June 02, 2005
The Woodward-Felt Connection Pre-Dated Watergate
What should a whistleblower do: Leak or go public?
Put yourself in Mark Felt’s shoes in the late summer of 1972. The results of the FBI investigation into the Watergate break-in show clear White House involvement. Your boss, a Nixon appointee you resent, is under pressure to deep-six the investigation. You should:
A) Demand that you and your boss go down to the White House and confront the President with information that his re-election campaign was involved in the crime.
B) Resign in protest over the failure of the FBI to pursue all leads in an ongoing investigation.
C) Call a reporter and offer to meet him in a garage in suburban Washington.
It turns out that Mark Felt was a mentor to Bob Woodward prior to Watergate (Woodward’s first person account in today’s Post reveals how they met in a White House waiting room while Woodward was still in the armed forces). So the path Felt took (C) was greased by the personal connection that existed between the older man and the young, ambitious journalist.
A lot of GoozNews readers wrote yesterday to complain about my quoting Charles Colson, the Nixon hatchet man turned prison evangelist who said Felt should have chosen course A or B. Forgive me for sleeping with the devil. Will it help if I quote the Jesuit Father Robert Drinan, who was overhead on the radio yesterday wondering why Felt didn’t come to the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Drinan, a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, was the first Congressman to call for Nixon’s impeachment.
Let me be clear. I didn’t mean to say that journalists shouldn’t talk to people who don’t want to be quoted. How else would journalists get tips? What I was decrying was the use of anonymous sources as the primary source of information for a story where the tipster demands anonymity as the price of the information.
Based on today’s account, Woodward appears to have relied on this technique (and his relationship with Felt) from the outset of his career. A few months before Watergate, Woodward was on the Wallace assassination attempt story. His page one lead, based on a Felt leak: “High federal officials who have reviewed investigative reports on the Wallace shooting said yesterday that there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Bremer was a hired killer.” This would become the model for the classic Washington insider story. A high government official wants something known. He leaks it to the press. And by doing so, he avoids personal responsibility if it turns out wrong.
Felt is being hailed as a hero. His defenders say without courageous whistleblowers like him, we’d never learn what is going on in government. But there’s a big difference between going public or resigning to protest when one objects to mistaken policies in government – as a few courageous officials have done in this administration – and talking behind the scenes to the press. The former are true whistleblowers and should be considered heroes. The latter are tipsters, and, in my view, shouldn’t be used as primary sources for stories.
In the wake of Watergate, the nation passed a whistleblower protection law so more government officials like Felt could act on their information without entirely ruining their careers. Like so many laws in this country, it is being violated with impugnity by this administration (see GoozNews, Jan . 9, 2005).
To all the reporters who insist on quoting their anonymous sources to report on national security issues in “this town,” here's a suggestion. Write about that.