Bob Woodward: Smoke-and-Mirrors From the Start

The prevailng myth on the left these days seems to be that Bob Woodward is a fallen angel, a once-idealistic crusader turned cynical tool of the powerful. There's another explanation - that from the beginning he's used internecine warfare in the intelligence community and elsewhere to advance his own career. The Watergate story may just be the first of many Bob Woodward tricks with smoke and mirrors.

We can start with the obvious holes in the Watergate mythology as it is currently accepted in this country: Mark Felt, an idealistic and disaffected senior FBI official, turned into "Deep Throat" and brought down a President. Felt contacted the journalist he first met what the young, fresh-faced scribe was with Naval Intelligence. Signalling his idealistic reporter friend with flower pots and the like, he met them in secret garages and led them to the secrets that saved the country. "The system," as so many liked to say at the time, "worked."

Felt was already deeply engaged in an internal struggle to wrest control of the FBI away from the factions brought in by Richard Nixon, with whom he had personal dealings. He was already, in effect, the "Chief Operating Officer" of America's secret police. His later indictment for illegal "black bag jobs" against American dissenters demonstrated both his lack of interest in the American constitution and his willingness to stop at nothing to advance his own side of a power struggle.

Somehow this powerful figure managed to move flowerpots around on an apartment balcony, unnoticed, in the middle of the day. And, if the now-discredited Woodward is to be believed, his motives were idealistic. A more believable explanation? That Felt - and others in the intelligence and law enforcement community - selectively leaked information to Woodward (who they considered a solid fellow) for their own cynical purposes. To protect them, Woodward then created a false narrative - the "Deep Throat" myth - that protected Felt and his other sources for thirty years. It continues to protect them today.

Other journalists have addressed the CIA's extensive activities in the field of American and foreign journalism and letters. Reporters, editors, and scholars in the US and abroad have been recruited for intelligence and propaganda work, both in the program that others (but not the CIA) referred to as "Operation Mockingbird" and in other operations. Interestingly, Woodward's old partner Carl Bernstein has written on Operation Mockingbird, although Woodward himself has not.

My theory - difficult to prove, but to my mind more plausible than the myth - is that Woodward's entire career is of a piece. He has always put himself in the service of one faction in an internal power struggle, whether in the political, military, or (primarily) the intelligence communities, in order to advance himself. (I'm leaving out the Dan Quayle and John Belushi books, as digressions from his primary career path - and because I imagine any self-respecting writer would rather be condemned as a rascal than as the author of these books.) I wrote a fictionalized account of Woodward's career (that is to say, a Woodward version) here.

Melinda Henneberger (in these pages) and others get it seriously wrong about Bob Woodward when they say that he remained neutral in the pursuit of his story. Books like "Plan of Attack" would be neutral, if they revealed who made which claim, and why - for example, if it read like this: "The President claims that George Tenet told him on Tuesday that the case for WMDs was 'a slam dunk.'"

But it doesn't read that way. Instead, it reads (I paraphrase) "As he sipped his now-tepid coffee, beads of sweat gleaming on his upper lip, Tenet told him the case for WMDs was 'a slam dunk.'" That's not neutrality, that's vanity publishing for the powerful - or a peverse kind of real-life fanfic. That's Woodward's quid pro quo for access, the tradeoff for helping someone wage internal or political warfare. The journalistic community needs to recognize that and condemn Woodward.

When that rascally old Republican genius John Ford made "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," it included this line: "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend." Our society and our journalism can't tolerate much more legend. It's late in the game to pursue the truth about Watergate, but everything about Bob Woodward's career and reporting (and that of others like him) should be questioned. An open society deserves no less.

A Night Light