Our name for him was Wig. And for two years only a handful of people at Vanity Fair’s office in New York knew what or who Wig was. It turned out to be another code name for Deep Throat, wittily, or perhaps tastelessly, given to Mark Felt by Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigations — undoubtedly the highest moment of journalistic inquiry ever on either side of the Atlantic.
Woodward was gracious when he learned that Vanity Fair had scooped him with his own story, as indeed was Carl Bernstein when Eeditor Graydon Carter called his friend to make a slightly rueful apology on Wednesday morning. Actually it’s a testament to Woodward and Bernstein’s integrity that Vanity Fair was able to capture the unicorn and reveal the identity of this mythic creature. This was a serious secret that still has the power to stir considerable passions in America, as we saw in the reaction of Pat Buchanan, who instantly branded Felt a traitor. Woodward and Bernstein, together with the former Post Editor Ben Bradlee, held true to the cardinal rule of journalism of never revealing a source. In a time of such looseness and compromise, this kind of rigid probity almost seems old-fashioned.
In many other ways, recalling Watergate this week emphasizes how times have changed, and I am afraid present values in the US media are not shown in an especially good light. Since Sept.11, when the heroic fortitude of America was at its most visible, the Bush administration has gradually contrived to cast all criticism and investigation into its activities as unpatriotic and an obstruction to its war against terrorism. Few cross the line in the White House, where a wary and unforgiving regime — not unlike that run by Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman for Richard Nixon — ensures that leaks are very rare indeed. Much the same atmosphere of fear and obedience obtains in the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld and at the Justice Department, though less so at the State Department and CIA.
Broadcasters have largely accepted that attacks on the White House can only harm America’s interests, and when they don’t they are bamboozled and vilified by the shrill voices of the right.
I visit the States three or four times a year, and watching the television news in hotel rooms in the last three years has been like witnessing a time-lapse study of emasculation. It’s not just the unbearable lightness of purpose in most news shows; it’s the sense that everyone is rather too mindful of the backstairs influence of the White House in companies such as Viacom and News Corporation that own the TV news. The anchorman Dan Rather, for example, was eased out by Viacom — CBS’s owner — after he wrongly made allegations about the president’s time in the Texas Air National Guard. It was not a mistake that required his head on a platter.
The result of this climate of fear and caution is that few Americans have any idea of the circumstances in which 1,600 of their countrymen have lost their lives in Iraq, the hideous injuries suffered by both Iraqi and American victims of suicide bombers, or even the profound responsibility that lies with Rumsfeld for mishandling practically every facet of the occupation. The mission to explain has been replaced by the mission to avoid. If today there was a whistleblower as well placed, heroically brave and strategic as Mark Felt, one wonders whether he would now find the outlet that Felt did at the Washington Post between 1972 and 1974.
The Post’s sister publication Newsweek has just had its nose rubbed in the dirt by the administration after what is still, I believe, a questionable scandal involving an item alleging that the Qur’an had been flushed down the toilet at Guant?namo. What is so worrying about the Newsweek story was the cowed reaction of the press. Marty Peretz, the owner of the New Republic, took space in his own publication to attack the Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff, who by the way was once the hero of conservatives for his hounding of Bill Clinton. It is plain that, despite all his wealth and shrewdness, Peretz does not possess an elementary understanding of the sacred duty of the press, which, however dishonored and ignored, is to watch government and make it answerable when the processes of democracy are corrupted by politics and the self-interest of politicians.
The motivated source that he describes perfectly delineates Deep Throat’s position during Watergate. Felt probably did have an agenda influenced by the fact that Nixon had made Patrick Gray head of the FBI when Felt was clearly the better and more experienced candidate. That would have ruled Felt out as a source under a Peretz editorship, even though Felt was primarily motivated by a deep revulsion at what was going on around him. He knew that all investigations into the Watergate break-in and the activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) were being fed back to the White House by Nixon’s man, Pat Gray. The CIA was also providing Felt’s investigators with false leads at Nixon’s behest.
As Felt remarked to Woodward long before Watergate, the Nixon White House was “corrupt” and “sinister”. Eventually the Watergate cover-up compelled him to the lonely and dangerous role of Deep Throat, but one cannot imagine that this was something Felt — a career G-man who admired J. Edgar Hoover — wanted for himself.
We must remember that these were dark days. Nixon fought and won an election during the Watergate scandal and, had it not been for the persistence of the Post and the wary guidance provided by Deep Throat, he might well have survived to serve a full second term. Had Peretz been editor of the Post at the time, all that criminality and corruption might well have gone unpunished.
It is good that Deep Throat has at last come in from the cold at a time when his country needs many more men and women like him. Let us hope the media is still willing and able to help a great American hero like Mark Felt.
— Henry Porter is the London editor of Vanity Fair. His novel about the fall of the Berlin wall, Brandenburg, is published by Orion on June 22.
