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November 02, 2005
History's echo
I’ve been reading The Secret Man, Bob Woodward’s short book on Deep Throat, the source who helped Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the scandal that sank Richard Nixon. W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s No. 2 man at the time, ended Washington’s long-running mystery early this year when he disclosed that he was Deep Throat.
The Secret Man is a good refresher course on how the scandal unfolded. It is also a fascinating account of the relationship between Woodward and Felt and of the factors that might have motivated Felt to help break the coverup. Some of his motives were noble, some weren’t.
I was already a newspaperman during the Watergate scandal. For a decade afterward, I read a Watergate book each year. There was no way anyone could keep up with all the memoirs and histories that rolled off the book presses, but I saw the scandal from many perspectives.
For me, the main thing new in The Secret Man is how central Mark Felt was to Woodward. He wasn’t just a source for the Watergate stories; in many ways he was their foundation. He was near the heart of the FBI's investigation of Watergate. Although his survival instincts could make him cryptic, he provided Woodward, Bernstein and the Washington Post with the assurance that their pursuit of the Watergate story was no wild goose chase. For months, it was a lonely, tedious, sometimes dangerous pursuit. The glory and the glamour came only later.
There was also a moment of resonance in reading The Secret Man. It was amazing to remember that Woodward and Bernstein were breaking stories damaging to Nixon right up until the 1972 election. In response, the White House denied the truth, threatened the Post and called the reporters liars and toadies for the Democratic Party. The coverup worked. Nixon won a landslide re-election despite all the despicable things he and his minions had done.
I heard an echo of this when I read E.J. Dionne’s column making the same point about the 2004 election campaign. The Bush administration did all it could in those months to cover up the unraveling of its case for going to war in Iraq and to slime those who were calling that case into question. The indictment of Scooter Libby last week was one result of the coverup. The first line of Dionne's column was: “Has anyone noticed that the coverup worked?”
Posted by Mike Pride at November 2, 2005 06:51 PM
Comments
Today's headlines, Washington Time: Democrats intensify Bush slams.
When will Democrats learn that fault finding is insufficient to build a national party? You've lost the White House, both houses in Congress and you are about to lose the liberal tilt on the Supreme Court.
Posted by: fullert at November 3, 2005 08:50 AM