by Bob Woodward, 2005
“Over time, we all become committed to a version of the story of our lives. Simplification and repetition solidify the account, and we tend to stick with that identity. But that is old news.” p. 213
This book reveals the story of how Bob Woodward met this most-famous informant and their relationship pre-, during, and post-Watergate. Many people find the book disappointing in that it doesn’t provide many “new revolutions” regarding Deep Throat. However, it’s an interesting look at how a chance meeting changed history.
Woodward initially met Mark Felt in 1970 in the halls of the White House, and immediately took to him. Woodward was a young man unsure of his next step in life, and used Felt as a kind of father-like mentor figure. They kept in touch off and on, even despite Felt’s dislike of Woodward’s decision to become a journalist. Not long after Woodward began working at the Washington Post, Watergate fell into his lap, and the men’s relationship began to drastically change. The men never spoke anymore except regarding the stories Woodward was writing. They never met anymore except in that famous parking garage. Something once near friendship was now nothing more than just business.
After All the President’s Men Felt wouldn’t even speak to Woodward anymore. (Deep cover meant not only that he would not be revealed as a source—a promise Woodward kept—but that it would not be revealed to the public that there even was a source.) Eventually, in the years just prior to Mark Felt’s 2005 revelation in Vanity Fair that he was Deep Throat, Woodward visited Felt in an attempt for closure. These scenes from the book reveal Felt as a man who doesn’t clearly remember the Watergate days and can’t shed any light on why he did what he did. Unfortunately, that question has been the second biggest question on everyone’s minds for years (—the first being “Who is Deep Throat?”).
Ultimately this book might not be the story the public wanted—it has the how, not the why. But it does reveal that *human side* of the Deep Throat story, which involved more than just secret meetings and spy tactics. This book is a telling, retelling and revealing of history from a man who has done his share of reporting on and participating in history.
Woodward also gives a little more commentary on the scandal and Nixon to add to the Watergate canon (already full of Woodward and Bernstein with All the President’s Men, The Final Days and Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate).
“Virtually everyone in Nixon’s inner circle turned on him—testified or wrote a book, telling about his bitterness and anger and efforts to break the law and to use his presidential power to settle new and old scores with his enemies, real and imagined.” p. 218
Note and don’t forget: “There never is a final draft of history.” p. 219