave him access and information he was able to leverage brilliantly later on.

Bob Woodward was not, and has never been, a heroic crusading journalist. He is a scribe, a stenographer, the public voice of certain factions of elite opinion. He has filled that role well, and his work by and large is accurate and informative. And Woodward's work in Watergate was the first of many instances where he furthered his career by serving the public relations goals of his elite friends.

Had Deep Throat been a White House employee with a conscience, had Woodward played a role in convincing Deep Throat to do the right thing against his own partisan or personal interests, the "journalist as hero" narrative might have been appropriate. But instead, Deep Throat is a high-ranking FBI official out to protect the independence and traditional prerogatives of his agency from White House interference. Instead of "journalist as hero" the more appropriate frame is "journalist as foot soldier in inter-agency warfare."

In my humble opinion, the history of Watergate needs to be revised, downplaying it as an example of victorious investigative journalism, and framing it more accurately as inter-agency warfare.

Posted: Thu - June 2, 2005 at 03:02 PM        

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