Woodward’s ‘Secret Man’ leaves many questions unanswered

Even investigative reporter Bob Woodward admits it: The final chapter of his Watergate reporting is not as he dreamed it would be.

For 33 years he had kept secret the real name of Deep Throat, the anonymous source who proved to be the rudder guiding the Washington Post’s reporting of the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon presidency.

Then, in late May, Vanity Fair magazine published a story in which 91-year-old W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s second in command during its Watergate investigation, is quoted once, saying: “I’m the guy they call Deep Throat.”

For years Woodward and his reporting cohort at the Post, Carl Bernstein, had sworn they would release Deep Throat’s name only after his death. But the magazine piece forced their hand. In something like 10 days, Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster prepared a manuscript for publication. It shows.

“The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat” is both sad and unsatisfying. And for the same reason: Felt’s memory is ravaged by dementia, and he can’t really speak for himself.

So the reader never learns why this former protege of the FBI’s patron saint, the late J. Edgar Hoover, risked ignominy and imprisonment to steer a 29-year-old reporter investigating corruption in the White House.

Those who know Woodward’s books (this is his 13th) know writing is not his strength. In his sometimes plodding, sometimes disjointed way, he describes his first encounter with Felt in late 1969 or early 1970. They met at the Nixon White House. Woodward was a Navy lieutenant delivering a package to the West Wing. Felt was on bureau business.

At that point in his life, Woodward wasn’t even thinking of becoming a journalist. He was fishing for job connections. He wangled Felt’s phone number, and over time actually used him as a sounding board for jobs, even as a mentor.

Two years later Woodward, a Post police reporter for eight months, was assigned as one of eight reporters to learn why five men had broken into the Democratic Party’s national committee headquarters in the Watergate office building.

The burglary unraveled like a cheap sweater. One of the burglars was a former CIA employee. Over the next months Woodward and Bernstein, using dozens of largely unnamed sources, would publish stories that moved closer and closer to the White House.

Felt by then was No. 2 at the FBI. Everything written about the Justice Department’s investigation of the burglary and later a cover-up in the White House came across his desk.

Woodward makes it clear in both “All the President’s Men” – the post-Watergate book in which he and Bernstein first acknowledged they had a source nicknamed Deep Throat – and in this book that he always initiated contact with Felt; Felt didn’t volunteer. Felt served as a backstop for the Post reporters; they would find information elsewhere and occasionally check it against what he knew.

Over the years outsiders, including some members of the Nixon administration, suspected Felt was Deep Throat. He denied it, even in the book he later wrote about his career. He even denied it before a federal grand jury, although the question and his denial were later withdrawn from the record.

One of the sadder aspects of the book is Woodward’s struggle to explain how and why he lost touch with Felt. And when they finally did reconnect in 2000, it is agonizing to read the transcripts of Woodward’s attempts to coax Felt into remembering anything of their clandestine conversations of 1972, some of which occurred in an underground parking garage.

There is Woodward with a tape recorder, almost achingly pleading with Felt to remember what he’d done, and coming up blank.

So what the reader is left with is Felt unable to say why he did what he did and all but unable to understand the praise and criticism heaped his way since his identity was revealed.

Woodward tries to speculate, even calls on a little Freud, and in the end surrenders: “Any attempt I might make to explain or resolve or fully make sense of Mark Felt’s behavior would probably fail.”

In that sense, then, this book fails, too, to answer one of Watergate’s more intriguing riddles.