Leak And Lies

Joseph C. Goulden, a Washington, D.C. attorney who says he still admires Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for their Watergate reporting, says that according to Max Holland, they lied about their most important source:

In their first book on Watergate, All the President’s Men, published in 1974, [they] depicted Deep Throat (who they did not name) as a selfless, high–ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House. Deep Throat, they wrote, “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency] to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” A secondary goal was to prevent the FBI from being corrupted by being drawn into a White House cover–up.

That statement turns out to be 100 percent false, according to Max Holland, whose exhaustively researched work is a must-read for any person interested in the tangled scandal that drove President Nixon from office....

As Holland authoritatively establishes, Felt (who died in 2008) turns out not to be an altruistic hero, but a scheming bureaucrat who yearned to replace J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director, and did so by staging a smear campaign in an attempt to discredit rivals for the job.

The Post Won't Plug This Leak

Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon library, recently suggested that the Reagan library whitewashed the Iran-contra affair in the same way Pravda (the now-defunct USSR Communist Party newspaper) would have when covering some Soviet official's scandal.

In its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the Washington Post appears to be doing some airbrushing of its own. Today reporter Marc Fisher filed a long survey of the ways the Watergate narrative has changed or been challenged over the years. Bizarrely, he couldn't find room for a word about Max Holland's wide-praised Leak.

Holland argues persuasively that the Post's most famous source, Mark Felt, wanted to be FBI director and leaked investigators' secrets to the Post to undermine the acting director, Pat Gray. Every reporter's judgment is different. But Watergate was serious stuff, and a book that will have to be taken into account by all scholars of the scandal and era unquestionably deserved at least a paragraph in Fisher's article, which contained five about the movie "Dick."

Let's be clear. Holland doesn't absolve Nixon or his men of any of their crimes or errors. Much as Nixon's advocates may sometimes have hoped otherwise, criticizing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting won't change much if anything about Watergate. As Holland and others have shown, by and large they were just reporting what the FBI was learning.

But Holland has added vital dimension and subtlety to the story of the greatest political scandal in modern U.S. history. Without especially helping Nixon, he shows that a reporter's source -- no hero; just another cynical operator with wingtips of clay -- had tried to use ambitious, sometimes credulous journalists to get even and get ahead. It's a quintessential Washington story -- but not in the Washington Post. Not this week.

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.

More Wars Of Watergate

In the wake of the publication of Max Holland's Leak -- which argues that the Washington Post's legendary secret source, lately identified as Mark Felt, was parceling out FBI secrets in a bid to get the director's job -- Holland dukes it out with Woodward and Bernstein in The Daily Beast:

Woodward and Bernstein are most alarmed by Holland’s claims about the scope of their Watergate reporting. “The most interesting thing he says is that we were just following what the prosecutors had found, and that is factually wrong,” Woodward says, noting that at the 1973 trial of the first seven Watergate defendants, federal prosecutors identified former G-man Gordon Liddy as “the mastermind” of the operation. On the contrary, Woodward says, their Washington Post reporting uncovered a massive, long-running political espionage and sabotage campaign that went far beyond the mere wiretapping of the Democrats and was run directly out of the Nixon White House. “This guy Max Holland doesn’t understand Watergate,” he says.

Holland retorts: “I wasn’t writing about Watergate,” but instead focusing on a single key actor amid a complex moment in history. “Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting deserves every kudo it has ever gotten. But let’s appreciate it for what it was and not pretend it was something it wasn’t … I talked to everybody at the FBI, the prosecutors, the journalists—I talked to everybody who’s still alive. Don’t they have a side of the story? Watergate isn’t the exclusive history of Bob Woodward. He doesn’t own it. There are other points of view.”

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Pat Buchanan isn't pulling his punches since being fired by MSNBC. Writing about Max Holland's Leak, he says Mark Felt was a snake and Woodward and Bernstein his stenographers.

Et Tu, Al?

John Mitchell biographer James Rosen (shown here) gives high marks to Leak, in which Max Holland argues that Bob Woodward's most famous secret source, Mark Felt, wanted Richard Nixon to make him FBI director so he would plug his own leaks. Rosen has two demurs:

[S]ome wobbly columns in the Deep Throat temple Leak inexplicably lets stand. “Felt was much too busy and prominent a man to circle page 20 of Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times . . . or monitor the movement of a red-flagged flower pot on the balcony of Woodward’s apartment,” Holland notes. Such chores, he shrugs, “were probably entrusted to reliable [FBI] agents.” Who, exactly — and why haven’t they been identified? Perhaps, alternatively, Holland is wrong to accept Woodward’s statements about this signaling system.

Likewise, Holland describes in detail Deep Throat’s “last great leak”: the accurate disclosure to Woodward, in November 1973, that the Nixon tapes contained a deliberate erasure. Felt had been forced out of the FBI five months earlier, in June 1973, and the existence of the “tape gap,” a rather recent development, was a secret held closely by President Nixon, his secretary Rose Woods and only a few White House intimates and attorneys; so how could Felt have been in a position to tell Woodward about it?

Holland ignores this problem. The only logical conclusion — especially since other Nixon-era officials, like Alexander Haig, Donald Santarelli, and Robert F. Bennett, are known to have served as sources for Woodward — is that “Deep Throat” was more than just Mark Felt. Holland’s unusual silence on this point suggests his otherwise indefatigable research turned up no other satisfactory answer.

Put another way, how many FBI agents does it actually take to overthrow an elected president, and who inside the White House may have helped them, and why? Rosen says that the records Bob Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, have opened so far don't add much to the picture. But as I wrote last April, when Woodward visited the Nixon library:

He said that when he and Bernstein open more reporting files from their second book, The Final Days, people will be surprised to find that one of Nixon's intimates was especially helpful, having concluded by late 1972 that he was doomed.

Nixon's Fall As An Unintended Consequence

Jack Shafer on Max Holland's Leak, to be published March 6:

Holland makes the persuasive case that [Washington Post source Mark] Felt, who died in 2008, used the classic techniques of counterintelligence he learned as an FBI agent to destabilize his main bureaucratic opponent inside the FBI (Acting Director L. Patrick Gray) with his leaks to Woodward (and other journalists). The goal of his leaks was to nudge President Richard Nixon in the direction of appointing him FBI director instead of Gray.

Leak overturns once and for all the romantic, popular interpretation of the Watergate saga of one inside source risking it all to save democracy. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” Holland writes. Although Holland never disparages the enterprise of Woodward and Bernstein, acknowledging the impact their reports had on Judge John J. Sirica and the senators who formed an investigative committee, neither does he bow to them. “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.”