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Jewish World Review
June 2, 2005
/ 24 Iyar, 5765
What did W. Mark Felt know, and when did he know it?
By
Keith Olbermann
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
So, just 17 days shy of the exact 33rd anniversary of the break-in that unleashed the whole Watergate scandal, we finally know the identity of the secret source, Deep Throat, who helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein keep the story alive in the pages of The Washington Post, while virtually every other news organization of the time had concluded it wasn't worth pursuing.
Deep Throat is Mark Felt, the former deputy associate director of the FBI except for the parts of Deep Throat that clearly aren't Mark Felt, like all the stuff Throat supposedly confirmed after Felt left the FBI in June, 1973.
Well, that's going to be something of a problem, isn't it?
Woodward and Bernstein, working together in harness again for the first time in years, were captured by an NBC camera at sunset Tuesday, entering the former's home in Washington's Georgetown section. They bantered jovially with the photographer, with Woodward telling him that they were "in for the night" and that they "need to get some work done."
You bet they do.
Felt's self-identification in the pages of Vanity Fair only confirmed an uncomfortable six hours later by the Post seems to raise more questions than it answers, and signals not the end of the Throat mystery, but merely its mutation into something stranger and maybe more pertinent. As John Dean, Richard Nixon's own White House Counsel, and in the ensuing years, the most dogged pursuer of Throat's identity, told me on Countdown: "Now we have a new mystery… focusing on Woodward's journalism.
"How is he going to explain Felt having some of the information he had," Dean continued, "when it just isn't in the realm of possibility that he had access to it, even as third or fourth hand hearsay?"
Dean's e-book for Salon three years ago was called Unmasking Deep Throat, and unlike all the other attempts to identify Throat, it is meticulous and scholarly. It is based, ironically enough, on a variation of Senate Watergate Committee member Howard Baker's famous rhetorical question about Nixon's involvement (and thus culpability) in the scandal itself. To paraphrase Baker, "What did Deep Throat know and when did he know it?"
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Dean analyzed the meetings Woodward describes in All The Presidents' Men and methodically analyzes what others have glossed over. For Woodward's version to be literally correct, his source had to be able to have access to specific information (and disinformation Dean estimated last night that half of what Throat told Woodward was materially wrong) at specific times. He also had to be physically in Washington to conduct the meetings Woodward wrote about in the book, which were presumably relied upon in the vital day-to-day coverage he and Bernstein wrote for the Post in 1972, 1973, and 1974.
Dean will doubtless enumerate, in other venues, the many disconnects. For us, he offered the startling fact that possibly the most vital information Throat gave Woodward that there were "erasures" on at least one of the surreptitious tapes of Richard Nixon's Oval Office conversations (the infamous "18 minute gap") was dispensed in November, 1973 nearly five months after Felt had left his position in the FBI.
So where did Felt-Throat get that information? Gossip? Where from?
Are there, in fact, Mini-Throats within Deep Throats?
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"It's going to be a problem," Dean added. Woodward and Bernstein have continually denied that Throat was a 'composite' character added to the narrative to simplify the sourcing process, and give the story (and the movie) the pivotal image of one super-knowledgeable, if not omniscient, Hal Holbrook-style tattletale.
There is an explanation offered by Shakespearean conspiracy theorists that may well apply to Deep Throat and Watergate. Scholars and experts in a dozen fields, from the law to the sea, insist the great playwright was so versed in the particulars of a given profession that he must have been a member of that profession. This being understandably impossible, a second theory has evolved from it: that Shakespeare simply stuck his name on the works of several different authors, perhaps including himself, to protect them. Much of the "Shakespeare" plays were politically dangerous at the time they were written, in an Elizabethan England in which it seemed like every third person was a spy for the government. If everybody knew that Shakespeare was just a business manager and perhaps a play doctor, he risked nothing in claiming "official" authorship, and protected many from prosecution. Shakespeare is now not a mere front man or composite, but a composite who could've done some of the work a kind of centerpiece to the composite.
So might Mark Felt be, as well. Perhaps he's 60% of Deep Throat, with the product of other sources conveniently mixed in, both to protect them, and smooth down the book's otherwise anonymous-source laden plotline.
"Felt just doesn't seem to me," Dean said, in agreeing with the modified-composite theory, "to be somebody who had all the information that Deep Throat had when he gave it to Woodward."
This might also explain why Felt so frequently denied being Deep Throat. He may have provided some of the information generally attributed to Throat, but not specific parts of it perhaps the parts that most damaged Richard Nixon, or reflected most poorly on his own probable motive (rancor at not being promoted after the death of J. Edgar Hoover) for being a White House source to many reporters, not just Woodward. Remember what he said to the Hartford Courant when he last publicly denied being Throat, in 1999: "I would have done better. I would have been more effective. Deep Throat didn't exactly bring the White House crashing down, did he?"
The mystery of the man's motives, his attitude towards himself and what it tonight proves he did, are all perhaps explained by those quotes to the Hartford Courant in 1999, and a statement he made to his own grandson that he didn't think being Deep Throat "was anything to be proud of..." It was a mixture of loathing that he did any of it, and loathing that he didn't do more.
"What's striking to me," Dean told me last night, "is that in coming forward at this time, (Felt) didn't drop so much as any inside information that would corroborate this. How did Felt get the New York Times and circle page 20 of Bob Woodward's paper to signal he wanted to talk to him? How did Felt manage, while he's running the bureau's day-to-day operations, to keep an eye on the flower pot on Woodward's balcony to see if the red flag was out?"
Of course, those issues of signaling when either wanted to meet might be explained by Felt's position in the FBI. Maybe those details were handled by agents, sympathetic to Felt, or just doing what he told them to do. Of more tangible concern is what Dean wrote in his analysis of 'Throat's identity in 2002. He says Woodward dropped plenty of hints in the text of All The President's Men and Dean even quoted page numbers to underscore the point that if there was only one Throat, he had to have worked in the White House, not some place else, like the FBI:
"Deep Throat worked for the federal government (page 23), in the Executive Branch (p 71); his position was "extremely sensitive"; and he was in a "unique position to observe the Executive Branch, with access to information at the Committee to Re-Elect The President as well as at the White House (p 71)... In fact, at one point Deep Throat tells Woodward that the FBI doesn't know what is truly happening (p 72)..." Dean's other sifting of how Woodward described Throat doesn't add up to a picture of Mark Felt or, at least, it doesn't add up to a picture of just Mark Felt. Dean notes Woodward called him an "old friend," gave him the characteristics of a night owl and a bachelor, a man of extreme temper, journalistically savvy but loathing of their "inexactitude and shallowness."
Dean told me last night that years ago, Bob Woodward told him what he'd told many others, that when Throat was finally identified, there'd be a "why didn't I think of that?" moment a light-bulb over the head, an epiphany of the soul, a full, and immediately understood revelation and understanding.
Dean doesn't buy it and neither do I. "I'm waiting for my epiphany."
Presumably that's what Woodward and Bernstein are brewing up in Woodward's home. If not, they have a lot of journalistic explaining to do.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
The writer hosts MSNBC's “Countdown with Keith
Olbermann.” The news program, dedicated to all
of the day’s top stories, telecasts weeknights, 8-9
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