The unbearable lightness of hindsight
A little over a month ago, former Associate Director of the FBI Mark Felt died at age 95. As just about everyone knows by now, Mr. Felt was the mysterious Watergate character known as Deep Throat, secretly providing his friend, Washington Post reporter Robert Woodward, with information on deep background. The information Felt provided was meant to point Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein in the right direction when digging for stories and sources on Watergate. And that he did.
For more than a few years now - probably about 20 - I have been something of a Watergate aficionado. And for many of those years, until Mark Felt was revealed in 2005 to have been Woodward's friend Deep Throat, I had my own theory as to who the source was. After reading All The President's Men for the first time, which occurred after I had read Watergate books by John Dean, Gordon Liddy, H.R. Haldeman and Jeb Magruder, I was sure I knew Deep Throat's identity. The clues I thought I had picked up led me to Fred Fielding, who served as John Dean's deputy in the Nixon White House (and later was White House Counsel for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush).
I came to this conclusion about 10 years ago. I based it on a number of factors:
1) Deep Throat was identified by Woodward as a friend who worked in the Executive Branch.
2) Woodward wrote that Deep Throat had knowledge of the inner workings of the White House, the FBI, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP), and the Department of Justice. Based on the information he reported, Deep Throat seemed to have very detailed knowledge of the behind-the-scenes scrambling at the White House and at the CRP following the arrest of the Watergate burglers on June 17th, 1972.
3) Deep Throat advised Woodward late in the summer of 1972 that both the White House and the FBI were trying furiously to pinpoint the source of Woodward's and Bernstein's stories in the Washington Post.
4) Deep Throat emphasized to Woodward (as Woodward tells it, anyway) that "the whole thing" was "a Haldeman operation." H.R. Haldeman was President Nixon's Chief of Staff. While not many had access to the President - Haldeman and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman saw to it that Nixon was kept out of reach of almost everyone at the White House - Deep Throat described how many people had access to Haldeman, and that Haldeman used them as surrogates or go-betweens to insulate himself from CRP's intelligence-gathering activities.
5) Haldeman himself actually pointed at Fred Fielding as the probable identity of Deep Throat.
After Mr. Felt died in December, I undertook to re-read All The President's Men and Blind Ambition (by John Dean) in their entirety, and portions of Haldeman's White House memoir, The Ends of Power. I wanted to see how and where I had gone wrong in believing Deep Throat was Fred Fielding. And like every other situation that has the benefit of hindsight, the clues were jumping off the page. It's actually hard to believe that I didn't see earlier that Deep Throat worked for the FBI.
A few of my mistakes, enumerated from the items above:
1) When one hears the term "The Executive Branch", what does one think of? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the President, and therefore the White House. I got stuck on the White House simply because of the term "Executive Branch". A very silly error, since it encompasses much more than just the White House.
2) Deep Throat knew what was happening inside the White House and inside CRP. One of John Dean's assets as Counsel to the President was that he had previously worked for the Department of Justice, as an assistant to Attorney General John Mitchell. He was one of very few people who could act as a go-between the White House and the CRP, where Mitchell was chair (up until late June 1972). Haldeman and Mitchell did not trust or respect one another, and Ehrlichman and Mitchell were frequently in conflict and had only disdain for each other. I therefore figured that for Deep Throat to have substantial knowledge of both the White House and CRP, he would have to be someone close to Dean. This pointed at Fielding.
3) The fact that both the White House and the FBI were trying to figure out who was leaking information to the Post should have led me to suspect either place as a possibility. But I was stuck on the White House. Ironically, a couple of days after the arrest of the burglars, Dean complained to his old colleague, newly-installed Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, that stories were being leaked to the press by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police. (The D.C. police, for example, leaked to Woodward that one of the burglars had a large quantity of cash on his person when arrested, which pointed at a money trail, and that the same burglar - Bernard Barker - had an address book in his jacket, within which was an entry for Howard Hunt, who had worked at the White House, putting the White House in the reporters' direct sights almost immediately.) Kleindienst told Dean that he couldn't do anything about the D.C. Police, but not to worry, the leaks would stop in a few days, because the FBI was about to take over the case. Hahahahahahahahahaa!!!
4) The characterization of the CRP's intelligence gathering activities, both legal and illegal, as "a Haldeman operation" led me (again) to believe that Deep Throat worked in the White House. But it shouldn't have necessarily - everyone by then who worked in a senior position in the federal government knew that Haldeman was essentially the Assistant President, and that his underlings were a) involved in everything of any importance and b) not authorized to do a bloody thing without his orders.
5) Just because Haldeman wrote that he believed it was Fielding didn't mean he wasn't making the same mistakes I made. Haldeman's other named suspects all worked in the White House. Interestingly, in private conversations with President Nixon, Haldeman stated that he believed Felt was leaking confidential information to the press. And according to FBI Director Patrick Gray (more on him below), Haldeman put pressure on Gray to fire Felt, but Gray resisted on the basis of Felt's (false) assurances that he was leaking nothing to the press.
Like I said, when I re-read the books, it makes perfect sense that the Deep Throat source worked for the FBI. From the earliest days after the burglary, Acting FBI Director Patrick Gray was ferrying copies of documents from the investigators to John Dean, who was keeping the White House and by times the CRP informed of the direction of the investigation. This, too, made me suspect Fielding, but I should have thought of the information flowing in the opposite direction. In other words, Gray was probably learning all kinds of things from Dean, even if Dean wasn't necessarily spelling everything out. And as was discovered later during Gray's Senate confirmation hearings in March 1973, his lips were a little loose and his comments were a little indiscreet. For example, Gray volunteered, without being asked, the fact that FBI reports on the Watergate investigation were being shown to John Dean. He also announced - in response to a question from Senator Robert "Methuselah" Byrd (D-W.Va.) - that Dean had "probably lied" to the FBI when he stated, five days after the Watergate burglary, that he did not know if Howard Hunt had an office at the White House. (Hunt and Liddy organized the burglary but did not enter the Watergate that fateful night.) Dean wrote in his book that the White House hated the thought of having Gray go in front of the Senate for confirmation hearings, as there was no telling what he might say. (It was even worse than they feared.) But they worried more about upsetting him by not nominating him to be FBI Director.
Getting back to the issue of press leaks: There is every reason to believe that Patrick Gray was a conduit of information from the White House back to his deputy, Mark Felt. He believed he could trust Felt and, as I described, he was not given to playing his cards close to his chest. And there is no reason to believe that Felt didn't have other friends in the White House and the CRP who were telling him things he really shouldn't have known. People talk. I'll bet people sometimes talked to Deep Throat, without knowing where it would lead.
Furthermore, the FBI was interviewing every staff member it could find at the CRP. That alone could have been Felt's line to the Committee.
To draw this rambling post to a close, I guess I'll just state that it's funny how we can get stuck on a particular line of reasoning, a single possibility, or, in the case of a mystery, a single suspect. In the process, we miss the most obvious clues and glaze over any reasoning that would point us in another direction.
