For Watergate junkies, another raking of the old coals is irresistible. For those underage younger persons who never understood what all the fuss was about, here is the chance to get with it.
Just to remind: in June 1972, a bunch of nasties, some of whose day job was with the CIA but currently working for Richard Nixon the President of the USA, broke into the offices of the rival Democratic party in the Watergate building and got caught red-handed. Nixon’s White House tried to cover up this illegal entry. A junior reporter at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward, unearthed a five-star source known on the Post and round the world as ‘Deep Throat’.
He leaked to Woodward details of the FBI’s investigation of the break-in and other juicy details, not always true, which helped to sustain the story until — two years and a congressional impeachment of the President later — Nixon resigned and Woodward ascended into journalistic Valhalla as the pattern for all time of the hero investigative journalist. Nixon, having sort of confessed and kind of said sorry to David Frost, died some years later, still in disgrace.
A third of a century after Watergate, Deep Throat, possibly suffering dementia, finally identified himself as one Mark Felt, who had been No. 2 in the FBI at the material time. Max Holland’s focus is on the question why did he, Felt, do it. Woodward had over the years offered various explanations, chiefly that he was a conscientious whistle-blower disgusted by Nixon’s shenanigans, but also that personal ambition and office politics may have played a part.
According to Holland this ambivalence was ‘a gaping hole at the centre of the narrative’. In fact, he argues, it was all office intrigue following the death of J.
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