10,000 Holes In The Hoover Building

Reviewing Max Holland's Leak, Athan Theoharis shows how Watergate leaker W. Mark Felt helped destroy both the Nixon presidency and the culture of secrecy at the agency he professed to love, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI:

The investigation of Nixon's role in the Watergate cover-up led to the exposure of his more serious abuses of the U.S. intelligence agencies: wiretapping prominent reporters, covert actions by the White House Plumbers, and, under the proposed Huston Plan, authorizing the use of illegal investigative techniques. In response, Congress in 1974—overriding President Gerald Ford's veto—enacted key amendments to the Freedom of Information Act that allowed reporters, activists, and scholars to obtain highly secret and revealing FBI records. That same year it enacted the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which ensured the preservation of the Nixon Oval Office tapes and transferred control over Nixon's presidential papers to the National Archives, and in 1978 it passed the Presidential Records Act, which defined presidential papers as public property and established the conditions and timing for giving the public access to them. And in 1975 it established special House and Senate committees that investigated and then publicized the abusive practices of the U.S. intelligence agencies from the 1930s through the '70s.

Combined, these actions ended FBI officials' absolute control over their agency's records, a change that eventually benefitted the research of Holland and others. Such research has expanded our awareness of how secrecy emboldened officials to violate privacy rights and the rule of law, and as such it offers a powerful, still relevant lesson in the adverse consequences inherent in blind deference to claims of "national security."

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.

Woodward's All Benned Out Of Shape

Watergate reporter Bob Woodward is spending the runup to the break-in's 40th anniversary caught in a pincer movement between Max Holland (who in Leak completed the deromanticization of Woodward's most famous source, Mark Felt) and former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (who in 1990 confessed to misgivings about Woodward's description of his source). Holland writes:

Lest you, dear reader, think this is a manufactured controversy, a kerfuffle over some minor details—did Bob really move a flower pot on his balcony, and if so, how many times?—Woodward realizes what is at stake. Shortly after [Jeff] Himmelman read the [Barbara] Feinman transcript for the first time in April 2010, he interviewed Woodward. His mentor was "visibly shaken" after reading the passage, Himmelman writes, and “all vigor drained from his voice.” Himmelman then went back to Bradlee, who would be lobbied by Woodward to disavow the phrase "residual fear" or prohibit its use by Himmelman. Together, Himmelman and Bradlee tried to parse the reason for Woodward’s “off-the-charts” reaction. To Bradlee, it suggested that the notion of embellishments in All the President's Men "might be true."

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.

Mark His Woodward

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Grey Hats

Interviewed for an article about Robert Redford's new Watergate documentary, to be broadcast next year, reporter Bob Woodward picks a fight with one of Nixon's aides, Frank Gannon, who helped 37 write his memoirs in the mid-1970s:

One of Nixon’s wars, Mr. Woodward said, “is a war against history” — intentionally speaking in the present tense. He cited a book review in The Wall Street Journal two months ago by Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide, who asserted that many questions about the scandal remain unresolved. “How did a politician as tough and canny as Richard Nixon allow himself to be brought down by a ‘third-rate burglary’?” Mr. Gannon wrote. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Mr. Woodward was having none of it. “The voluminous record shows that there are answers to some of those questions,” he said. “When I read the review, I thought, the war continues, and it should be met with facts.”

Reporter Brian Selter continues:

[Woodward] said he had guided Mr. Redford and the other executive producer of “All the President’s Men Revisited,” the media executive Andy Lack, to new material about the scandal, like information about the 2005 disclosure of Mark Felt, the onetime associate F.B.I. director, as the so-called Deep Throat source.

Woodward and Redford, who portrayed him in "All the President's Men," will want to consult Leak, the new book by Max Holland that argues, to the satisfaction of most reviewers, that Felt passed FBI secrets to Woodward and other reporters in pursuit of personal gain, namely his hope that Nixon would dump the new FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, and replace him with Felt. The portrait of the Woodward source as a principled whistle-blower, as conveyed by the legendary Hal Hobrook performance in Redford's film, has been, well, met with facts.

I can imagine Woodward (whom I've known since 1988 and last saw at the Nixon library in April 2011) saying that Felt's motives don't affect the accountability of Nixon and his men. But we'll surely learn better lessons from history if we know the whole story of Washington's power struggles during the Vietnam war, which pitted Nixon against his real and imagined political adversaries (inside and outside the White House) and also Felt's FBI and even the Pentagon. Black and white hats were more evenly distributed than we've been led to believe.

Watergate And Factional Journalism

At Salon, Jefferson Morley reviews Max Holland's Leak:

Portraying [Mark] Felt/Deep Throat as a factional power player, not a high-minded voice of truth, is a public service. But Holland goes too far in deprecating the accomplishments of Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He develops the argument first made by Edward Jay Epstein that the Post got too much credit for exposing the criminal conspiracy emanating from Nixon’s White House.

“Contrary to widely held perception that the Post uncovered Watergate,” Holland writes, “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 prosecutor’s case well in advance of the trial.” From the leisurely perspective of a historian that may be convincing. For working journalists, the publication of a story days or weeks in advance of the government is the whole point.

Nevertheless, “All the President’s Men” embellished Woodward’s and Bernstein’s fine job to an act of moral heroism. The film reassured viewers that the good guys could win with the help of a wise man on the inside. Any young person who is inspired to do journalism by “All the President’s Men” should also read Leak. The romantic myth of journalism is dead and that’s a good thing.

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.

Who You Calling An Ambassador?

Max Holland's book about Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's secret Watergate source, gets kudos from former Nixon counsel John Dean (shown here), who compares it favorably with what he describes as a sloppy account of the scandal in Tim Weiner's new book about the FBI. Among other things he lauds Holland for making his own Watergate transcripts:

Weiner quotes Nixon from a conversation when he was reacting to information I had learned on October 19, 1972, which unequivocally established that Mark Felt was leaking information. At one point, Nixon said to Haldeman, in Weiner’s (incorrect) version: “You know what I’d do with him [Felt]? Bastard!” In fact, what Nixon really said to Haldeman was much more telling, and interesting. He didn’t say “Bastard!” Rather, he said, “Ambassador.”

In short, Nixon would have done with Felt what he would later do with CIA director Richard Helms, to keep him happy and get him out of the way: make him an ambassador in a foreign land.

According to Dean, Weiner doesn't identify his sources for Watergate transcripts. NARA tapes specialist Samuel W. Rushay, Jr. writes that two scholars have made this particular error, one of whom is Stanley Kutler, who rushed out a book of transcripts in 1998. More about Kutler's errors here. Kutler also erred when transcribing a comment of Nixon's about the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, Howard Baker. One day in 1973, Nixon told his aides that Baker needed bucking up, one of his classic idioms. Kutler picked another consonant. Funny how these mistakes never make 37 look better.

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.”

One Dumb Gumshoe

According to Max Holland's new book, Mark Felt, the Washington Post's famous Watergate source, was leaking secret FBI information to reporters so Richard Nixon would hire him as FBI director to plug the leaks. This is from a Daily Mail report. Holland was kind enough to send me an advance copy, so more later.

Bob Felt Strongly

A top FBI official, Mark Felt gave law enforcement secrets to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and helped destroy Richard Nixon's presidency. One authority, Ivan Greenberg, recently called it a coup, asserting that at least three others at the FBI were involved. Did Felt, who died in 2008, want to save his country from White House abuses or to get back at Nixon for passing him over for J. Edgar Hoover's job as FBI director? Historian and journalist Max Holland promises to answer the question in his new book, Leak, due in March. Thanks to Max posting on Facebook, here's an excerpt from the jacket copy:

Holland critiques all the theories of Felt’s motivation that have circulated over the years, including notions that Felt had been genuinely upset by White House law-breaking or had tried to defend and insulate the FBI from the machinations of President Nixon and his Watergate henchmen. And, while acknowledging that Woodward finally disowned the “principled whistleblower” image of Felt in The Secret Man, Holland shows why that famed journalist’s latest explanation still falls short of the truth.

Holland showcases the many twists and turns to Felt’s story that are not widely known, revealing not a selfless official acting out of altruistic patriotism, but rather a career bureaucrat with his own very private agenda.

While Woodward kept the secret for a generation, Nixon and his aides always suspected it was Felt. In 2009 Holland promised to reveal the identity of the person who tipped off the White House. Presumably that nugget will be in Leak.

In an April 2008 post, I plotted the Felt connection between the Nixon and Obama eras:

If everyone knows that William Ayers and his comrades in the Weather Underground were planning to set bombs to murder innocent people, why didn’t they do time?

Because the investigation against them was muffed thanks to the illegal activities of the Washington Post‘s favorite Watergate answer man himself, Mark Felt — aka Deep Throat.

In 1972-73, FBI official Felt and his colleague Edward S. Miller authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of Weather Underground members. When the black bag jobs became public, the federal government decided it couldn’t prosecute the alleged terrorists. Indicted during the Carter Administration, Felt and Miller were tried in 1980 in Washington. Ever the patriot, former President Nixon voluntarily testified on the defendants’ behalf, but they were convicted anyway and pardoned by President Reagan in March 1981.

Mr. Nixon’s gesture was especially gracious in view of his suspicions in the early 1970s that Felt had been the Post‘s famous source. When J. Edgar Hoover died, Felt had hoped to be named FBI director, but Mr. Nixon passed him over, whereupon the author of the FBI’s illegal campaign against the Weathermen developed a more finely-tuned sense of righteousness when it came to White House efforts to limit the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Behind the back of his rival and boss, acting director L. Patrick Gray, Felt used the press to undermine Mr. Nixon by dishing confidential information to Bob Woodward. He and the Post kept the secret of his identity and motives until 2005.

Now we know the truth. If it hadn’t been for Mark Felt, President Nixon might have finished his second term, and William Ayers might have gone to jail.

37 Felt Strongly About This

When Nixon stuck up for Deep Throat.

Nixon Library: Still Standing

If you've seen "The Last Waltz," the documentary about the Band's last concert, you remember the bit with Robbie Robertson and the fly. "Catch that fly," says his buddy, director Martin Scorsese, when the guitarist and songwriter is being bugged during one of their interviews about life on the road. Last night at the Nixon library, the irascible Ben Bradlee, 89-year-old former executive editor of The Washington Post, was listening to a colloquy between his superstar reporter, Bob Woodward, and Nixon library director Tim Naftali when he waved his hand in the air and interrupted them. "There's a goddamn fly here," Bradlee said.

"Hit it with your stick," Woodward said genially, nodding toward Bradlee's cane. Later, as Woodward referred in his measured cadences to Richard Nixon's emotional farewell to his White House staff on Aug. 8, 1974, Bradlee got a laugh from the audience by pretending to saw on a violin.

I thought to myself that, like the Band, they should take their show on the road, which, of course, they have, for most of the last 40 years. How often has Woodward told the story of finding E. Howard Hunt's name in a Watergate burglar's notebook next to the notation "W House"? "We realized that could only mean two things," he said, pausing expertly for 600 knowing laughs before applying the rim shot. "Carl Bernstein called the whorehouse, and I called the White House." And then: "Ben doesn't like this, but I'll say it anyway. All good work is done in defiance of management." Turning to his ex-boss Bradlee, he said, "Go ahead. Give me the finger." With practiced timing, Bradlee complied.

Comic turns by old colleagues and friends couldn't take all the sting out of the story of an administration and a nation in crisis. Woodward was especially moving as he described how, after 25 years, he'd come to the conclusion that Gerald Ford had done the right thing in pardoning Nixon. 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.

Now that we know the name of Woodward's most famous source, FBI official Mark Felt, the architecture of the Post's Watergate story is clearer than ever before. Woodward said last night that he first checked with Felt after learning within a few days of the Watergate break-in of the connection between Hunt and White House operative Chuck Colson. Felt replied that the Post would be on the right track with any negative story about Colson and Hunt -- another laugh line, but also a reminder that a powerful official was using his access to raw FBI files to undermine the president who had denied him the prize of the FBI directorship.

Woodward is shown above with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff, who organized the campaign to build the $13.5 million wing where Woodward and Bradlee spoke and where the Nixon White House and Bob Haldeman operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation, although absent last night, keep their offices.

During the question period, I asked Woodward to remind his audience when he'd first met Mark Felt. In the Nixon White House, he replied, when Woodward was still a naval officer. I'm skeptical about the theory that the reporter was part of a "Seven Days In May"-style conspiracy hatched by the Pentagon and proto-neocons against a president who was making peace with the Soviets and Chinese and in Vietnam (although Woodward retains exceptionally good sources among the brass). Still, Felt's resentment of Nixon and revelations of his own illegal activities have muddied the Watergate. Woodward said in passing that Felt "had some glimpse" of intelligence community abuses. That's for sure. At the same time he was waxing pious with the Post about Nixon administration abuses, he was ordering illegal black bag jobs against the anti-Vietnam war Weathermen.

When Kathy and I greeted Woodward after the event, with characteristic solicitousness he asked for our impressions of his comments. I told him that I had always experienced him as a bit of a Watergate puritan, so offended by Nixon's lapses that he had trouble taking a balanced view of Nixon's legacy. But last night, he ended on a hopeful note, beginning with what President George W. Bush had said about how history would view the Iraq war. In an Oval Office interview with Woodward, Bush shrugged and said he didn't much care, "because we'll all be dead." Same with Nixon legacy, he said. It's not for us in our time to decide whether Nixon's foreign policy achievements will ultimately outweigh his failures.

Perhaps something about being welcomed to the Nixon library, with its new Watergate exhibit finally open to the taxpaying public, enabled a mellower Woodward. As for the library, last night was a boon because it proved the roof wouldn't cave in when Nixon was criticized, not because we were going to hear a fully nuanced story of modern politics' greatest scandal, no matter how integral our speakers' roles in uncovering it. Researchers in the bowels of the Nixon library may have some work to do even on that seemingly settled but complicated subject. After their talk, as I photographed Bradlee, Naftali, and Woodward, I told them that in profile, they looked like Mount Rushmore. Woodward responded, "Let history decide!"

Mark Felt's "Coup" Against Richard Nixon

Ivan Greenberg, writing at the History News Network after studying 3,500 pages of (legally obtained; how quaint, how old school) records about FBI official W. Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's most important Watergate source:

[W]hen Felt’s role as Deep Throat first was made public in 2005 few in the media, with the exception of the Albany Times Union, adequately appreciated that he did not act alone. At least three other top-level FBI officials or agents worked with him to coordinate the leaks to the press. What might properly be called a “coup” inside the government, led by Felt, forced the President to resign. The actions of this FBI faction were extraordinary. Instead of targeting political liberals or radicals, they went after the chief executive using information as a weapon.

Felt’s motives have been discussed at length. He saw himself as a patriotic whistleblower acting to preserve the integrity of government. Nixon broke the law during Watergate and so the President should be exposed. Critics see less noble purposes. Felt resented being passed over for the Director’s job by Nixon after J. Edgar Hoover died in early May 1971. In addition, Felt acted as a vigilante against Nixon because the President wanted to run “dirty tricks” intelligence operations directly out of the White House bypassing the FBI altogether. The latter point is critical: Felt hoped to preserve the dominant role of the FBI to spy on Americans in domestic politics. Felt called it preserving the FBI’s “independence.”

FBI files show that the Felt faction engaged in a high-level of deception within the Bureau to protect its secret contact with the press. Soon after the Watergate break-in, Director L. Patrick Gray III put Felt in charge of finding sources of FBI leaks to the press. In short, the fox had been put in charge of protecting the chickens.

The Nebulous Baker Boys

Russ Baker is a conspiracy-minded writer whose 2008 book about the Bush family stepped outside the bounds of believability and indeed propriety by hinting that George H.W. Bush had a role in President Kennedy's assassination.

But Baker also poses questions about the military and intelligence communities' actions during the Nixon administration that deserve more attention that they've gotten from mainstream scholars. This piece of the Watergate puzzle doesn't have to be the whole picture, but it deserves to be part of it.

Yet anyone who writes about it at all, such as Baker, Len Colodny, and James Rosen (who's still waiting for a New York Times review of his painstakingly researched study of John Mitchell, John Dean, and Watergate), runs the risk of being called a noncanonical outlier. Former Sen. Gary Hart reprimanded the late Peter Rodman, a respected Kissinger aide, for even raising the issue of detentenik Nixon's hawkish institutional foes.

So in the vein of a beggar not being too choosy, here's an excerpt from a Russ Baker blog entry about the cozy relationship between Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (shown here) and the military establishment:

Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course — so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more — and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean — wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?

Hat tip to Len Colodny

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.

Felt Tip

Washington sleuth Max Holland has published the first of two articles describing his investigation into how the Nixon White House learned by October 1972 that the principal government source for the Washington Post's Watergate reporting was FBI official Mark Felt, whom President Nixon had spurned for the post of the bureau's director. So far, Holland has ruled out several attorneys who represented the Post or its sister publication "Newsweek." We'll have to tune into the next excerpt to see whom he rules in.