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The Secret Man : The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat - Bob Woodward
Ch 10
/I wondered if he was trying to be literally true—he had never leaked to “Woodward and Bernstein.” He had never met Carl. His dealings were only with me. He was scrupulous about staying away from specifics in FBI files. I suspect he did not consider that he was “leaking” information—he was only supposed to confirm what I had and steer me. But the sum of all the confirmations and guidance added up to more than a leak. It was a road map.
Ch 12
/ “That’s one key,” Felt replied, “and another key is to realize that getting old has got a lot of problems connected with it. And you just have to put up with them.”
“At 56, I find the same thing.”
“Believe me,” he replied, “you haven’t got near the problems that you’ll have in another 20 years.”
/ Then Felt said something odd. “Let’s just, I’ll hang up,” he said firmly and conclusively, then added, “And this closet door can be a closed door.”
Ch 13
/ The Deep Throat legacy was a foundation of establishing the compact: I would never tell. Often during the first interviews, subjects would start talking almost at once. In an odd way, many, or certainly some, wanted to deliver the goods, the secrets. The transaction with the reporter was important, not only for the reporter but also for them.
Ch 14
/ He added, “We thought everybody was lying in the beginning. I mean it was just kind of, we just took it for granted.”
/ The atmosphere around the FBI and the attitude of the agents shouted one message: The Nixon men are lying and the White House is covering up.
/ What would Mark Felt really want now? What would be journalistically proper? What would be safe, for both Felt and for me—and for the Post and journalism? At times, Elsa said she thought it might be best to take the secret to my grave.
/ Understanding concealment is part of the spy hunter’s art.
/You were a stand-up guy, I said. “You know what I mean by that?”
“I’m proud that you use it,” he said.
What could I say? I was touched, and I felt an urge to cry out or just cry. I said goodbye, and he hung up.
/ There was my version of Felt—restrained, careful but really gutsy and courageous. He had walked the road and played the part of secret informer so well. Surely that would be history’s version. Right? He had carved out his role and found a way to serve a higher principle. Right?
/ But what of the version he had of himself? I would never know. Who did he owe allegiance to as he defined it? At one time long ago he was obviously torn, perhaps ripped up inside more than I or anyone could have imagined or known. Like many people, he had played two roles. That was it. Inevitably he was both. And the two might not fit together neatly at all. Was that the paradox of personality?
Ch 15
/ When Bob is asked to address an issue, he surrounds it. Given his years navigating the shoals of Washington politics, he sees angles that I would not imagine. When he is your lawyer, he devotes himself entirely to your interest. He has a framework for analyzing any problem: Everyone else has real or potential interests other than yours. His job is to identify your interests and yours alone. I wanted him to contemplate the question because I knew his mind would be circling around and around the issues during his nonbillable, off-duty hours. That way I would not only be getting the very best legal and overall advice, I would be getting a genuine bargain. He doesn’t charge for the hours he is thinking in the shower or on an airplane. Or tossing in his sleep. Thank God.
/ SSUES TO BE CONSIDERED
/ I said that he had been a kind of Lone Ranger on something important.
/ I am disappointed and a little angry at both myself and him for never digging out a more exacting explanation, a clearer statement of his reasoning and motivation.
/ Peter Gay, one of Sigmund Freud’s biographers, attempted to reduce Freud’s insights to a single idea and came pretty close. Gay wrote that personality is really not the resolution of an individual’s various impulses but rather the organization of those impulses. In other words, one’s less desirable impulses, desires or inclinations are often not conquered, but fit into a life hopefully dominated by the more desirable impulses. So contradictions abound. Any attempt I might make to explain or resolve or fully make sense of Mark Felt’s behavior would probably fail.
/ At the same time, there is a certain consistency—even a nobility and surely courage—in what Felt did if you adopt J. Edgar Hoover’s overall view of the FBI’s role in the United States government. I find it frightening, but in this view the Bureau is a pillar that stands to protect law-abiding citizens, and if in that process the FBI had to become a law unto itself, so be it. The bank robbers, gangsters, mobsters, domestic terrorists, foreign spies, philandering civil rights leaders, corrupt politicians and even presidents were all formidable foes. But the FBI could eventually beat them all.
/ AGAIN AND AGAIN I retraced my steps, the notes, the books, testimony, an occasional lunch with an old Watergate player and, most important, I sifted decades of memory. Mark was now shielded from my effort at interrogation, and even his own self-interrogation. There were many questions that we would never get to. Highly trained and focused, Mark was a product of that FBI pyramid—the hierarchy and the Hoover rules. The climax for Mark Felt was the year 1972—Vietnam, the perceived domestic threat, law and order challenged, the presidential election and all its intensity, the Wallace shooting, the death of Hoover, the unexpected directorship of Pat Gray, Watergate, thwarted ambition, and the insistence of a young reporter.
/ I WAS HOPING to put down the full story, as I have attempted to do here. I wanted it to be clear, straightforward, nothing held back. The portrait of me is not all that admirable. I was pushy, secretive, I used Mark Felt, and I lied to a colleague, Richard Cohen. But I wanted this account to be the antidote to Watergate, which had always been so convoluted, things always being concealed. Because that strange and compelling era played such an important part in my life, I kept going back to it.
--> Movie : Mark Felt : the Man Who Brought down the White House - 2017