Intelligence

Out of the shadows but still a mystery (Deep Throat, Nixon)

TheStar.com - Out of the shadows but still a mystery

We know who Deep Throat is but not where he fits in history

CHRIS YOUNG
TORONTO STAR

The shadowy figure of the man known as Deep Throat was revealed last week, solving one of American history's great mysteries. Assessing his place in that history, though, remains problematic.

Deep Throat, the Watergate informant who outed himself Monday as former FBI second-in-command Mark Felt, has so far been viewed through ideologically tinted glasses.

To some — conservative commentators and Nixon loyalists — Felt is a traitor and a heel, a man who, passed over for the top G-Man job, ground his axe on the Great Seal of America.

Others see a patriot and a courageous player in a long-ago saga in which a corrupt president, and not some intern or hapless White House reporter stooge, was brought to his knees. Whatever else he is, Deep Throat is a generational touchstone for baby boomers (and a shrug to many under 30).

Now Deep Throat is flesh and blood — and, paradoxically, as much a mystery as ever.

In serving as The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's "deep background" source into the 1972 break-in at the Democrat National Committee headquarters in Washington, how did he change history, if at all?

Was he a lead actor, or, as former Post editor Barry Sussman has called him, "an anonymous bit player, a minor contributor, (who) has become a giant"?

In his most recent column for FindLaw.com, John Dean called Felt "history's supreme whistleblower." But in an interview with the Star, Dean said he is still groping to understand the motives behind Felt's actions.

"I'm not sure that Deep Throat did change history at all," said Dean, the former counsel in Richard Nixon's White House. Dean himself was a Watergate whistle-blower, as the star witness for the prosecution in the Senate hearings that ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

"In other words, as somebody who was familiar both at the time and has looked at the record since, there's an incredible amount of misinformation he gave to (Bob) Woodward.

"When it's the (FBI agent) who is literally running the Watergate investigation, it just raises a host of tricky, mind-bending questions. He's not only running the official investigation, he's using The Washington Post to run another avenue.

"My gut instinct is it was a heroic act. But I don't understand it."

Take Deep Throat's early role out of the picture, as Nixon indirectly tried to do when his spokesman initially dismissed the nascent scandal as nothing more than a "third-rate burglary," and you could have a completely different history, says Michael Schudson, author of the 1993 book Watergate in American Memory.

"It's always hard to know what would have happened without him. Would Woodward and Bernstein have been able to find other sources, other people willing to leak?" said Schudson. "There's a very good chance that history would have been very different without this individual. There wasn't a horde of reporters on the story and it could easily have died. In that interim period, there's just not that much happening to encourage people to keep after the story — apart from this guy."

Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, China and détente — guessing which dominoes would never have fallen, or even appeared on the table, had Nixon not resigned makes for nearly as good a parlour game as the one that until last week surrounded Deep Throat's identity.

Even the question of how Deep Throat changed journalism is open to debate. Convention tells us that Watergate resulted in a rush to journalism as a career by idealistic young Woodward worshippers, a more adversarial role by the media, and perhaps even a period, albeit a brief one, of public appreciation of the journalist.

But according to data cited by Schudson, the trend was already underway, perhaps due to the Vietnam War, with the number of U.S. college majors in journalism doubling between 1967 and '72, the year of the break-in.

Woodward, one of the U.S.'s top reporters, has since made a career out of using unnamed sources to chronicle the very top of American politics. The practice has become commonplace, while hardly gaining acceptance and approval from the public. In a University of Connecticut poll this year, an astounding 89 per cent of 1,000 Americans questioned agreed with the statement that one should question the accuracy of a story that uses unnamed sources.

As for eagerly pursuing the story, no less than The New York Times and The Washington Post recently apologized to their readers for not being diligent enough in their reporting on the U.S. war on Iraq.

On the other side of the rostrum, the Bush administration seems determined to follow the Nixonian example in attempting to control leaks, manage the news and intimidate the media. According to the Arlington, Va.-based Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, there has been a sharp rise in subpoenas forcing journalists to name their sources.

Perhaps the real question is not Deep Throat's legacy but whether there's a legacy at all. Meantime, until Felt, 91, tells his complete story — and perhaps even after that — Deep Throat will remain a riddle.

"The possibility that he was trying to protect an institution he felt deeply committed to — not the U.S. but the FBI — is quite interesting," said Schudson. "It's the notion that government and democracy might be protected because not all parts of the government work in lockstep, but they each have their own set of priorities and loyalties — and sometimes, that's what might save us."

June 5, 2005 at 11:31 AM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home