Deep Throat, Watergate, and the Bureaucratic Politics of the FBI

On May 31, 2005, former FBI associate director W. Mark Felt revealed that he was “Deep Throat,” the shadowy high official whose leaks to the Washington Post helped to provoke the Watergate crisis and topple the Nixon presidency. Felt’s confession ended one of the capital’s longest-running guessing games; the hushed phone calls and parking-garage trysts of All the President’s Men, co-author Bob Woodward confirmed, were based on encounters with Felt. Media outlets framed the revelation as a drama of individual derring-do, assigning Felt the role of noble whistleblower or despicable traitor, liberal ally or conservative nemesis. As a result, they missed an opportunity to reconsider the larger story of Watergate, perhaps the most mythologized political scandal of the twentieth century. This article argues that Felt’s actions—and, by extension, Watergate itself—must be understood in the context of a long-standing institutional conflict between the Nixon administration and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.¹

As an event, Watergate occupies an uneasy place in American political history. Nearly all historians agree that the crisis marked a pivotal moment—“the most serious scandal in the history of U.S. presidential politics,” in the words of Nixon scholar Michael Genovese. ² And yet our understanding of Watergate has remained largely fixed since the mid-1970s, when highly politicized narratives of virtue and criminality first took root. Popular accounts tend to devolve into blow-by-blow descriptions of who said what to whom—on White House tapes, in congressional testimony, or in the dozens of memoirs by minor players. To most of the public, Watergate remains the character-driven showdown of All the President’s Men, with scrappy young reporters facing off against a uniquely duplicitous president. In this narrative, Nixon occupies center stage as a power-hungry but paranoid chief executive, seeking absolute control over his enemies and political opponents. ³

Academic historians tend to be less convinced of Nixon’s singular evil. But they have struggled in recent decades to reconcile the Watergate scandal with broader narratives of political change in the 1970s. One interpretation describes Watergate as a social crisis, a flashpoint for enmities born of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Nixon’s lifelong clash with liberals. A second takes a more structural approach, framing Nixon’s actions as a particularly dramatic example of presidential overreach in the decades-long march toward the “imperial presidency.” In this view, the concentration of executive power begun at the turn of the century found its final expression in the hubris of the Nixon presidency. Watergate was the outcome of a larger battle between Congress and the president—and between the president and democratic society—over who would control the domestic purse strings, create policy, and manage the conduct of the Vietnam War. ⁴

These interpretations have much to recommend them. But none entirely explains how or why a man like Mark Felt decided to turn against a president who appeared to be one of the FBI’s great allies and champions. Felt was no liberal; he applauded Nixon’s attacks on college radicals, civil rights demonstrators, and leftists of all stripes. Nor was he a congressional partisan; his entire professional career had been spent at the service of an executive agency. His experience suggests that there may be a third way to think about Watergate: as a struggle not just between the president and Congress, or between Nixon and his enemies, but as a bureaucratic conflict within the executive branch itself. ⁵

Among historians, the role of federal bureaucracies in shaping American politics has received relatively little attention. Yet as political scientist Dan Carpenter has noted, the rise of an administrative bureaucracy within the American democratic system has been “one of the most wrenching and controversial changes of the twentieth century,” spanning Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Not all bureaucracies—or all bureaucrats—have managed to translate this expansion into significant political power. Where they have been successful, however, bureaucratic entrepreneurs have proved to be some of the most innovative and influential figures in American political history. Successful bureaucrats...