Jack Shafer

This review originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 6, 2012, and is being reprinted by permission of the Post.

Jeff Himmelman uses his new book, Yours in Truth, to take shots at Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and their 1974 book, All the President’s Men. But Himmelman’s fire does not come from the usual redoubt of Watergate revisionism. He is a former researcher for Woodward, one who worked so diligently on Maestro the reporter’s 2001 book about Alan Greenspan, that Woodward gushed about him in his author’s note.

“Jeff Himmelman,” he wrote, “was my full-time collaborator at every step of this book—reporting, writing and editing. … A truly remarkable man of unusual maturity, brainpower and charm, Jeff is an original thinker who retains a deep sense of idealism. … This book would never have been completed without him, and it is his as much as mine. I consider him a friend for life.”

After he finishes reading Yours in Truth, Woodward will probably consider a different sort of life sentence for Himmelman.

Although former Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee gets top billing in Himmelman’s book, he plays a supporting role, not the lead. The book is chockablock with Bradlee—drawing on more than 60 boxes containing his papers and other private archives, and countless hours of interviews with him and his colleagues, to tell the story of his life, which Bradlee already covered in his 1995 autobiography, A Good Life. But the genuine subject is Woodward.

Himmelman publicly signaled as much last Sunday when, before the book’s release, he published an excerpt on the Web site of New York magazine. He capitalizes on an unpublished 1990 interview in which Bradlee discussed his “little problem with Deep Throat,” the code name for Woodward’s legendary Watergate source, Mark Felt. Of the clandestine parking-garage meetings with Deep Throat that Woodward convened by moving a flower pot on his apartment balcony, Bradlee expressed doubts. “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight,” he said.

Himmelman’s other blast criticizes Woodward and Bernstein for being less than honest about how successful they were in their efforts to interview members of a Watergate grand jury. The duo has long maintained that they did not reap any information from the grand jurors they approached. But a memo in Bradlee’s papers, written by Bernstein at the time of the Watergate investigation, indicates that they did talk to a grand juror.

Such shots land hard on Woodward and Bernstein, but will they cause lasting damage?

Himmelman attempts no deep forensic study of what he found in Bradlee’s boxes, contrary to what you’d expect of an investigative reporter challenging the legend of Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, he gives the reader long, descriptive and dialogue-rich passages in which he confronts Bradlee — and then Woodward and Bradlee—with his findings. It’s almost like reading one of the spectacular fly-on-the-wall scenes from a Woodward book, except in Yours in Truth, all the flies are on the record and the stakes aren’t as quite as global or spectacular.

Say what you will about Woodward and his reportorial techniques—and many journalists and scholars have weighed in—All the President’s Men has withstood rigorous scrutiny over the past four decades. Entire books have been dedicated to its examination. While its treatment of Watergate is not complete or perfect, the book is a powerful document of the investigation.

One of the more appealing aspects of All the President’s Men is the authors’ willingness to portray themselves in a less-than-flattering light. Bernstein is shown trampling ethics and possibly breaking the law by asking an employee at a credit card company, and another at a telephone company, to lift records. Woodward repeatedly expands his agreement with Deep Throat, phoning him after promising to stay away from the phone and quoting him anonymously in the paper after vowing never to do so. And by quoting Deep Throat at length, All the President’s Men violates the sourcing arrangement completely.

So the idea that Woodward and Bernstein would push the envelope to get a story is not revelatory: They confess to their methodology in their book.

What, then, to make of Bradlee’s doubts? Of the grand jury memo?

As I read Bradlee, what he’s doubting are the highly dramatic scenes in All the President’s Men, not the Watergate findings in the book. Arranging flower pots to set up meetings with a source inside a parking garage may sound like something out of Austin Powers, but let’s remember that Deep Throat’s first suggested signal was for Woodward to leave his apartment drapes open, which Woodward rejected because he likes sunshine. Also, the reporter devised an alternate method to set up the meetings: a telephone call that did not identify him.

The skullduggery behind the flower-pot signals and coded messages completely fit the man Deep Throat was, one experienced in counterintelligence. Deep Throat may have thought the tradecraft made him safe, or he may have used it to impress Woodward with what an important, inviolable source he was.

Woodward and Bernstein fill All the President’s Men with their heavy breathing, which is one of the things that makes it so readable. For instance, after Deep Throat warns Woodward that his inquiries are putting lives in danger, Woodward and Bernstein storm Bradlee’s home after 2 a.m. with the news. The next day, the two reporters have a meeting with The Post’s top editors, Bradlee included, where, as Woodward writes in The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, veteran editor Richard Harwood “thought we had finally gone around the bend and that our coverage was nearing the edge of fantasy, a kind of paranoid delusion of persecution.”

Yes, the pair overdramatized their story, but it’s likely they considered their book a form of cinema verite. If your best source told you your life was in danger, you might appear overdramatic and delusional to others.

Himmelman’s grand jury revelation is difficult to parse because it’s impossible to determine what he’s found and what precise deceit Woodward and Bernstein allegedly committed. Himmelman writes that a Bernstein source code-named “Z” in All the President’s Men was “a grand juror in disguise,” which contradicts the reporters’ claim that they did not get any information from the grand jurors they contacted. Woodward and Bernstein responded to Himmelman’s charge in full on The Post’s Web site last week, conceding that Z was a grand juror but that Bernstein didn’t know that until he visited her and she volunteered it. They insist that they elided her grand juror status in their book to protect her identity.

How important was Z? Woodward loosely equates her cryptic hints with those of Deep Throat (and other sources) in a scene in All the President’s Men in which he visits Sen. Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices.

Himmelman writes, “If they were willing to dress Z up, might they not have hung something extra on Deep Throat, too?”

It would take the brain of a Jesuit tandemed with that of a Talmudic scholar to answer this question. Does masking the identity of Z, along with a lack of candor over what they learned from the grand jury, mean that Woodward and Bernstein would have fabulized about Deep Throat? Not in my mind. At best, Himmelman appears to have caught the reporters in either a small lie or a narrow truth about Z and the grand jury. That can’t lead to faking facts about Deep Throat unless Himmelman can point to something stronger than the doubts in Bradlee’s 1990 interview—which he doesn’t.

It’s a pity that Himmelman didn’t confront Woodward and Bernstein over the Z memo for his book and give them a chance to mount a sustained defense. Instead, he conducted an unrewarding interview with them via conference call for the New York magazine excerpt.

If the Woodward and Bernstein story is the meat in this sandwich, Bradlee’s career, before and after Watergate, is the bread. Himmelman admits that some of the bread he serves is pretty stale, conceding that “nearly all of the good stuff” from the 1990 interviews that Bradlee conducted with his researcher “went wholesale into Ben’s memoir.” The bread isn’t tasteless, though. Himmelman makes better use of material from the decades-long Grant Study of Adult Development of Harvard students, of which Bradlee was one, than Bradlee did in A Good Life.

He also brings readers up to date on Bradlee’s life since 1995, when his memoir appeared, though the audience for the period must be limited. If you’ve read A Good Life and Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, Personal History, this book will strike you as a bit of a yard sale of the Bradlee archives.

It didn’t have to be that way. The book appears to have originated as an idea of Bradlee’s wife, Sally Quinn, who wanted her husband to write another book about himself and drafted Himmelman as his assistant. He was a credible choice, having impressed Woodward and aided Ben and Sally’s son, Quinn, in writing his memoir, A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures.

Had the archives been dropped on a master of narrative journalism, such as Richard Ben Cramer, or a press scholar, instead of a trusted intimate of the Bradlee family, perhaps a great work could have surfaced. Instead, we’re stuck with a book that has the flavor of a Woodward production without any of the substance.

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Who grilled Sloan in the kitchen? (That will make sense only to those who know All the President’s Men and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor.) See if you can be more obscure in email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed’s flower pot is flying its red flag. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

In 1990, former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee told journalist Barbara Feinman, who was helping him on his memoir A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures, that he had “a little problem with Deep Throat.” Bradlee, who was then 69 years old, continued:

Did that potted [plant] incident ever happen? … and meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage? Fifty meetings in the garage? I don’t know how many meetings in the garage … There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.

This confession and other findings drawn from Ben Bradlee’s papers appear in a book excerpt that was published in New York magazine last night. The excerpt has sparked a near riot in Watergate Nation – the principals who reported the story, other journalists, history buffs, and political devotees for whom the 1972 Democratic National Committee headquarters break-in and Nixon administration cover-up remain an inexhaustible topic of fascination.

The excerpted book, Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, which goes on sale May 8, is by former Bob Woodward researcher Jeff Himmelman. Himmelman first surveyed the Bradlee papers as part of a proposed book collaboration with Bradlee, but after the veteran editor decided against writing the book, he gave Himmelman sanction to write his own book based on the material.

Himmelman’s New York excerpt exploits his Bradlee-in-doubt finding for maximum dramatic potential. First, he confronts Woodward with the Bradlee quotations and recounts at length his former boss’s reaction. (Bob is rattled.) Next, he recounts a morning powwow at Bradlee’s house in which Bradlee, Woodward and Himmelman discuss the merits of publishing the two-decades-old interview about Bradlee’s Deep Throat “problem,” debating whether or not it should be included in the Himmelman book. Naturally, Woodward is opposed, saying it would give “fodder to the fuckers” who hate Bradlee, the Washington Post, the Post‘s Watergate coverage, and Woodward.

With all the grace of a toddler icing a cake with a shovel, Himmelman paints that powwow scene in Oedipal colors. Himmelman is killing the older Woodward who gave him a first, big break; Woodward is contemplating the murder of his own mentor, Bradlee, who listens to all arguments but approves the use of the interview in Himmelman’s book. I’m eager to read the book to learn if any eyes are gouged out or sacred laws of hospitality are violated.

The other bomb detonated by the Himmelman excerpt accuses Woodward and Carl Bernstein of having lied for decades about one aspect of their Watergate reporting. The two have always maintained that the Watergate grand jurors they approached during their reporting told them nothing (their efforts on this front earned them a verbal rebuke from the court, which warned the paper not to interfere with the grand jury). But a memo found by Himmelman in Bradlee’s papers states that a grand juror code-named “Z” did speak to them. “All of the quotes attributed to Z in [All the President's Men] matched this interview,” Himmelman writes. “And there was no doubt, in the memo, how Z knew what she knew: ‘Of course, I was on the grand jury,’ she said plainly.”

When Himmelman interviewed Woodward and Bernstein about the memo, they said Carl hadn’t known the woman was a grand juror when he first visited her, and Woodward told Himmelman dismissively, “This is a footnote to a footnote.” Bernstein joked: “Maybe they’ll send us to jail after all [for approaching the grand jury].”

In a written explanation Woodward and Bernstein gave to the Washington Post‘s Joel Achenbach for publication, the duo reiterate in detail their denial that Bernstein knew the woman was a grand juror when he originally went to interview her. Woodward and Bernstein continue: “To the best of our recollection, someone contacted Carl and said there was a person, a neighbor, who had important information on Watergate. Carl went and interviewed the woman as described in the Dec. 4, 1972 memo.”

According to Woodward and Bernstein, Bernstein “quotes her in the memo as volunteering, ‘of course I was on the grand jury’ because that was news to him.” They add that they did not identify her as a grand juror in the book to protect her as a source.

I asked Max Holland, author of the new book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, for his reaction to the Himmelman excerpt. He responded via email.

“What is getting lost in the coverage so far is that Bradlee is not expressing qualms about the Post’s reporting and/or published stories from June ’72 onwards, but reservations about the fairy tale that is All the President’s Men,” he said. It’s Holland’s view that Felt leaked to Woodward not out of patriotism, as Woodward originally wrote, but out of self-interest. He was jockeying for the top job at the FBI.

Woodward and Himmelman are also dueling in the pages of Politico, where Dylan Byers is covering the story. In one Byers piece, Woodward accused Himmelman of not including in his New York excerpt a Bradlee interview from 18 months ago in which Bradlee expressed full confidence in Woodward’s Watergate reporting. ”He can write what he wants, but his own transcript undercuts his premise,” Woodward told Byers. “It’s one of those Perry Mason moments.”

Himmelman has returned fire. He told Byers that the interview Woodward describes can be found in his forthcoming book. Himmelman also cited a year-old interview in which he offered Bradlee a chance to retract his 1990 doubts, and he declined.

With all respect to Ben Bradlee, the Woodward-Himmelman spat is starting to resemble that movie in which a much-coveted dog is placed midway between two contesting owners and they rely on him to choose which owner he wants to go home with. Isn’t this historical dispute, which relies on accurate memory, a bit much to put a 91-year-old man through? Bradlee obviously admires and respects both journalists, but age has dimmed his powers of concentration (as it has mine). For that reason, I put less stock in what Bradlee has been telling Himmelman since 2007, when they first started talking, than I do the original interview with Feinman from 1990, when he had yet to retire as Post executive editor.

If Bradlee had Deep Throat doubts in 1990, if he wondered about the efficacy of the potted-plant meeting signals and the likelihood that Woodward actually had multiple meetings with Deep Throat in a parking garage, he is hardly alone. Those elements belong to All the President’s Men, a Woodward and Bernstein product over which Bradlee had no direct control, and not the Washington Post, over which Bradlee did. It means something that Bradlee doubts All the President’s Men, but what?

Until the Himmelman book appears, and he shows his complete hand, I’d be nuts to declare a winner in this dispute. But if this were a boxing match, I’d give the first round to Woodward.

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Does mention of Watergate make you thirsty for more? See my February review of Max Holland’s Leak. Sluice your own views into the trough that is my email inbox, Shafer. Reuters@gmail.com or sip from the poison well that is my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Ben Bradlee (L), a former Washington Post executive editor, and Bob Woodward, a former Post reporter, pose for a photo during a tour of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, before their discussion about the Watergate burglary and stories for the Post, in Yorba Linda, California, April 18, 2011. REUTERS/Alex Gallardo

Why did Deep Throat leak to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward?

Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in their 1974 book, All the President’s Men, that Deep Throat shared his secrets to “protect the office” of the presidency and “effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Woodward amended his source’s purely patriotic motives in his 2005 book, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. In it, Woodward held that Deep Throat — whom he confirmed was W. Mark Felt, a former high-ranking FBI man who outed himself as the leaker — supplied him with information to protect the FBI from the meddling Nixon White House. That harmonized with the rationale offered in A G-man’s Life: The FBI, Being ‘Deep Throat,’ and the Struggle for Honor in Washington, Felt’s 2006 book published with the guiding hand of a co-writer (Felt was 92 and suffering from dementia): that Deep Throat leaked to Woodward to “spark a broader investigation” by the Justice Department of the break-in.

By 2010, Woodward’s appreciation of his leaker’s motives had expanded to include bureaucratic infighting. Woodward writes:

In brief, [Felt] knew there was a cover-up, knew higher-ups were involved, and did not trust the acting FBI director, Pat Gray. He knew the Nixon White House was corrupt. At the same time he was disappointed that he did not get the directorship. And I was pushing him and pushing him. [Emphasis added.]

This timeline of Woodward’s changing view of Felt appears in the opening pages of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (University Press of Kansas), a dandy, detailed book by veteran journalist Max Holland. Holland, who has mastered the Watergate corpus, rewinds the complete story of the break-in, the cover-up, and the press and FBI investigations to reveal Felt as a mendacious, manipulating, and opportunistic source. Yes, on occasion, Felt deliberately and repeatedly disinformed Woodward, who was oblivious to his lies at the time and wrote in All the President’s Men that “Deep Throat would never deal with [Woodward] falsely.”

Holland makes the persuasive case that Felt, who died in 2008, used the classic techniques of counterintelligence he learned as an FBI agent to destabilize his main bureaucratic opponent inside the FBI (Acting Director L. Patrick Gray) with his leaks to Woodward (and other journalists). The goal of his leaks was to nudge President Richard Nixon in the direction of appointing him FBI director instead of Gray.

Leak overturns once and for all the romantic, popular interpretation of the Watergate saga of one inside source risking it all to save democracy. “Nixon’s downfall was an entirely unanticipated result of Felt’s true and only aim,” Holland writes. Although Holland never disparages the enterprise of Woodward and Bernstein, acknowledging the impact their reports had on Judge John J. Sirica and the senators who formed an investigative committee, neither does he bow to them. “Contrary to the widely held perception that the Washington Post ‘uncovered’ Watergate, the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation, with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutors’ case well in advance of the trial.”

Leak, to be published Mar. 6, vindicates journalist Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of Woodsteinmania. In a Commentary piece published in July 1974, about a month after the Woodstein book came out, Epstein eviscerates what he calls the “sustaining myth of journalism.” Naïve readers believe that intrepid reporters expose government scandals by doggedly working their confidential sources. Of course such scoops do occur, but the more conventional route to a prize-winning series is well-placed leaks from well-oiled government investigations, which Holland maintains was the case with Watergate. Epstein’s essay looks especially prescient in the context of Holland’s book. Epstein believed at the time that Deep Throat was not one person but a “composite character,” but noted that Justice Department prosecutors “now believe that the mysterious source was probably Mark W. Felt, Jr. [sic].” But he accurately divines the primary motive behind the leaks, which he says were designed

… not to expose the Watergate conspiracy or drive President Nixon from office, but simply to demonstrate to the President that Gray could not control the FBI, and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to his administration. In other words, the intention was to get rid of Gray.

Holland’s deft book reads like lightning — no prior Watergate scholarship required. Recasting Deep Throat as an avenger and not a patriot, Leak illuminates our understanding of the press by explaining why sources leak. Anonymous sources — especially Washington’s anonymous sources — almost invariably have an ax to grind, as Betty Cuniberti established in her classic August 1987 Los Angeles Times story. One unnamed Reagan administration official tells her that most Reagan White House leaks are “personal,” aimed at other White House officials. “There’s a great deal of infighting,” he tells her.

Reagan White House staffers who couldn’t get the president’s attention would slip “Message-to-Reagan” leaks to the press to generate news stories or press conference questions to which he would have to respond, Cuniberti writes. The art of the leak requires information to be packaged just right, she notes. A national security adviser who wanted to plant a story in the press — a so-called authorized leak — might avoid giving the information directly to a reporter because the reporter would rightly view it as a self-serving leak designed to advance the administration’s views. Even rookie reporters get suspicious of sources’ motives. Better to have a subordinate convey the leak to disguise the motive and make the information seem more authentically newsworthy.

Leak‘s persuasive position is that Felt gamed Woodward, making him think that he was on the side of the angels when what he was trying to do was screw his enemies and become the next J. Edgar Hoover. That’s not a criticism of Woodward or his Watergate work, which by the standards of any day was very good. I doubt that Woodward and Bernstein’s copy would have been remarkably different had they appreciated the degree to which Felt’s leaks were self-promoting.

Also, Felt was one of many Watergate sources for the Washington Post; the memory of the movie version of All The President’s Men makes him loom larger than he did in real life. In his 2011 book, Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse, Jon Marshall writes: “Although Deep Throat became Woodward and Bernstein’s most famous source, he was hardly their only one.” (Bob Woodward contributes the foreword for Marshall’s book.) Barry Sussman, who was editor in charge of Post Watergate coverage, writes that “Deep Throat barely figured in the Post‘s Watergate coverage. He was nice to have around, but that’s about it.”

Nor was Felt’s gaming of Woodward unusual. Every source leaks for a reason, and it’s usually not about preserving the Constitution and the American way. As Stephen Hess writes, sources have many reasons to leak. They leak to boost their own egos. They leak to make a goodwill deposit with a reporter that they hope to withdraw in the future. They leak to advance their policy initiative. They leak to launch trial balloons and sometimes even to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. But until contesting evidence arrives, it’s usually a safe bet that a leak is what Hess calls an “Animus Leak,” designed to inflict damage on another party.

Mark Felt was not quite the master of the animus leak that he thought he was, as Holland notes. The White House figured out that Felt was leaking, but Nixon feared that firing him would do even more damage because Felt knew many of the politically explosive secrets that J. Edgar Hoover hoarded. Students of journalism — defined as anybody who consumes news — will profit from reading this Watergate redux: They’ll never read the phrase, “the source, who asked to remain anonymous,” the same way again.

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Disclosure: A Leak footnote briefly discusses a column I wrote in Slate after Deep Throat was unmasked. (Some of the ideas in that column are reprised here.) If you have a headnote you’d like to share, send it to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is leak-free. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt waves to the press as his daughter Joan Felt (L) and grandson Nick Jones (R) look on from the front door of his home in Santa Rosa, California, May 31, 2005. REUTERS/Lou Dematteis