Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat

11. The Making of Deep Throat: 1973–1981

c h a p t e r e l e v e n The Making of Deep Throat 1973–1981 Folks may be getting fuzzy about the Watergate details, but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it? —Wilfrid Sheed, Essays in Disguise 151 In the few weeks in the Bureau that remained to him, Felt managed to regain his equilibrium while putting out self-serving accounts of the long year since J. Edgar Hoover’s death. He told one favored reporter, Jeremiah O’Leary of the Washington Star, that he had been “uncomfortable ” during the entire interregnum. “[Felt] and others were appalled by the damage to Bureau morale during the tenure of the naïve and inexperienced Gray,” O’Leary wrote on May 27, some two weeks after the confrontation with Ruckelshaus and five days after the official announcement of Felt’s “retirement.” This story marked the first time that Felt was open in public about his true attitude toward Gray all along.1 Woodward and Bernstein, naturally, worried that they might be handicapped by Deep Throat’s departure from the FBI. They needn’t have. By now their reputations were firmly fixed, and they had little trouble finding sources as Watergate passed into a new phase. As one contemporaneous account observed, “Almost everyone . . . wants to open a line of communication with them, to plant his version of what has been going on, to try to find out how much the young reporters know.” The lengthening list of Watergate defendants became sources, as their lawyers maneuvered for favorable treatment. Federal prosecutors became much more talkative about their efforts, and willing to expose what the White House had done to stymie their case. Even staffers at the White House, including Leonard Garment, a counsel, and David Gergen, a speechwriter , eventually became willing sources.2 And by the spring of 1973, Woodward and Bernstein were no longer solely devoted to daily journalism. The previous fall they had signed a $55,000 contract (nearly $300,000 in 2011 dollars) with Simon & Schuster chapter eleven 152 to write a conventional political narrative about the scandal, one that would go well beyond their cautious stories in the Post. They were not making good progress, however, on what was supposed to be a “short, quick” book due at the end of 1973. Trying to fashion a self-contained narrative when the story was mushrooming and changing weekly was daunting; how could they write a book when there was no end in sight? It got to the point where the book’s tentative title—A Point in Time— seemed self-mocking. Frustration set in, and by early spring, the thought was percolating that “maybe [the book] isn’t such a good idea” and the advance ought to be returned.3 Then Woodward had a serendipitous conversation with actor Robert Redford, who, having long disliked Richard Nixon, had taken a keen interest in the Post’s coverage. Redford had starred in The Candidate—a well-received 1972 film about modern politics—and wanted to make a movie about Woodward and Bernstein’s perseverance when many veteran reporters cynically regarded Watergate as “business as usual in the nation’s capital.” He was drawn to the odd-couple quality evident in the Woodward/Bernstein relationship, and it struck him immediately as grist for a potential film. “I remember thinking, ‘This is very interesting, a study in opposing characters and how they work together,’” Redford would recall when the film was released.4 He first tried to contact Woodward shortly after the 1972 election, but they did not actually meet until April 1973, when Redford came to Washington for a screening of The Candidate. Bernstein didn’t attend, but the actor started talking to Woodward about the Watergate book. After Woodward described the problem he and Bernstein were confronted with, Redford responded with a valuable tip: borrow his conception. Instead of writing a book about what they discovered, Redford advised, readers were more likely to be interested in how they discovered it. That was what intrigued him, and he wanted to produce a film that was a reenactment of their actual reporting. Eventually Redford bought the option to make the movie for $450,000 (more than $2 million in 2011 dollars ). But that Hollywood windfall for Bernstein and Woodward paled next to the value of the actor’s advice.5 At first Bernstein thought the suggestion a poor one. Recasting the...