Inside Watergate's Last Chapter

BEN MARGOT / AP
Mark Felt, with his daughter, is unmasked as Deep Throat

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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 creditor blame, as some still see itfor 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.

When you go back to the Post's coverage, instead of the movie myth, a more complex picture emerges of what Deep Throat brought to the caseand what he didn't. A review of Post stories and Woodward and Bernstein's book points to a handful of instances in which Deep Throat's leaks advanced the story in specific ways. (See timeline.)

But even Bernstein told the Post last week that "Felt's role in all this can be overstated." As the No. 2 man at the FBI, overseeing the agency's daily operations, including the break-in investigation, he conducted infrequent cloak- and-dagger conversations with Woodward from June 19, 1972, two days after the break-in, until November 1973, five months after he quit the FBI. Generally, other sources provided the details while Deep Throat distantly guided the hunt. He corroborated information, tipped the duo where to dig, steered them off side paths and encouraged them to keep pushing the story hard, especially in the early days when Watergate was an inside-the-Beltway tale that might have petered out under the White House campaign to cover things up. Barry Sussman, the Post editor who was in charge of the Watergate story, argued in a 1997 article on the Internet that Woodstein's shoe-leather work was really the key to their prizewinning stories. No editor asked them during the process for Deep Throat's name, he said, "because Deep Throat was basically unimportant to our coverage." It's true, says Bradlee, that Deep Throat's guidance was "invaluable." But he also says the paper did not need Deep Throat to fuel its thirst for the story: "God himself couldn't have slaked it."* Today Deep Throat's role still stirs both scorn and praise, much as Felt feared. Nixon diehards like former speechwriter Pat Buchanan last week called Felt a shameful "snake" who snitched on his government and betrayed his agency. Others piously complained he should have gone through channels or spoken up publicly, rather than leaking to the press in a dark parking garage in the wee hours.