The Dissing of Deep Throat

The Appalling Management Style of Presidents

When the Vanity Fair story broke last week that Mark Felt was the legendary "Deep Throat" character that fueled The Washington Post's investigation into the Watergate scandal, I watched Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein interviewed the next day by Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" show.

A remark by Bernstein floored me: "We had no idea of his motivations, and even now come of his motivations are unclear."

Could Bernstein be serious? Here was one of two guys who knew more about Watergate than anyone in the world and he showed himself to have the sensitivity of a rhinoceros.

Read John D. O'Connor's "I'm the Guy They Called Deep Throat" in Vanity Fair and the subsequent media coverage, and one single fact out and grabs you by the collar: Like government and private sector employees throughout the world, Mark Felt was the victim of gross mismanagement

Mark Felt

In his prime, Mark Felt was handsome, articulate and always elegantly dressed and coifed, and from all accounts was passionate about his career. Joining the bureau in 1942, Felt worked his way up through the ranks and became known to Director J. Edgar Hoover as a go-to guy and a doer. Hoover appointed him deputy director and the third most senior official at the FBI. There was a catch. The second in command was Hoover's long-time crony, Clyde Tolson who, at the time, was ill and frequently absent. So for all practical purposes, Felt was No. 2.

In his Vanity Fair scoop, O'Connor repeatedly talked about Felt's devotion to the bureau and the awe in which he held his boss. In Felt's book, "The FBI Pyramid From the Inside," he described Hoover as "charismatic, feisty, charming, petty, giant, grandiose, brilliant, egotistical, industrious, formidable, compassionate, domineering."

Shortly before Hoover's death on May 2, 1972, the White House put serious pressure on the FBI to have the bureau's forensic lab declare a highly incriminating memo to be a forgery. Hoover and Felt refused to cave. At the time, Hoover may have been even more powerful than the president with reams of scandal and gossip on virtually every important person in the United States from Jane Fonda to Nixon himself.