Across the pond

Millions of people know that Deep Throat was the main un-named source of the Washington Post newspaper articles which led to the fall of the Nixon presidency as a result of Watergate. One of the few occasions in history when journalism made a difference to the events reported upon.

Yet few journalism students, and not many more journalists, would have been able to tell me who Mark Felt was, had I asked them yesterday.

Today, Mark Felt is news, because he has died, peacefully at home, aged 95. His death will probably have more coverage in the world’s press than he had at any time in his life.

That is the nature of journalism. This article shows its good points and its bad points.

Watergate was a triumph for journalism by exception. The original break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party in 1972 got little headline coverage, but thanks to the persistent reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, and equally zealous reporting by the New York Times and a few US regional papers, the story was kept alive. But it was not until two years later that the US President, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign.

The Washington Post deservedly got most of the credit, because, unlike their competitors, the Post had an un-named Government source who was telling them what was actually happening in the White House at this time. And after the film, All the President’s Men hit the screens is 1976 all the world knew that the source was Deep Throat, named with journalistic humour, after the porno movie of that name running at the time.

But the world did not know who Deep Throat was until 2005, when Felt outed himself in an article in Vanity Fair. By that time Watergate was old hat, Felt himself was not a good interview subject, because he was suffering from senile dementia. But the story was confirmed by Bob Woodward himself. What actually happened should be known by all would-be journalists and those readers who try to make sense of what journalists write.

Woodstein got their great coup, not because they were so much better than the competition at ‘investigative journalism’ but because of serendipity, our old friend luck who makes and mars our lives.

We know this for sure because Woodward has chosen to tell the unvarnished truth about it, rather than bask in self-glorification. But not to tell the truth until his source had outed himself. Which one important lesson for would-be journalists. When a source says he information is strictly on the basis that it cannot be traced back to him, the journalist, to maintain that trust, has to keep it from his closest friends and family, not just not publish it with his story.

So for thirty years the only people who knew for certain who Deep Throat was were Woodward and Bernstein and Ben Bradlree, their boss at the Washington Post. (President Nixon thought it was Felt, but he did not know for sure.)

Now, that we all know that it was Mark Felt, we can understand why Bradlee was ready to gamble his own reputation and that of his newspaper. Because Felt was not a minor civil servent or junior cabinet minister, he was the Number Two man at the FBI, to Hoover, the long-standing head of the FBI, and one of the most powerful men in America.

Woodward got the biggest story of his life when he was making routine enquiries at FBI headquarters. Because he had met Felt a few years earlier, when he was an officer in the armed forces trying to decide what to do with his life, he knocked on his door.

No-one can be sure why Felt un-burdened himself to Woodward in that un-scheduled meeting. He was a hard-liner and not sympathetic to the liberal agenda of the Washington Post. Apparently he wanted to be Hoover’s successor and he was already aware that Nixon did not favour him. And he was also concerned, because he felt Nixon was politicising the FBI. But whatever his motive, he decided to leak and met Woodward, in the car park and elsewhere on several subsequent occasions.

Bernstein did not even meet Felt, until Woodward arranged a get-together after the Vanity Fair article. Both journalists have done OK in the rest of their lives. But nothing they have done quite measures up to what they did on Watergate. And neither of them is as well known as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

Which is as it should be. Because the journalist’s job is to report the news, not to become the news himself. Which is the mistake that Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqui shoe-throwing journalist made.

But let’s consider al-Zaidi and Felt as human beings. Neither are ideal role models for their chosen professions. I doubt whether any applicant who professed himself an admirer of Felt would get past an FBI interviewing panel.

But, for me, I sleep easier in my bed, knowing that some journalists, like al-Zaidi, have the courage to violate the conventions of their chosen profession, and some FBI men, like Felt, do not always behave as FBI men are expected to behave.

I don’t want to make them into heroes. But I think their stories suggest that they were decent human beings struggling to make sense of the world as they have experienced it, and not taking the easy way out.

Footnote. Shortly after I posted this article I read Jonathan Freedland’s article in The Guardian. It makes several points that I might have made myself. Well worth reading.