Two of the people who are brought up most in conversations about the Watergate Affair are Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were both instrumental in covering the affair, but they are given too much credit for investigation. While their coverage of the affair could be considered some of the best journalism of its time, most of the credit for the investigation should go to the FBI. It is no secret that Bob Woodward was in constant contact with a secret source referred to as Deep Throat, who revealed himself to be the FBI number two Mark Felt, who kept Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation on the right track. Felt was able to aid the investigation because the FBI’s investigation was already many steps ahead of the Washington Post. In order to fully understand the investigation into the Watergate Affair in regards to how the case was brought to public and how Nixon was forced to resign is to look at Felt and Woodward’s relationship along with the legal proceedings of the case. Even though Woodward’s perseverance cannot be undermined, part of Woodward’s success in the investigation was that he was lucky enough to meet Felt.
Woodward was a Navy Lieutenant in 1970 and acted as a courier that took documents to the Whitehouse. He was in a waiting space outside the Situation Room waiting to be acknowledged where he met Mark Felt for the first time. Woodward found that although he introduced himself and talked a bit about his career and his reason for being in the waiting space, Felt wasn’t as keen to talk about his work. They found talking points abut graduate school and career paths and Woodward managed to get Felt’s office phone number. Felt became a constant source for Woodward when it came to career advice (Woodward).
As Woodward fought an uphill battle to get a career in journalism, Felt was fighting his own battles in the FBI. Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, who was the FBI director at the time. Hoover’s FBI and Nixon’s Whitehouse were constantly at odds. At one point, Hoover and Nixon were in a scuffle about an electronic monitoring program that would give the FBI and the CIA unprecedented power but would spy on many innocent people. Felt complained about having to stop initiatives by others in the FBI to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in Los Angeles or to open file on every member of Students for a Democratic Society. Felt went as far as writing that he consider Nixon "a kind of White House gauleiter [an official presiding over Nazi territory] over the intelligence community (Woodward)."
After a year of trying, Woodward finally secured a job at the Washington Post and kept in contact with Mark Felt. One of Felt’s conditions for their continued contact was that Woodward never discloses to anybody that he had a contact so high up in the FBI. Sometimes, Woodward would use things he heard from Felt as story ideas, such as in the case where Vice President Spiro T. Agnew took a $2,500$ bribe and kept it in his drawer and the attempted assassination of the Governor of Alabama who was a presidential candidate at the time (Woodward).
Felt and Woodward were still regular contacts when the Watergate Affair was dropped on the intelligence community. After Woodward tried to contact Felt a few times, Felt stopped answering Woodward’s calls. Woodward ended up going to Felt’s home in Virginia to get help from him in regards to problems in the investigation. Felt made it clear to Woodward that from then on, they would have to meet in secret (Woodward).
Felt used his experience with espionage to arrange his meetings with Woodward; they were supposed to never speak together in public or over the phone. Felt had devised a method to put a not in Woodward’s copy of the New York Times to tell him when he wanted a meeting, and told Woodward to change the position of his flowerpot with the red flag in it to indicate when he wanted a meeting (Woodward).
Felt’s insistence on secrecy came into context when Nixon’s chief of staff, Harry Robins Haldeman, had a conversation with Nixon about whom he thought was the leak. “We know what's leaked and we know who leaked it,” said Haldeman to Nixon. “Somebody in the FBI?” Nixon replied. "Yes, sir.” "Somebody next to Gray?” “Mark Felt.” “Now why the hell would he do that?” “I think he wants to be in the top spot.” (Dobbs) Much of the evidence shows that Felt did indeed “want to be in the top spot.” There is no way for anyone to be sure because he was in declining health when he revealed his role in revealing the Watergate Affair. Felt made many references to what he calls “the FBI Pyramid.” The FBI pyramid was, to him, the hierarchical structure of the FBI and he even wrote a book on it titled after that same phrase. Also, in his autobiography, Felt makes it no secret that he wanted the job as FBI director after Hoover died and was disappointed to see L. Patrick Gray III get the nomination from Nixon instead (Dobbs).
Another important consideration that cannot be left out is Mark Felt’s contempt for President Nixon. As was mentioned before, Felt thought of Nixon as a Nazi officer presiding over the intelligence community. One of the most obvious ways to help prosecutors who would one day bring a case against a sitting President of the United States would be to garner public support against said president and use that support to egg the prosecutors on.
In their book All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein discussed Felt’s piecemeal approach to helping the reporters on their way to investigating the conspiracy. Plausible explanations were that he didn’t want to compromise his place in the FBI due to the personal dangers that were inherently present in leaking the information, that the White House could have easily discredited one or two big stories emerging out of the blue, but concluded that he was just trying to protect the FBI, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Another explanation could be that he felt that revealing this information to the public bit by bit would draw readers in and have a greater effect on public opinion.
Another mystery about the man once known as Deep Throat, was about why he didn’t reveal his identity for so long. One reason could be the legal trouble he got into a few years after the Watergate Affair about a mission he was a part of during the Hoover years. Felt was convicted of civil rights violations for the surveillance of people he thought to be associated with a group called Weather Underground that he was investigating. Woodward offered to reveal the information on Felt’s involvement during the Watergate Affair but Felt thought that it could only hurt his legal case against the prosecutors.(The Secret Man) Felt ended up paying a $7,000 fine in the case but managed to escape jail time because of a pardon from Ronald Reagan.
Felt was in a good position to be Deep Throat. As the FBI’s number two, it was Felt’s job to compile the information on the Watergate investigation It is when the FBI’s role in uncovering the Watergate Affair is brought into question that many people are less knowledgeable. The reason for this lack of knowledge about how the scandal was truly uncovered, according to Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer, and Donald E. Campbell, who served as prosecutors during the Watergate case is that “No one really wants to know.” (Epstein) The truth is, the account of investigative journalists uncovering a big scandal and ousting a sitting president is a great story and not many people want to look beyond it. Most, if not all, of the information on the Watergate Affair was uncovered by the FBI before anyone else, including Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had any idea that there was any sort of scandal in the works.
The FBI located three important chains of events after the Watergate break-in. They first used the serial numbers on the hundred-dollar bill that the burglars had stuffed into their pockets to trace the bills. They had traced the bill through the Federal Reserve Bank to the Miami Bank account of Bernard Barker, who was one of the burglars arrested at the Watergate hotel. The prosecutors mentioned above subpoenaed Barker’s bank transactions and found that the money had originally come from the Committee for the Re-election of the President. Other names such as the CRP regional finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg’s and others came out as a result of this subpoena issued on June 22 1972, five days after the June 17 burglary. The Washington Post published this information about a month later on August 1st, 1972. (Epstein)
The FBI had also used receipts and other information found on the burglars to connect White House Consultant E. Howard Hunt to the burglary within 24 hours of the incident. A leak from the Washington Police to Washington Post reporter Eugene Bachinski allowed for the Washington Post to publish this information a few days later. Prosecutors sought out Kathleen Chenow, Hunt’s secretary, after her return from England. After interviewing her, they confirmed a connection between Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who was suspected of having spear-headed the conspiracy. (Epstein)
The day of the burglary, the FBI found their most important lead which, second to the tapes Nixon kept, had the most influential effect on exposing the scandal. What the FBI found was a listening post in the Howard Johnson Motor Hotel that was used as a point for communication between the burglars and former FBI agent Alfred Baldwin. Baldwin was a key witness because he kept records on all wiretaps and wiretapping operations. The FBI and prosecutors used advanced interrogation techniques and cut deals in order to get the records from Baldwin and were able to use them to create a case against Hunt, Liddy, and the five burglars. (Epstein)
After compiling all this evidence independent of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein or any other journalistic sources, the prosecutors would have taken this case to a grand jury and exposed the conspiracy. Once it went to the grand jury, reporters all over the country would have pounced on the story. If it wasn’t for the FBI’s number two, Mark Felt, who had access to all of this information guiding the two reporters through their own investigation, they would most probably have been lost in the see of reporters flooding the courthouse to get all the information they could on the conspiracy.
Works Cited
Bernstein, Carl, and Bob Woodward. All the President’s Men. 1st ed. Pocket Books, 1994. Print.
Epstein, Edward Jay. "Did the Press Uncover Watergate." Edward Jay Epstein. Edward Jay Epstein, July, 1974. Web. 5 May 2010.
Dobbs, Micheal. "Watergate and the Two Lives of Mark Felt." Washington Post 20 Jun 2005, WeekdayPrint.
Woodward, Bob. "How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'." Washington Post 05 Jun 2005, WeekdayPrint.
Woodward, Bob. The Secret Man the Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. Simon and Schuster, 2005. Print.
