Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesMark Feldstein is the Richard Eaton professor of broadcast journalism in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.Carroll Kilpatrick, “Nixon Intends to Stay on Job,” Washington Post, July 21, 1973, A1.Journalistic news pegs structured around anniversary dates—as well as news conferences, interviews, political demonstrations, and speeches—are “pseudo-events,” in the words of historian Daniel Boorstin, “synthetic” or “counterfeit” occasions that ease journalistic routines to serve up “pre-cooked” stories that can “keep till needed.” But while “commemorative journalism” often “fails to provide” necessary historical context, scholar Jill Edy observed, nevertheless it “is one of the few times the media encourage us to look critically at our past,” and “even simple stories can offer a forum for debate about [its] meaning.” (Edy noted three ways that the news media shape collective memory: by using anniversaries or obituaries as news pegs to examine the past, by using historical analogies to compare contemporary events to previous ones, and by providing historical context to trace the origins of the present.) Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 19; and Jill A. Edy, “Journalistic Use of Collective Memory,” Journal of Communication 49 (Spring 1999): 76.Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Norton, 1990), 9, 616, 620.W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 122–123. In the first six months after the Watergate arrests, the Washington Post published some two hundred stories about Watergate—many on the front page—more than twice that of the New York Times. Otherwise, media coverage of Watergate was “almost nonexistent.” Before Nixon's landslide re-election in November 1972, fewer than fifteen of more than four hundred reporters in Washington worked exclusively on Watergate; and more than seventy percent of the nation's newspapers endorsed Nixon's re-election—while just five percent opposed it. Watergate coverage increased only slightly even when the burglars’ trial began in January of 1973, and Nixon was barely questioned by reporters about the scandal until more than nine months after the break-in. Louis W. Leibovich, Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 68, Appendix C; and Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 226.The White House cover-up included destroying documents, intimidating witnesses, paying hush money to the Watergate burglars, and getting pliant officials at the top of the Justice Department to reveal evidence FBI agents were uncovering about Nixon's men; these and other attempts to obstruct the criminal probe ultimately failed, some more quickly than others. Kutler, Wars of Watergate; Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 74, 83; Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 98.David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003), 162.Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 20.Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), book jacket.Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2004, 62–63.Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, 104. To be sure, the narrative by Woodward and Bernstein did not purport to be a definitive history of the Watergate scandal but a contemporary memoir about their experiences covering the story. “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that's horseshit,” Woodward later said. “The press always plays a role, whether by being passive or by being aggressive, but it's a mistake to overemphasize” media coverage. But author David Halberstam reflected the larger journalistic mindset in his media-centric book, The Powers That Be. “Watergate was a will-o’-the-wisp,” he wrote, an “evanescent” story that could have vanished if not for Woodward and Bernstein: “If the story had broken on a weekday instead of on a weekend, perhaps the Post might have assigned a senior political reporter from the national staff, a reporter already preoccupied with other work, and the story might have died quickly. If the first marriages of both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had not ended leaving them both bachelors, they might have been pulled away by the normal obligations of home and might not have been willing to spend the endless hours that the story required.” Without Woodstein, in other words, Watergate might never have been exposed, Nixon never driven from office. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979), 606; Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” 63.Adrian Havill, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (New York: Birch Lane, 1993), 88.Campbell, 116, 224–225. As recently as the summer of 2014, award-winning author Rick Perlstein recycled the folktale, writing that Woodward and Bernstein “cracked Watergate” and the press as a whole succeeded in “taking down a president.” So, too, the director of Harvard's Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Alex S. Jones, stated in his most recent journalism book that “press coverage brought down a president.” Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 462; and Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 60.“Even for journalists who were not involved or who entered into news work after Nixon's resignation, journalistic retellings of Watergate have been foundational to journalism's self-identity,” media scholar Matt Carlson observed. “As journalism comes under fire in the present, the need to cultivate the past in a manner that supports journalistic authority takes on added importance.” Matt Carlson, “Embodying Deep Throat: Mark Felt and the Collective Memory of Watergate,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 3 (2010): 237.At times, Watergate narcissism has verged on parody as bit players have sought reflected glory in the tale even decades afterward. For example, a zoning board's 2014 vote to tear down the parking garage where Woodward met Deep Throat received national news coverage, and actor Robert Redford's 2013 documentary, “All the President's Men Revisited,” was a “self-celebration” that “gives almost as much credit to Mr. Redford for making a movie about Watergate as it does to the Washington Post for sticking with the story.” Doug Stanglin, “Garage of ‘Deep Throat’ Watergate Fame to Be Razed,” USA Today, June 16, 2014; Kris Maher, “Watergate Parking Garage to Be Torn Down,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2014; and Alessandra Stanley, “Robert Redford Narrates ‘All the President's Men Revisited,’” New York Times, April 18, 2013.Phil Bronstein, “The Newsroom,” New York Times, August 3, 2012.Clark R. Mollenhoff, Investigative Reporting: From Courthouse to White House (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 337.Feldstein, “Watergate Remembered,” 67. See also John W. Dean, Lost Honor (Los Angeles: Stratford, 1982), 272; and John W. Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (New York: Viking, 2014), 208–209.Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls during Watergate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 62; and Halberstam, 696–697.Unlike history—the reality of what actually happened in the past—collective memory is how society chooses to remember those events: the “meaning that a community makes of its past,” as one scholar put it. Edy, 71.Victor Lasky, It Didn't Start with Watergate (New York: Dial Press, 1977), 1–3, 247–253; and Greenberg, 218–221.Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999), 649–653.Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984), xviii, 281. This book received wide publicity—its author was interviewed on network TV broadcasts—but leading reviewers criticized its “circumstantial…uneven quality of evidence” and “inference and innuendo… tottering on a tower of unproven assumptions.” J. Anthony Lukas, “A New Explanation of Watergate,” New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1984, 7, 9; and Anthony Marro, “Deep Throat, Phone Home,” Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1984, 5, 7.Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin's, 1991). This book was attacked both by reviewers (“wild charges and vilifications,” “fantasies”) and Watergate participants (“a scandalous fabrication,” “untrue and pathetic,” “a fraud,” “absolute garbage,” “lunatic”). The book's publisher settled out of court after a $150 million libel lawsuit was filed against it. Howard Kurtz, “Watergate Book Opens to Tough Audience,” Washington Post, May 21, 1991, C1, 3; William L. O’Neill, “Break-Ins, Cover-Ups, and the Watergate Conspiracy,” Washington Post, June 30, 1991; Stephen E. Ambrose, “What He Didn't Know and When He Didn't Know It,” New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1991, 7–8; and George Lardner Jr., “Watergate Libel Suit Settled,” Washington Post, July 23, 1997, C1, 8.See, for example, Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic, 1994); Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996); Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); and Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro, Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon (New York: Skyhorse, 2014).Greenberg, 217.Bradley Franks, Adrian Bangerter, and Martin W. Bauer, “Conspiracy Theories as Quasi-Religious Mentality: An Integrated Account from Cognitive Science, Social Representations Theory, and Frame Theory,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 1 (July 2013): 2.Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles, “The Truth Is Out There,” Psychologist 23, no. 7 (2010): 561.Historian Stanley Kutler argued that the “endless, pointless game of trying to identify Deep Throat” was really just “a convenient means of journalistic self-congratulation, a way the media reminds us of its place at the center of the Watergate constellation.” Kutler, “Watergate Misremembered,” Slate, June 18, 2002.Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 13; Havill, 86–88, 127; David Obst, Too Good to Be Forgotten (New York: Wiley, 1998), 246; and Jeff Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the Flowerpot,” New York, April 29, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/features/ben-bradlee-2012-5/. Initially, Woodward and Bernstein didn't intend to write a memoir about themselves or Deep Throat; they originally proposed a more conventional narrative about the Nixon White House and Watergate. But the scandal began unraveling so quickly they feared that by the time their book was published, it would just be a rehash of old headlines. Hollywood's Robert Redford, who purchased the movie rights to their work, suggested they focus instead on themselves—“a howdunit,” a wag called it, rather than “a whodunit, because that was already well known.” Woodward, Secret Man, 108–109; Campbell, 119; and Alicia C. Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (New York: Wiley, 2007), 59, 65–67, 74–76, 115.Woodward, Secret Man, 104, 66; and Shepard, 263.“I can't recall any story we got because of” Deep Throat, Sussman said. “True, he offered encouragement that Watergate was important.... That was nice, but we knew it on our own.” Sussman, who had a falling out with Woodward and Bernstein, believed they were hoisted on their own petard by exaggerating the role of Deep Throat, leading many people to believe that “Woodward did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies.” This erroneously detracted from Woodstein's genuine enterprise and initiative, Sussman realized, because the “greater the importance of Deep Throat, the less the achievement of the two reporters.” Barry Sussman, “Why Deep Throat Was an Unimportant Source,” Nieman Watch Dog, July 29, 2005; and Barry Sussman, “Watergate 25 Years Later,” Watergate.info, June 17, 1997.Bernstein and Woodward, 271, 72. Archival records released over the years demonstrate that Deep Throat provided Woodward false information, either by accident or design. According to author Max Holland, there were also “marked differences” between All the President's Men and the reporters’ contemporaneous typed notes, which they sold to the University of Texas archives for $5 million in 2003. Holland discovered that many quotations in the book were substantially altered or nowhere to be found in the reporters’ files and that Woodstein articles misleadingly characterized a key FBI executive as a White House official or a “knowledgeable Republican source.” Another author who perused newly disclosed files found similarly misleading source attributions and out of context quotations in All the President's Men. Dean, Nixon Defense, 165–168; Shepard, 107; Woodward, Secret Man, 76; Obst, 247; Holland, 143, 86, 94–95, 116, 143, 158, 232–233, 249; and Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.”For example, see Hougan, 280–281, and Ron Rosenbaum, “Ah, Watergate!,” New Republic, June 23, 1982, 15–23.Bernstein and Woodward, 130, 243.Government insiders figured it out much earlier—Nixon and his advisors in 1972, top Justice Department officials by 1974; they believed that Felt's motive was ambition and revenge, not idealism. Jack Limpert, “If It Isn't Tricia, It Must Be…,” Washingtonian, June 1974; Jack Limpert, “Deeper into Deep Throat,” Washingtonian, July 31, 1974; and Edward Jay Epstein, “Did the Press Uncover Watergate?,” Commentary, July 1974, 21–24.Woodward, Secret Man, 221–232. A year later, when Felt's senility had worsened further at age 92, a ghostwritten book published under his name attempted to capitalize on his newfound fame. It included a statement that “there is no doubt that much of the White House involvement in the break-in and the subsequent cover-up would never had been brought to light without the help of the press.” Proponents of the heroic journalistic narrative have cited the remark as confirmation of their beliefs. But Felt offered a different opinion when Watergate was still fresh in his mind more than a quarter-century earlier: that the White House cover-up was doomed to failure, regardless of news coverage, because “No one could have stopped the driving force of the investigation without an explosion in the Bureau—not even J. Edgar Hoover.” This statement, too, should be treated with some caution because Felt made many demonstrably false statements at that time and later. Felt was “a truly cunning operator,” said Nixon counsel John W. Dean, who worked with Felt, “undoubtedly one of the most Machiavellian characters in government.” Jon Marshall, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 105–107; W. Mark Felt and John O’Connor, A G-Man's Life (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 213; W. Mark Felt and Ralph de Toledano, The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside (New York: Putnam, 1979), 258, 12, 213; and Dean, Nixon Defense, 226.Woodward, Secret Man, 221–232.Carlson, 244.Bob Woodward, “How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat,” Washington Post, June 20, 2005.Carlson, 242–244, 239, 249.Felt was also an apologist for Hoover's bigoted policies, including his refusal to hire black and female FBI agents. Women posed a “risk” on the job because they were not “as strong as men,” Felt wrote, so it was a “waste” even to train them because “most women Agents would marry” and then the FBI to themselves to Felt even a to Hoover's on Martin and that the rights in including of often Felt, and Woodward, Secret Man, “Deep Throat, Watergate, and the of the Journal of History no. and J. FBI of Felt's place in the first four months of the about Deep motive have been by Watergate's author Max Holland observed. the scandal did not out as a to Nixon's and history should not be as if it Holland, 9, According to Holland, other who also to be director but up and from the FBI when got the top Felt to while to from the Felt attacked his to and to FBI even for Felt's own the Felt to his as and a for an the in so that the most Felt to the Watergate probe was a Holland to the investigation and not it be by the White it Felt but was to with the was to the White House that would be different if he were the he could what was either or of the that Felt was to FBI the Felt Felt was not he had in the FBI who also to reporters and have Felt in his Holland “If Felt they Holland, 11, 9, 21, and Woodward, Secret Man, met Woodward by one in or when he was a to the White House to a was almost to at the center of the was only in Woodward and was and have verged on the about his for his he was for an as a his with Felt a Felt offered that Woodward should his but the reporter it as a was for the and decades later still it as “a of the in that had the Woodward, Secret Man, that Felt had that and not that he was and about and the of it. the reporter that Felt because he so he would be to or had “a about his Woodward that Felt as a and Woodward as his Woodward, Secret Man, and Holland, the of the Watergate Woodward there no time to our have an to Woodward didn't Felt because the was after a on an and story by his an media Jack noted of Woodward, Secret Man, and Jack “What Deep Throat 21, Holland wrote, were Nixon who genuine and but their by FBI agents or the Holland, that he had Felt “there would be no of his or even a in that a source But Felt believed Woodward by into All the President's Men under the of Deep Woodward to Felt's to the book after it was he he Woodward said. was he might his own can still the of his and the For the Woodward up on trying to the was did But in the reporter and called his old Felt, then years was Woodward A later, Felt to have Woodward It was as if some was to But genuine It out that Felt's was the of senility not the FBI source didn't really remember Woodward or Woodward that Felt had the reporter a about He not only had on Watergate. He had the way to of Woodward, Secret Man, Secret Man, 104, for Woodward, to a old well as his have as well as and to the in of its if to Nixon's own Watergate to the who already Woodward a in a to from evidence he found about in All the President's Men. the even if Woodward added a few and to up a Woodward got his in an because he even as “a and on his Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the The Press and (Washington, DC: 1984), is for journalists but as the American reporter for his of Woodward has been out for over the who to can be he even the most as if that their not only be but into the author Joan Woodstein's narrative and were so with of that how would have been and had that the was It was but the two were had an they to the with these and to put to happened to the to be so many of a how it, just of the The two these with a was not much for It could be a their to did not to to the The three and and how little they really knew the even after these Joan “The New York of Books, and “The of the as to Woodward and Washington and and his were out to reporters at Nixon counsel John W. wrote, as it Bob Woodward of the Washington Post was way down Felt's An to Watergate, historian Stanley Kutler observed, was the of FBI during which did what Dean, Nixon Defense, Kutler, Wars of Watergate, and Kutler, “Watergate as Jack put “The FBI to be the only national force on the and would reporters began for the Watergate as as our national with and in the nation's one wrote, have much on Deep Throat as an and not on the Jack “Why Deep Throat Slate, June 2005; John on New York Times, August 1973, and “Deep Throat: An May If died a few the of the Watergate burglars, the would have been author about the break-in and of but about White House on Hoover's “How he would have when he discovered just how in the cover-up that the President was to he had never in the past to and the other had also up in previous to his on and Robert Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, Feldstein, and of How the Investigative Theory, and no. Watergate was not a story that truly to in the first Time reporter who also received Watergate from Felt and stories about the that than two of his truly that the was the found the and us to as by the national that reporters in the means more than as a for or even them out of no how stories might out to it is own work and not a of an investigation made by as or In Watergate, because the political the evidence of they was to to reporters and could be only to their own or to more coverage of other Watergate journalism was and on by that were already under way news began covering Holland, The (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), Mollenhoff, 19; and Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, on Watergate who were as at the of Woodstein as their journalistic and the political “a of the later that “Woodward and Bernstein in our The that they were was a of the that believed that Felt was Deep Throat and that his motive was to the Watergate or President Nixon from but to demonstrate to the President that director L. could not the and would a to his a
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