Filial Loyalty and Rebellion in Watergate: Woodward, Felt and Nixon (article)

Bob Woodward was 26-years-old, a Navy Lieutenant, bored, and uncertain of his future when in 1969, in the basement of the Nixon White House, he met W. Mark Felt, a senior FBI of ficial. Out of this chance encounter and subsequent developments, a hidden psychological drama developed that resulted in Nixon’s resignation and forever marked the lives of these three men. It involved issues of worthy and unworthy father figures, generational loyalties, and ego ideals.

This story begins with the identity issues of the young Bob Woodward. Woodward’s own father was a prominent attorney in Wheaton, Illinois who, Woodward says, “wanted me to go to law school and eventually join the firm” (The Secret Man: The Story

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of Watergate’s Deep Throat [NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005], p. 24). In a 2003 interview, Woodward says: “my father to a certain extent was my model” (Academy of Achievement, “Bob Woodward: Journalist For Truth,” p. 8 [www.achieve ment.org/autodoc/page/woo1int-1-9]). Family developments modified the extent to which Al Woodward was a model for Bob, the oldest of three children. When Bob was around 12 his mother had an affair and his parents divorced. His father won custody of the children while his mother remarried and moved to another town (Adrian Havill, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, [NY: Birch Lane Press, 1993], p. 7). Speaking about the dissolution of his parent’s marriage, Woodward says: “Divorce is painful…it destroys the very notion of context, because the only context you know as a child is family” (“Journalist,” p. 7). Three years after the divorce, Al Woodward remarried. His new wife, Alice, had three children of her own and then together they had a daughter. According to biographer Adrian Havill, Bob Woodward “viewed his stepfamily with suspicion and jealousy” (Havill, Deep Truth, p. 11). One Christmas, Bob investigated and found his father had spent substantially more on gifts for his stepchildren than his offspring from his first marriage. “I confronted him,” he told Playboy in 1989, “and showed him that the money he spent on them and on us was so dramatically out of balance…it was kind of sad, but the fact is that it’s a very competitive world when two families are brought together this way” (Havill, Deep Truth, p. 11). Despite the emotional wounds, Woodward endured and as a young man he felt some obligation to adhere to his father’s expectations. In accordance with his father’s wishes, while still in the Navy, Woodward applied to and was admitted into Harvard Law School for the fall 1970 term. Woodward was having second thoughts about this decision. “This was a time in my life,” Woodward admits, “of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future” (Woodward, Secret, p. 18).

Mark Felt came along at a crucial time in Woodward’s life. Impressed with Felt’s bearing and personality, Woodward turned to Felt for mentoring. Woodward writes in The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat: “Mark Felt had

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in some respects been an extra father” (Woodward, Secret, p. 186). When Felt told the younger Woodward he should follow his own inclinations, this gave Bob the needed permission from a father figure to go against the hopes of his own father. For Bob Woodward, there was an inner conflict between filial piety and the separation-individuation process. By transferring, in part, his ego ideal and identification from his biological father to Mark Felt, both of whom were born in 1913, Woodward took the step towards individuation and chose journalism over law. When Bob told his father about his decision, the elder Woodward replied: “You’re crazy.” Bob says that this “was probably the severest thing he has ever said to me” (“Journalist,” p. 7). With the advice of Felt, Woodward had established independence from the expectations of his father. Interestingly enough, the same father-son drama over loyalty and independence that occurred between the senior and junior Woodward was to reoccur between Bob Woodward and Mark Felt, with significant and varying consequences for both of them.

W. Mark Felt was a loyal “company man.” His ego ideal and father figure was personified by its authoritarian and perfectionist director, J. Edgar Hoover. Felt writes: “I had tremendous admiration for the man” (W. Mark Felt, The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside [NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979], p. 178). Hoover “was a sincere human being…with real greatness” (Felt, FBI, p. 204).

Hoover had built the FBI into the agency that defended the country against “public enemies.” These public foes of the FBI evolved from depression era professional criminals, to Nazis, Communists, Martin Luther King. Jr., and other assorted radicals. As the loyal and capable son, Felt had risen to be the third in command in the agency. W. Mark Felt adhered to Hoover’s paternalistic ideology of the FBI as the defender of virtue against public enemies. After Hoover died on May 2, 1972 and the next in command retired, Felt believed his service to the “Bureau” and filial loyalty entitled him to succeed Hoover. The good son should inherit the father’s company. “I allowed myself to think I had an excellent chance,” Felt admits (Felt, FBI, p. 178). However, President Nixon thwarted Felt’s hopes by appointing a Nixon loyalist, L. Patrick Gray, rather than Felt, a Hoover loyalist, as Acting FBI Director.

Richard Nixon, who was also born in 1913, had loyalty and father issues of his own; he was raised by an erratic and tempestuous father. As a freshman Congressman in the 1940s, Nixon had allied himself with Hoover’s war against the “public enemy” of the Communist menace. His alliance with Hoover had helped him break the Hiss case. Nixon exploited the fear of Communism to rise to national prominence and be selected as Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952. As Eisenhower’s Vice President for eight years, Nixon endured rejection and distance from the fatherly President. In a move for independence, when Nixon first ran for president in 1960 he did not seek the help of the popular Eisenhower until late in the campaign, and may have lost the presidential race as a result.

For the next eight years, Nixon endured the slings and arrows of fortune, many of them self-inflicted, until he barely won the Presidency himself in 1968. As the resentful son who had finally earned the role of Supreme Commander,

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Nixon saw the president as a law unto himself, as someone almost above the law. He asserted on more than one occasion that some things might be illegal for others but if the president did them, they would be legal. Certainly, such a man, fearful that others might have authority over him, did not want an FBI Director who might put the interests of the law and the FBI over those of the president. Where FBI loyalists adhered to the “public enemy” ideology, Nixon had moved from fighting “public enemies” to combating his “political enemies.” The Nixon White House developed an “enemies list.” It was this descent from “public” to “political enemies” that led Nixon’s followers to their ill-fated adventures culminating in the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972. Where Hoover and the FBI used a paternalistic model to enforce social injunctions, Nixon and his men used power and authority to go after those sibling rivals: political opponents.

We have three different men with divergent ego ideals and moral beliefs who become central figures in one of the great dramas in American history. Interestingly enough, the generational struggles that each of our protagonists had were echoed by the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. For this time period was one where generational conflicts were prevalent. Many of America’s youth were attacking the legitimacy of paternal authority in the family and in government and other adults were seeking to control the actions of disobedient youth. Oedipal and generational struggles pervaded these years.

Mark Felt is an unlikely candidate as a rebel against presidential authority. He was willing to sponsor FBI intrusions into the activities of the radical left, and believed in upholding the law as interpreted by the puritanical J. Edgar Hoover. Though Felt could rationalize secret black bag searches and seizures at the homes of radicals and wiretapping Martin Luther King’s private activities as protecting the public against its enemies, he found the White House’s thwarting, with Acting Director Gray’s assistance, of the FBI probe into the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex as a threat to the integrity and independence of the FBI. Felt writes, “once in the Oval Office” Nixon “saw the possibilities of making the FBI a White House police force.” Nixon wanted the FBI to be “an adjunct of the Nixon White House” (Felt, FBI, p. 277). To Felt, the threat to the FBI from the Nixon administration was serious. “What Nixon did not foresee,” Felt declares, “was that the Bureau’s professional staff would fight this tooth and nail” (Felt, FBI, p. 277). Even so, Felt believed that FBI agents should not leak the details of investigations to the press–such disclosures go against the very grain of the agency. So it was not without intense inner conflict that on June 19, two days after the Watergate break-in, Felt turned to a reporter to get information out about the extent of Watergate activities. There were probably senior reporters in whom Felt could have confided. He chose to talk to the relatively inexperienced but talented Bob Woodward, someone 30 years his junior whom he could treat as a subordinate, as a loyal son faithfully carrying out the wishes of the “father.” So Mark Felt became the legendary “Deep Throat.”

Leaking to the Washington Post was only one part of Felt’s tooth and nail fight. Within the Bureau, on July 5, Felt and FBI colleagues forced a confrontation with Acting Director Gray to stop the White House and CIA obstruction of the FBI probe into the Watergate break-in. As a result, Nixon and the CIA backed down and the investigation into the break-in resumed without restriction (Felt, FBI, pp. 253-257). Nevertheless, Felt was still worried about political influence on the conduct of the agency and continued to turn to the young reporter.

Felt laid down strict conditions to Woodward regarding how and where they would communicate. Part of their understanding was that Felt’s contributions would be on what is known in journalism as “deep background.” Early in The Secret Man, Woodward explains, that in deep background “information can be used but no source of any kind would be identified” (Woodward, Secret, p. 4). Later in the book, after the Watergate break-in, when Felt has laid out the elaborate rules by which they could contact each other, Woodward reiterates that “deep background” meant that “no source would be cited–not an FBI, Justice Department or administration source” (Woodward, Secret, p. 66).

The secret conversations Woodward and Felt had in the underground parking garage in Vir-

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ginia were very helpful in providing direction for Woodward and Bernstein’s investigations. The reporting in the Washington Post helped break the Watergate case and was influential in getting other investigations going which eventually led to the fall of the President. Woodward and Bernstein recognized in late 1972 that Nixon could be impeached and that they would have a role in toppling the Commander in Chief of the United States. Whether Mark Felt knew his conversations with Woodward would lead to Nixon’s fall, we will probably never know. Felt was focused on upholding one authority over another: the FBI’s role in law enforcement over the White House’s political attempt to subvert legal investigations. For Woodward and for Felt, higher authority and father figures might be corrupt, so there may be legitimacy in overturning them. One wonders about feelings of guilt and remorse over this rebellion against authority.

The issue of filial loyalty arises for both Felt and Woodward. It has been reported that Felt was reluctant to admit he was “Deep Throat” because in revealing information and his fears to a reporter he had violated his own professional ethics. He was torn between adhering to two different value systems and did not want his rebellion against presidential authority to be known. In his 1979 memoir of his FBI career, The FBI Pyramid, Mark Felt on a number of occasions addressed the question of whether he was the source known as “Deep Throat.” In his book, he asserts: “I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or anyone else!” (Felt, FBI, p. 226). We now know this is false. Curiously, in his book, Felt says that “‘Deep Throat’ leaked details” of the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe “to The Washington Post which carried the story” (Felt, FBI, p. 259).

Woodward’s filial loyalty to Felt took an interesting turn. Because of the recognition that came to Woodward and Bernstein and because of their reporting, albeit assisted by Mark Felt, they were offered a book contract. When writing All the President’s Men, Woodward phoned and inquired of Felt if he would mind being identified in the book. Woodward writes: “He exploded. Absolutely not. Was I mad even to make such a request?” Felt insisted, as Woodward writes, that “he had to be able to count on our agreement, to count on me. He used the word ‘inviolate’” (Woodward, Secret, p. 110). What was Woodward’s response to his “extra father’s” call for loyalty? “Felt made me feel shame. I wondered how I could even have made such a request…..Exposure would challenge his probity with everyone important in his life” (Woodward, Secret, p. 111). Despite Felt’s admonitions, Woodward and Bernstein decided to take Mark Felt off deep background and identify him by his newsroom nickname of “Deep Throat” in their book. “It never really crossed my mind,” Woodward admits, “to leave out the details of Deep Throat’s role” (Woodward, Secret, p. 113). In moving Felt from deep background to “Deep Throat,” Woodward was going against his own definition of “deep background” where no source of any kind is identified. As Woodward wrote, this would include not giving any indication that he had a source from the FBI, Justice Department or the administration. Woodward and Bernstein in announcing in All the President’s Men, that “Woodward had a source in the Executive Branch” and that “Woodward had promised he would never identify him or his position to anyone” were being ingenuous  (Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President’s Men [NY: Simon and Schuster, 1974], p. 71). For it was not only Felt’s personal identity or position that was to be protected, on deep background there was never supposed to be a printed acknowledgment that such a source existed. Did Woodward either inform Felt or ask his permission for breaking their agreement that he would remain on deep background? No, he did not. So much for Woodward protecting the inviolate nature of his agreement with Felt. By going against Felt’s conditions, was Woodward exhibiting a filial disloyalty to Felt as he had with his own father? In all likelihood, yes. There were layers of generational revolt on Woodward’s part in the Watergate affair.

After Woodward and Bernstein’s book was published in 1974, Woodward phoned Felt. Woodward writes: “I was dying to know what he thought….When he heard my voice, he hung up. For days I was haunted, imagining the worst….he would go public and denounce me as a betrayer and scum who had exploited our accidental friendship….I can still hear the banging of his telephone

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and the sudden dial tone….I did not have the courage to phone him again” (Woodward, Secret, pp. 115-116). Woodward then goes on to add that soon afterwards that both the Washingtonian magazine and the Wall Street Journal identified Felt as “Deep Throat.” For the next 31 years, Felt would publicly deny that he was the secret source for Woodward and Bernstein. Felt’s payback for befriending Woodward was a life of public lying and private shame.

It has often been said that the sins of the fathers are passed on to the next generation. In this case, Mark Felt the father stand-in may have been both a sinner and a savior, but the sins of the psychological son were inflicted onto the father figure. In 1978, when Felt was indicted for his role with the radical Weather Underground, it became clear that if his role as “Deep Throat” were revealed it would further complicate Felt’s life and fate. Around that time Woodward and Felt talked. Felt reminded Bob of his “commitment not to further exploit our relationship” and this added to, Woodward says, “my growing feelings of personal responsibility for his plight” (Woodward, Secret, pp. 144-145). After Woodward had wounded his mentor, he felt and feels guilt. This brings to mind “the remorse” the sons in the primal horde feel after they “had satisfied their hatred” of their father (Freud (1913), Standard Edition, Volume 13, p. 143). While outwardly for over 30 years Woodward appeared to be a loyal protector of “Deep Throat’s” privacy, inwardly Woodward knew that he had exploited his relationship with Felt for his own fame and fortune.

The ironic circle of these three players is continued when at Felt’s criminal trial, former President Nixon testifies in Felt’s defense and Woodward remains silent. Nixon’s historical fate will always be entwined with those of Felt and Woodward, men he hardly knew or had not met at all. Nixon’s presidency, with all its abuse of power, was exposed by two aspiring reporters, some anonymous sources, including a disgruntled federal official. In this saga, Nixon, Felt and Woodward form an unusual triangle. For all three unresolved issues of paternal authority and generational loyalty combined with more public factors to produce a complicated drama. Public issues of power and authority have parallel sources in how families interact. The actions of players in public political dramas are also reflections of their family conflicts. Political issues and childhood dramas are forever entangled. In Watergate and its exposure, the lead actors have mixed motivations and are enacting family dramas on the public stage. The father figures in this drama paid severe prices for their actions, while the son becomes a heroic reporter, a slayer of dragons, a symbolic killer of various father surrogates. In victory, The Secret Man is Woodward’s confession of his betrayal and remorse.

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