Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

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If Felt's reasons for unmasking himself are a mix of high and low, so too were his apparent motives for talking to Woodward in the first place. After all, Felt was a by-the-book G-man, a ramrod-straight protege of J. Edgar Hoover's who made the FBI his life. In their book, Woodstein, as the Post duo came to be called, portrayed their source as a contradictory character who liked gossip and drink and had grown fiercely disillusioned by the "switchblade mentality" of the Nixon White House. But in a long Washington Post piece last week, presumably from his upcoming book, Woodward says, "With a story as enticing, complex, competitive and fast breaking as Watergate, there was little tendency or time ... to ask why [our sources] were talking or whether they had an ax to grind."

In a perceptive 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly, former Post reporter James Mann speculated that Felt or another top FBI official was the one who had leaked to Woodward as a way to protect his beloved FBI from Nixon's efforts to use the agency for political purposes. Deep Throat, wrote Mann, probably resented the appointment of outsider and Nixon loyalist L. Patrick Gray to replace FBI Director Hoover, who had died six weeks before the Watergate break-in, and wanted to blunt White House efforts to suppress the FBI investigation of the burglary. Of course, the FBI under Hoover had its problems with autocratic control and operations outside the normal bounds of law enforcement. In 1980 Felt was convicted of approving "black-bag jobs," illegal searches of homes of relatives and friends of fugitive American radicals. (Felt was pardoned by Ronald Reagan in 1981.) Mann and others have speculated that Felt became Deep Throat for revenge as well: he had thought himself ready and able to replace Hoover as FBI director and resented being passed over. "That could have figured in it," says Bernstein. "He never told us what his motivations in this were, for the most part."

The journalistic romance of Watergate was built on the irresistible combination of tenacious, enterprising reporters led toward the truth by a fearless whistle-blower bucking the foremost power in the land. In fact, it wasn't nearly that simple, and the credit--or blame, as some still see it--for precipitating Nixon's August 1974 resignation belongs as well to other journalists who doggedly pursued the story; to U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who pressed participants in the break-in to confess Administration involvement; to special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, who stood firm against White House interference; to the Senators and Representatives whose questioning on television brought the Administration's dirty dealings to public light; to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a President was not above the law when he tried to hide damning tape recordings confirming the cover-up he led. Without any of them, the Nixon Administration might well have survived to serve out its second term.