Deep Throat, Shallow Footprint?

Defending his former reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, from charges that they were stenographers for an ambitious secret source, Barry Sussman, editor in charge of the Washington Post's Watergate investigation, says that Max Holland, author of Leak, overstates Mark Felt's importance to the story:

Deep Throat wasn’t an important source at all. He was nice to have around, helpful on occasion, especially in October, 1972, when he confirmed and added to a story in which the Post introduced Donald Segretti as a political saboteur against the Democrats. But that’s about it. Woodward and Bernstein have blown up Felt’s importance for almost four decades or nodded in assent when others did, and instead of pricking this big balloon, Holland pumps more air into it.

Holland states that for decades “the parlor game that would not die” – the search to uncover Deep Throat – had the effect of “elevating Deep Throat’s role as a source and cementing the myth about the Post reporters’ own role in uncovering Watergate.” Except Holland very much accepts the first part of that formulation.

Chapin Away At The Truth

The Nixon foundation's campaign against the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit became public in an Aug. 6, 2010 New York Times article. The foundation has now published a portion of its 132-page complaint, dated Aug. 2. Among other things, Nixon's White House aides criticize library director Tim Naftali's use of his oral history interviews with, well, Nixon's White House aides, including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities.

Naftali's subjects all signed gift and release forms, which the foundation described as follows:

We note that the “Gift” document conveys the interview to NARA “for eventual deposit” with NARA and that the Donor’s wish is that the “Interview be made available for research as soon as possible, and to the fullest extent possible, following its deposit with NARA."

The foundation's argument is that even though the interviewees agreed that their comments should be made available to researchers and scholars to the fullest extent possible, they shouldn't have been been available to Naftali, the researcher and scholar whom the archivist of the United States asked to assemble a Watergate exhibit. The foundation refers to Naftali's proposed exhibit videos as "snippets" and "brief excerpts."

I guess it depends on what you mean by snippet. The videos and White House tape segments which Naftali had chosen for the exhibit have been available for months at nixonlibrary.gov. Among them is a two-minute, 40-second super-snippet in which Dwight Chapin, who organized dirty tricks for the 1972 Nixon campaign, claims that President Nixon was present when Chapin was ordered to ramp up. Chapin says:

One day the buzzer goes off, and I go into the president’s office, and he’s sitting there with [chief of staff Bob] Haldeman. And they say, “Do you know—“ -- by they, Bob says it, the president’s sitting there – “Do you know anyone who can do Dick Tuck-type stuff? We should have somebody like that.”

Chapin describes hiring Donald Segretti, his USC roommate, and arranging for Nixon's personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach, to pay him. Chapin continues:

I gave [Segretti] some direction. I aimed him at [Democratic candidates] Muskie…[and] Humphrey…He went and innovated and did whatever he did…I never questioned this, because to me, Dick Tuck had always been— This had been part of what I had grown up with….Their request to have a Dick Tuck type-guy was not that insane of an idea. Now you can look at it and say, “You mean to tell me the president of the United States is sitting in his office with his chief of staff; you’re coming in there; and they’re talking about dirty tricks stuff and there’s a Vietnam war and why the hell aren’t they running the war and why are they focused on this stuff?” Can’t answer that. I mean, we had all been in campaigns. Nixon had always had this little rinky-dink crap pulled on him….I don’t know what prompted it that made them buzz me in there, but I went in, that’s what they asked me to do, and that’s what I did. It’s not a good excuse, but that’s what I did.

Watch the video here. Chapin's charge is explosive. During the long months of Watergate in 1973-74, Senate, House, and special prosecutor investigators tried but failed to obtain evidence of Nixon's direct involvement in arranging campaign dirty tricks.

It's also important to remember that Chapin did federal time for perjury. He doesn't say when he was buzzed into Nixon's office, but if it was after February 1971, when the taping system was installed, then the conversation would've been recorded. No such tape has turned up so far, except Chapin and Naftali's. When the new Watergate exhibit is unveiled on Thursday, it will be interesting to see whether those now controlling Nixon's foundation have managed to persuade the National Archives to withhold Chapin's interview and, perhaps, others (such as White House aide Fred Malek's unrepentant conversation with Naftali about counting the number of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

If Chapin himself has had second thoughts about his late hit on Nixon, he was well positioned to have an influence on the exhibit's final contents. We also learn from the foundation's Aug. 2 memo that a member of the five-person task force brought on board to critique Naftali's work was none other than Dwight Chapin.

Chapin's Late Hit

You may remember Sen. Howard Baker's 1973 question about Watergate: What did the president know and when did he know it? It'll be asked again when word gets around about operative Dwight Chapin's startling charge that Richard Nixon was present when chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman ordered Chapin to set up a dirty tricks operation during Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign.

Nixon always denied being directly involved in setting up the dirty tricks. In 1973-74, congressional and federal investigators tried and failed to find evidence to the contrary.

Chapin made his news-making accusation in an interview with Tim Naftali, director of the Nixon library. Go here and listen to Chapin talk about being buzzed into Nixon's office to get the fateful order, deciding to hire his USC classmate Donald Segretti to run the unit, and lining up Nixon's personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach, to pay for it.

The three went to jail as a result of the Watergate scandal. In judging Chapin's late hit, remember that he was convicted in federal court of lying under oath.

The interview appears among the background materials for the Nixon library's upcoming Watergate exhibit, which was attacked by Chapin's White House friends last summer. It will be interesting to see if the interview will be aired by C-SPAN along with Naftali's other revealing chats with Nixon's men.

Trojan Sources

There's irony or aptness, depending on your perspective, as Dwight Chapin returns to his alma mater, the University of Southern California, to participate in a Nixon foundation co-sponsored panel discussion about President Nixon's China initiative. A 1963 USC graduate, Chapin hired classmate Donald Segretti to run dirty tricks during Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. It was often said that they first stocked their bags of political tricks as undergraduates.

Chapin was jailed for perjury in Watergate's wake. He's making news at the Nixon library by charging that Nixon was present when chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman gave the order to create the dirty tricks unit. Until now, Nixon was never directly implicated.

Nixon's foundation is currently enjoying a Haldeman renaissance. Joining Chapin at the USC event will be Haldeman's aide Larry Higby, who also features in the library's proposed new Watergate exhibit.

Chapin Says Nixon Knew About Dirty Tricks

In 2007, Nixon biographer Conrad Black wrote, "There was no evidence [presented to the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment proceedings in 1974] connecting Nixon to campaign 'dirty tricks'..."

That was then. In an oral history interview with Nixon library director Tim Naftali, White House aide Dwight Chapin, who hired and directed dirty tricks operative Don Segretti and was later jailed for perjury, says that chief of staff H. R. Haldeman gave the order to launch the effort in the president's office as Nixon sat listening. If Chapin's contention is true, then the order was given before February 1971. After that, it almost certainly would've been caught by the White House taping system.

Listen to the news-making Chapin interview, slated for the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit, here.

Soul Sources

Todd Purdum (left) is a respected former New York Times correspondent who now writes for "Vanity Fair." Discussing his recent article about Washington's prevailing dysfunction with Fresh Air's Dave Davies on NPR, he talked about the always fraught issue of anonymous sources -- especially as it pertained to a controversial mid-2008 article (with the subhead "Bubba Trouble") in which he quoted a raft of unnamed FOB who were worried about how some of Bill Clinton's business and personal hi jinks might reflect on Hillary:

One of my friends, a former Clinton administration official, told me when the story came out that this friend had asked a colleague, do you think the story is unfair? And the answer was, well, it would be if it weren't true and well-sourced. So I guess what I have to count on and in some ways the publication of the story showed me that it isn't enough, is I have to count on my own and reputation and I have to count on the fact that my colleagues in Washington who know me, my colleagues in journalism who know me, my sources over the years, you know, in politics, know me to be reliable. So in some sense, I'm putting my credibility on the line by granting these people anonymity, I'll give you that.

And, you know, I wouldn't have done it if I didn't trust them and if I didn't think they were telling me the truth and I wouldn't have presumed on the reader's good faith if I didn't have faith in my own reporting. But I'll grant you that in this day and age that's probably a slender reed to hang on and people are welcomed to draw their own conclusions.

In my days with Richard Nixon I inveighed plenty against anonymous sources. The most famous one ever, Mark Felt (right), who helped the Washington Post with Watergate and later because known as Deep Throat, was mad Nixon hadn't made him FBI director. Felt was later convicted of abuses of power himself. Though Nixon and others suspected that he was the culprit, it was confirmed just a few years ago, not long before he died. While Watergate went down in the 1970s, readers didn't know anything about his motives or character. He wasn't the spurned, angry operative who'd ordered illegal black bag jobs. He was Hal Holbrook in the parking garage, an unnamed mythic hero who was risking his job and maybe his life to save the republic from Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti's dirty tricks.

Knowing Felt's identity at the time would certainly have helped readers understand more about the strange institutional dynamics that occurred as official Washington tried to get the measure of an anticommunist president who was keen to visit Moscow and Beijing. But the hard truth is that while many people and factors contributed to Nixon's downfall -- from his own actions and those of zealous, self-serving aides to the anger and ambitions of his political and institutional adversaries -- Mark Felt, while a favorite target of Nixon boosters, was probably just a little more than a bit player.

These days, most news organizations have better rules about how secret sources are used and described. A Times reporter, for instance, will write that someone is "an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorized to discuss the negotiations." Even that gives the reader pause to wonder what's afoot. You can figure out for yourself what Felt's descriptor would've been if the Post had been playing by the same rules 38 years ago.

Besides, as I listened to his NPR interview, I realized that I do trust Purdum. Why shouldn't I? He wouldn't have lasted this long in the business by making up or misusing quotes. Besides, as newspapers radically reconfigure themselves, our democracy will continue to depend on good information that trained reporters get by digging and by talking to people, whether on the record or not. Otherwise all we'll have is government propaganda and opinions recycled by denizens of the hackosphere hunched over laptops in Starbucks.

Still, the canny reader should always wonder what's up when a source has been given the gift of anonymity. Here's a tip: Sometimes a person can be a named and an anonymous source in the same story. (I know, because I've done it.) What's the reporter's motive? What's the source's? You may hope the reporter knows, but sometimes she may not. One more quote from Purdum's interview about his 2008 Clinton story:

[I]n a strange way that I only came to see later, [Clinton's anonymous aides and friends] were conducting through me a kind of effort to influence him, I think, by saying, you know, some of them had tried to raise these issues with him and were rebuffed. And it was a kind of a strange bank shot of an intervention or something in which that they were doing it indirectly through me.

There's a better word for that: Triangulation. It happens when family systems resist change, as they almost always do. When the 42nd president was asked about the "Vanity Fair" story when it was published, he called Purdum a "scumbag." According to systems theory, the insult was actually a predictable outburst at his cronies for calling him out. Purdum, who had positioned himself directly in the line of fire, says he and Clinton made up later -- and according to most reports, Clinton's been the soul of discretion ever since. Purdum's probably owed a commendation by the Secretary of State for an act of self-sacrificial public service.