REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Deep Throat's Legacy
Watergate, the press and the Presidency.
Congratulations to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for getting scooped this week on the story about their own Watergate source. Rather than betray the man who became known as Deep Throat, they managed to keep one of the great secrets in media history for 30 years, until the source first outed himself to another reporter. Their integrity is worth noting amid so many recent examples of lapsed media ethics.
About the legacy of Deep Throat himself, now 91-year-old Mark Felt, we are more ambivalent. Most of the press corps is hailing him as a hero because he was willing to risk his job as deputy director of the FBI by leaking the contents of confidential documents. His motives are said to have been "patriotic," and maybe they were. But leaking is not unknown in Washington, and in our experience the motives of leakers are complicated and often self-interested.
Perhaps Mr. Felt believed that going to the press was his only recourse. But as a senior government official, he had other alternatives--confronting Richard Nixon himself, or resigning in protest and then taking his story to Capitol Hill. It's fascinating to consider what might have happened had Mr. Felt helped to crack the coverup before the election of 1972, when voters could have had a say rather than have to endure a painful impeachment two years later. We will certainly be interested in hearing Mr. Felt explain why he acted as he did.
All the more so because the larger story of Watergate was about holding the Presidency accountable for the misuse of that office's vast power. One lesson we learned from the Nixon and Bill Clinton eras is that it is both difficult and painful to check a President, especially one abusing the Justice Department.
The press got Watergate right as a story about Nixon's coverup. But even Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein, who covered the story virtually alone for months, didn't expose most of the abuses. Those became known only after the other institutions of government--the courts and Congress--began to do their work. Judge John Sirica's decision to give harsh sentences to the Watergate burglars proved to be the first break in unraveling the coverup. Later Congressional hearings turned up word of the secret White House tapes, which ultimately proved to be Nixon's undoing.
To the extent that the Washington Post's reporting influenced Judge Sirica, it played a critical if not decisive role. The reporters' task is of course to report what they can find out, and it's notable that in their Watergate coverage Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein played the role of old-fashioned diggers, not cable-TV partisans. The rest of the press corps ultimately joined their digging, and Nixon came to have few media defenders.
That was all very different from the Clinton era, when many good reporters did similarly important digging. (Susan Schmidt at the Washington Post and Jeff Gerth of the New York Times come to mind.) But far from being praised for their enterprise, they often became pariahs at their own newspapers and the targets of White House attacks. Much of the media took political sides, rather than stick to their higher obligation of ensuring that a President doesn't misuse his Constitutional authority. This was the motive for our own extended coverage of Whitewater and the other ethical corner-cutting of the Clinton years.
Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein earned their fame, but the consequences for journalism have not always been salutary. In their zeal to be the next Woodstein, many in the press have developed a "gotcha" model of reporting that always assumes the worst about public officials. We've pointed this out recently about reporting on Iraq and the military, and the defensive reaction from our peers confirms to us that many recognize (even if they won't publicly admit) that there is a problem. The unveiling of Deep Throat, and the rediscovery of Watergate's history, will do some good if it reminds us that the Fourth Estate's first duty is to report the facts.
