Wallowing in Watergate: Historiography, Methodology, and Mythology in Journalism's Celebrated Moment
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/08821127.2014.968946
ISSN2326-2486
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesMark Feldstein is the Richard Eaton professor of broadcast journalism in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.Carroll Kilpatrick, “Nixon Intends to Stay on Job,” Washington Post, July 21, 1973, A1.Journalistic news pegs structured around anniversary dates—as well as news conferences, interviews, political demonstrations, and speeches—are “pseudo-events,” in the words of historian Daniel Boorstin, “synthetic” or “counterfeit” occasions that ease journalistic routines to serve up “pre-cooked” stories that can “keep till needed.” But while “commemorative journalism” often “fails to provide” necessary historical context, scholar Jill Edy observed, nevertheless it “is one of the few times the media encourage us to look critically at our past,” and “even simple stories can offer a forum for debate about [its] meaning.” (Edy noted three ways that the news media shape collective memory: by using anniversaries or obituaries as news pegs to examine the past, by using historical analogies to compare contemporary events to previous ones, and by providing historical context to trace the origins of the present.) Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 19; and Jill A. Edy, “Journalistic Use of Collective Memory,” Journal of Communication 49 (Spring 1999): 76.Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Norton, 1990), 9, 616, 620.W. Joseph Campbell, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 122–123. In the first six months after the Watergate arrests, the Washington Post published some two hundred stories about Watergate—many on the front page—more than twice that of the New York Times. Otherwise, media coverage of Watergate was “almost nonexistent.” Before Nixon's landslide re-election in November 1972, fewer than fifteen of more than four hundred reporters in Washington worked exclusively on Watergate; and more than seventy percent of the nation's newspapers endorsed Nixon's re-election—while just five percent opposed it. Watergate coverage increased only slightly even when the burglars’ trial began in January of 1973, and Nixon was barely questioned by reporters about the scandal until more than nine months after the break-in. Louis W. Leibovich, Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 68, Appendix C; and Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 226.The White House cover-up included destroying documents, intimidating witnesses, paying hush money to the Watergate burglars, and getting pliant officials at the top of the Justice Department to reveal evidence FBI agents were uncovering about Nixon's men; these and other attempts to obstruct the criminal probe ultimately failed, some more quickly than others. Kutler, Wars of Watergate; Bob Woodward, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 74, 83; Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 98.David Greenberg, Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003), 162.Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 20.Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, All the President's Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), book jacket.Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” American Journalism Review, August/September 2004, 62–63.Schudson, Watergate in American Memory, 104. To be sure, the narrative by Woodward and Bernstein did not purport to be a definitive history of the Watergate scandal but a contemporary memoir about their experiences covering the story. “To say that the press brought down Nixon, that's horseshit,” Woodward later said. “The press always plays a role, whether by being passive or by being aggressive, but it's a mistake to overemphasize” media coverage. But author David Halberstam reflected the larger journalistic mindset in his media-centric book, The Powers That Be. “Watergate was a will-o’-the-wisp,” he wrote, an “evanescent” story that could have vanished if not for Woodward and Bernstein: “If the story had broken on a weekday instead of on a weekend, perhaps the Post might have assigned a senior political reporter from the national staff, a reporter already preoccupied with other work, and the story might have died quickly. If the first marriages of both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had not ended leaving them both bachelors, they might have been pulled away by the normal obligations of home and might not have been willing to spend the endless hours that the story required.” Without Woodstein, in other words, Watergate might never have been exposed, Nixon never driven from office. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979), 606; Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” 63.Adrian Havill, Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (New York: Birch Lane, 1993), 88.Campbell, 116, 224–225. As recently as the summer of 2014, award-winning author Rick Perlstein recycled the folktale, writing that Woodward and Bernstein “cracked Watergate” and the press as a whole succeeded in “taking down a president.” So, too, the director of Harvard's Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, Alex S. Jones, stated in his most recent journalism book that “press coverage brought down a president.” Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 462; and Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 60.“Even for journalists who were not involved or who entered into news work after Nixon's resignation, journalistic retellings of Watergate have been foundational to journalism's self-identity,” media scholar Matt Carlson observed. “As journalism comes under fire in the present, the need to cultivate the past in a manner that supports journalistic authority takes on added importance.” Matt Carlson, “Embodying Deep Throat: Mark Felt and the Collective Memory of Watergate,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 3 (2010): 237.At times, Watergate narcissism has verged on parody as bit players have sought reflected glory in the tale even decades afterward. For example, a zoning board's 2014 vote to tear down the parking garage where Woodward met Deep Throat received national news coverage, and actor Robert Redford's 2013 documentary, “All the President's Men Revisited,” was a “self-celebration” that “gives almost as much credit to Mr. Redford for making a movie about Watergate as it does to the Washington Post for sticking with the story.” Doug Stanglin, “Garage of ‘Deep Throat’ Watergate Fame to Be Razed,” USA Today, June 16, 2014; Kris Maher, “Watergate Parking Garage to Be Torn Down,” Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2014; and Alessandra Stanley, “Robert Redford Narrates ‘All the President's Men Revisited,’” New York Times, April 18, 2013.Phil Bronstein, “The Newsroom,” New York Times, August 3, 2012.Clark R. Mollenhoff, Investigative Reporting: From Courthouse to White House (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 337.Feldstein, “Watergate Remembered,” 67. See also John W. Dean, Lost Honor (Los Angeles: Stratford, 1982), 272; and John W. Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (New York: Viking, 2014), 208–209.Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls during Watergate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 62; and Halberstam, 696–697.Unlike history—the reality of what actually happened in the past—collective memory is how society chooses to remember those events: the “meaning that a community makes of its past,” as one scholar put it. Edy, 71.Victor Lasky, It Didn't Start with Watergate (New York: Dial Press, 1977), 1–3, 247–253; and Greenberg, 218–221.Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1999), 649–653.Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984), xviii, 281. This book received wide publicity—its author was interviewed on network TV broadcasts—but leading reviewers criticized its “circumstantial…uneven quality of evidence” and “inference and innuendo… tottering on a tower of unproven assumptions.” J. Anthony Lukas, “A New Explanation of Watergate,” New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1984, 7, 9; and Anthony Marro, “Deep Throat, Phone Home,” Washington Post Book World, November 25, 1984, 5, 7.Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin's, 1991). This book was attacked both by reviewers (“wild charges and vilifications,” “fantasies”) and Watergate participants (“a scandalous fabrication,” “untrue and pathetic,” “a fraud,” “absolute garbage,” “lunatic”). The book's publisher settled out of court after a $150 million libel lawsuit was filed against it. Howard Kurtz, “Watergate Book Opens to Tough Audience,” Washington Post, May 21, 1991, C1, 3; William L. O’Neill, “Break-Ins, Cover-Ups, and the Watergate Conspiracy,” Washington Post, June 30, 1991; Stephen E. Ambrose, “What He Didn't Know and When He Didn't Know It,” New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1991, 7–8; and George Lardner Jr., “Watergate Libel Suit Settled,” Washington Post, July 23, 1997, C1, 8.See, for example, Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic, 1994); Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1996); Conrad Black, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); and Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro, Nixon's Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon (New York: Skyhorse, 2014).Greenberg, 217.Bradley Franks, Adrian Bangerter, and Martin W. Bauer, “Conspiracy Theories as Quasi-Religious Mentality: An Integrated Account from Cognitive Science, Social Representations Theory, and Frame Theory,” Frontiers in Psychology 4, no. 1 (July 2013): 2.Viren Swami and Rebecca Coles, “The Truth Is Out There,” Psychologist 23, no. 7 (2010): 561.Historian Stanley Kutler argued that the “endless, pointless game of trying to identify Deep Throat” was really just “a convenient means of journalistic self-congratulation, a way the media reminds us of its place at the center of the Watergate constellation.” Kutler, “Watergate Misremembered,” Slate, June 18, 2002.Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 13; Havill, 86–88, 127; David Obst, Too Good to Be Forgotten (New York: Wiley, 1998), 246; and Jeff Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the Flowerpot,” New York, April 29, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/features/ben-bradlee-2012-5/. Initially, Woodward and Bernstein didn't intend to write a memoir about themselves or Deep Throat; they originally proposed a more conventional narrative about the Nixon White House and Watergate. But the scandal began unraveling so quickly they feared that by the time their book was published, it would just be a rehash of old headlines. Hollywood's Robert Redford, who purchased the movie rights to their work, suggested they focus instead on themselves—“a howdunit,” a wag called it, rather than “a whodunit, because that was already well known.” Woodward, Secret Man, 108–109; Campbell, 119; and Alicia C. Shepard, Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (New York: Wiley, 2007), 59, 65–67, 74–76, 115.Woodward, Secret Man, 104, 66; and Shepard, 263.“I can't recall any story we got because of” Deep Throat, Sussman said. “True, he offered encouragement that Watergate was important.... That was nice, but we knew it on our own.” Sussman, who had a falling out with Woodward and Bernstein, believed they were hoisted on their own petard by exaggerating the role of Deep Throat, leading many people to believe that “Woodward did little more than show up with a bread basket that Deep Throat filled with goodies.” This erroneously detracted from Woodstein's genuine enterprise and initiative, Sussman realized, because the “greater the importance of Deep Throat, the less the achievement of the two reporters.” Barry Sussman, “Why Deep Throat Was an Unimportant Source,” Nieman Watch Dog, July 29, 2005; and Barry Sussman, “Watergate 25 Years Later,” Watergate.info, June 17, 1997.Bernstein and Woodward, 271, 72. Archival records released over the years demonstrate that Deep Throat provided Woodward false information, either by accident or design. According to author Max Holland, there were also “marked differences” between All the President's Men and the reporters’ contemporaneous typed notes, which they sold to the University of Texas archives for $5 million in 2003. Holland discovered that many quotations in the book were substantially altered or nowhere to be found in the reporters’ files and that Woodstein articles misleadingly characterized a key FBI executive as a White House official or a “knowledgeable Republican source.” Another author who perused newly disclosed files found similarly misleading source attributions and out of context quotations in All the President's Men. Dean, Nixon Defense, 165–168; Shepard, 107; Woodward, Secret Man, 76; Obst, 247; Holland, 143, 86, 94–95, 116, 143, 158, 232–233, 249; and Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.”For example, see Hougan, 280–281, and Ron Rosenbaum, “Ah, Watergate!,” New Republic, June 23, 1982, 15–23.Bernstein and Woodward, 130, 243.Government insiders figured it out much earlier—Nixon and his advisors in 1972, top Justice Department officials by 1974; they believed that Felt's motive was ambition and revenge, not idealism. Jack Limpert, “If It Isn't Tricia, It Must Be…,” Washingtonian, June 1974; Jack Limpert, “Deeper into Deep Throat,” Washingtonian, July 31, 1974; and Edward Jay Epstein, “Did the Press Uncover Watergate?,” Commentary, July 1974, 21–24.Woodward, Secret Man, 221–232. A year later, when Felt's senility had worsened further at age 92, a ghostwritten book published under his name attempted to capitalize on his newfound fame. It included a statement that “there is no doubt that much of the White House involvement in the break-in and the subsequent cover-up would never had been brought to light without the help of the press.” Proponents of the heroic journalistic narrative have cited the remark as confirmation of their beliefs. But Felt offered a different opinion when Watergate was still fresh in his mind more than a quarter-century earlier: that the White House cover-up was doomed to failure, regardless of news coverage, because “No one could have stopped the driving force of the investigation without an explosion in the Bureau—not even J. Edgar Hoover.” This statement, too, should be treated with some caution because Felt made many demonstrably false statements at that time and later. Felt was “a truly cunning operator,” said Nixon counsel John W. Dean, who worked with Felt, “undoubtedly one of the most Machiavellian characters in government.” Jon Marshall, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 105–107; W. Mark Felt and John O’Connor, A G-Man's Life (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), 213; W. Mark Felt and Ralph de Toledano, The FBI Pyramid: From the Inside (New York: Putnam, 1979), 258, 12, 213; and Dean, Nixon Defense, 226.Woodward, Secret Man, 221–232.Carlson, 244.Bob Woodward, “How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat,” Washington Post, June 20, 2005.Carlson, 242–244, 239, 249.Felt was also an apologist for Hoover's bigoted policies, including his refusal to hire black and female FBI agents. Women posed a “risk” on the job because they were not “as strong as men,” Felt wrote, so it was a “waste” even to train them because “most women Agents would marry” and then “leave the FBI to devote themselves to child raising.” Felt even gave a pass to Hoover's spying on Martin Luther King and publicly spread word that the civil rights leader took part in “drunken sexual orgies, including acts of perversion often involving several persons.” Felt, Pyramid, 121–126, 237, 330; and Woodward, Secret Man, 43.Beverly Gage, “Deep Throat, Watergate, and the Bureaucratic Politics of the FBI,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 2 (2012): 158.Felt, Pyramid, 178, 208, 226, 294; and Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 279, 307, 496, 514, 431, 556–557.Ungar, 497, 500–501, 519, 527.Virtually all of Felt's leaks took place in the first four months of the 26-month scandal. “Too often, speculations about Deep Throat's motive have been influenced by Watergate's seemingly inexorable endgame,” author Max Holland observed. “But the scandal did not start out as a mortal threat to Nixon's presidency, and history should not be written as if it did.” Holland, 11.Ibid., 26, 9, 108. According to Holland, unlike other Hoover men who also wanted to be director but gave up and resigned from the FBI when Gray got the top spot, Felt decided to “feign loyalty while working to undermine Gray” from the inside. Felt attacked Gray behind his back to newsmen and to FBI colleagues, even blaming Gray for Felt's own leaks. At the same time, Felt flattered Gray to his face—addressing him as “Boss” and obsequiously sending a thank-you note for an autographed photo: “I am rearranging the pictures in my office so that yours will occupy the most prominent spot.” Meanwhile, Felt privately encouraged Gray to pursue the Watergate probe aggressively. “Felt was playing a tricky double game,” Holland maintained, urging “Gray to keep the investigation moving and not let it be derailed” by the White House; it “cost Felt nothing, but was bound to hurt Gray” with Nixon. At the same time, “Felt was simultaneously communicating to the White House that everything would be different if he were the director—that he could accomplish what Gray was either unwilling or incapable of doing”: stopping the leaks that Felt was helping to spread. No wonder FBI co-workers nicknamed the silver-haired Felt “the white rat.” Still, Felt was not alone; he had several “active collaborators” in the FBI who also leaked to trusted reporters “to oust Gray and have Felt installed in his place,” Holland found. “If Felt moved up, they would, too.” Holland, 11, 9, 64, 54, 21, 41, 113–114, 123, 215, 97.Ungar, 556–557; and Woodward, Secret Man, 72–73.Felt met Woodward by happenstance one night in 1969 or 1970, when he was a Navy lieutenant dispatched to the White House to deliver a package. “I was almost drooling” to meet “someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing in [the] Navy,” Woodward remembered, and was “way too anxious and curious…deferential, though I must have seemed needy…my patter verged on the adolescent.” Worried about his future—upbraiding himself for his “gutless” naval service, fearful he was headed for an equally “gutless” life as a lawyer—Woodward turned his encounter with Felt “into a career counseling session.” Felt offered boilerplate advice that Woodward should follow his heart, but the future reporter regarded it as a “revelation. I was thankful for the advice” and decades later still cherished it as “a kind of ‘Rosebud,’ the elusive X-factor in someone's life that explains everything.” More important, “I had set the hook.” Woodward, Secret Man, 20–26.Woodward allowed that Felt had multiple motives that “were complicated and not fully explainable,” that he was “torn and uncertain” about leaking and yet “liked the game” of it. Early on, the reporter speculated that Felt leaked because he wanted “to get caught so he would be free to speak publicly” or had “a love-hate dialectic about his government service.” Later, Woodward acknowledged that Felt viewed Gray as a “political hack” and regarded Woodward as his “agent.” Woodward, Secret Man, 46; and Holland, 191–192.In the midst of the fast-breaking Watergate scandal, Woodward asserted, there simply “was no time to ask our sources, ‘Why are you talking? Do you have an ax to grind?’” Perhaps Woodward didn't explicitly ask Felt such pointed questions because the answer was obvious; after all, why risk alienating a high-level insider on an important and highly competitive story by questioning, let alone impugning, his objectives? Naiveté, however, seems an unlikely explanation: “Even rookie reporters,” media critic Jack Shafer noted skeptically, “get suspicious of sources’ motives.” Woodward, Secret Man, 104; and Jack Shafer, “What Made Deep Throat Leak?,” Reuters, February 21, 2012.The “real whistleblowers,” Holland wrote, were Nixon campaign staff members who “took genuine risks, and gained nothing but their self-respect, by telling FBI agents or federal prosecutors the truth.” Holland, 193.Woodward acknowledged that he had promised Felt “there would be no identification of him, his agency, or even a suggestion in print that such a source existed.” But Felt believed Woodward betrayed this “inviolate” agreement by prominently injecting him into All the President's Men anyway, under the pornographic nickname of Deep Throat. Woodward phoned to get Felt's reaction to the book after it was published. “When he heard my voice, he hung up,” Woodward said. “For days I was haunted,” afraid “that he might take his own life…I can still hear the bang of his telephone and the sudden dial tone.” For the next quarter-century, Woodward gave up on trying to repair the breach: “I was basically gutless. I did nothing.” But in 2000, the reporter tried again and called his old source. Felt, then 86 years old, seemed friendly. “I was relieved, terribly relieved,” Woodward remembered. A month later, Felt agreed to have lunch. Woodward “was exhilarated. It was as if some pall was beginning to lift.” But genuine absolution eluded him. It turned out that Felt's welcome was the product of senility not forgiveness; the FBI source didn't really remember Woodward or Nixon. Nevertheless, Woodward decided that Felt had taught the reporter a lesson about “gratitude. He not only had helped me on Watergate. He had showed me the way to develop relationships of trust.” Woodward, Secret Man, 218, 110–111, 115–116, 126, 165, 173, 183.Woodward, Secret Man, 104, 214.Besides, for Woodward, to tarnish a senile old man's image—as well as his own—would have appeared cruel as well as degrading; and to belatedly correct the record in all of its embarrassing complexity invited humiliating if overstated comparisons to Nixon's own Watergate stonewalling. “Don't give fodder to the fuckers” who already hated him, Woodward reportedly lectured a former underling in a vain attempt to prevent him from publicizing evidence he found about embellishments in All the President's Men. Longtime mentor Benjamin Bradlee thought this reaction “off the charts”; even if Woodward added a few “bells and whistles” to “neaten things up a little—we all do that! … Woodward got his bowels in an uproar” because he wrong saw even minor criticism as “a critical and fatal attack on his integrity.” Himmelman, “The Red Flag in the Flowerpot.”Stephen Hess, The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1984), 77–78.This is true for all journalists but as the American reporter best known for his use of unnamed sources, Woodward has been repeatedly singled out for criticism over the years. “Those who talk to [him] can be confident…that he will treat even the most patently self-serving account as if untainted,” thus reassuring future informants that their “testimony will not only be respected but burnished into the inside story,” author Joan Didion complained. Woodstein's omniscient narrative voice and opaque attribution were so “larded with flattering portrayals of cooperative sources” that another journalist satirized how Hitler's last days would have been depicted: “Goering and Himmler had heard rumors that the Furhrer was anti-Semitic. It was all hearsay, innuendo, but still, the two men were troubled. They had reached an inescapable conclusion: they must go to Berchtesgaden, confront the Fuhrer with these allegations, and ask him to put all doubts to rest….‘The Jews, mein Fuhrer, what's happened to all the Jews?’ Goering asked. ‘There used to be so many of them.’... Hitler exploded. ‘I don't give a shit how you do it, just get rid of them. That's the plan.’ The two men greeted these remarks with a disappointed silence. There was not much room for maneuvering here. It could be a problem. They kept their concerns to themselves, however. They did not wish to add to the Fuhrer's burdens.... The three men shook hands and Himmler and Goering simultaneously realized how little they really knew the Fuhrer, even after all these years.” Joan Didion, “The Deferential Spirit,” New York Review of Books, September 19, 1996; and Arthur Levine, “The Final Days of the Third Reich as Told to Woodward and Bernstein,” Washington Monthly, September 1976, 48–52.Holland, 34, 410–442, 89; and Ungar, 509, 520–523, 531, 533–534, 556. “Felt and his cronies were passing out information to favorite reporters at will,” former Nixon counsel John W. Dean wrote, “and as it turns out, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post was way down Felt's list.” An important backdrop to Watergate, historian Stanley Kutler observed, was the post-Hoover “War of FBI Succession,” during which “the Hooverites did what all disgruntled bureaucrats do: They leaked.” Dean, Nixon Defense, 686; Kutler, Wars of Watergate, 120; and Kutler, “Watergate Misremembered.”Or, as journalist Jack Shafer put it: “The Hoover FBI wanted to be the only semi-fascistic national police force on the scene and would repel all trespassers.” Some reporters began advancing this institutional explanation for the FBI's Watergate leaks as early as 1973; “in our national preoccupation with personality and celebrity in the nation's capital,” one wrote, “we have concentrated too much on Deep Throat as an individual and not enough on the underlying bureaucratic forces.” Jack Shafer, “Why Did Deep Throat Leak?,” Slate, June 2, 2005; John Crewdson, “FBI Warns Staff on Leaking Data,” New York Times, August 26, 1973, A1; and James Mann, “Deep Throat: An Institutional Analysis,” Atlantic, May 1992, 106–112.Gage, 161, 176. If Hoover hadn't died a few weeks before the arrest of the Watergate burglars, the “imperious bureaucrat... would have been furious,” author Sanford Ungar wrote—not about the break-in and violation of civil liberties but about White House “encroachment” on Hoover's terrain. “How he would have reacted when he discovered just how high complicity in the cover-up went—and that the President himself was involved—is hard to say…but he had certainly never hesitated in the past to defy and distress presidents.” On the other hand, Hoover had also covered up presidential scandals in previous administrations to maintain his hold on power. Ungar, 528; and Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 267–268, 447–448.Mark Feldstein, “Dummies and Ventriloquists: Models of How Sources Set the Investigative Agenda,” Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism 8, no. 5 (Fall 2007): 543–553.Actually, Watergate was not a story that truly lent itself to original investigative reporting in the first place. Time magazine investigative reporter Sandy Smith, who also received Watergate leaks from Felt and broke several important stories about the scandal, estimated that “less than two percent” of his reporting “was truly original investigation.... People forget that the government was investigating all the time…[that] government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.” Original investigative journalism, as defined by the premier national nonprofit organization that trains such reporters in the US, means more than merely serving as a receptacle for leaks, or even prying them out of reluctant government officials, no matter how important such stories might eventually turn out to be. Rather, it is “one's own work product and initiative... not a report of an investigation made by someone else” such as police, prosecutors, or congressional committees. In Watergate, because the political figures implicated faced significant legal jeopardy, the evidence of wrongdoing they possessed was generally too dangerous to entrust to reporters and could be confided safely only to their own attorneys or to law enforcement officials. So like more routine coverage of other grand jury probes, Watergate journalism was largely and necessarily derivative, reporting on investigations by authorities that were already under way before news outlets began covering them. Holland, 180; Steve Weinberg, The Reporter's Handbook (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), vii–viii; Mollenhoff, 19; and Feldstein, Poisoning the Press, 299.Epstein's interpretation relied on Watergate prosecutors, who were obviously as irked at the canonizing of Woodstein as their journalistic rivals and gave the political scientist “a documented account of the [government] investigation.” One prosecutor, Seymour Glanzer, complained later that “Woodward and Bernstein followed in our wake. The idea that they were this great investigative team was a bunch of baloney.” At the time, Epstein reported that prosecutors believed that Felt was Deep Throat and that his motive was “not to expose the Watergate conspiracy or drive President Nixon from office, but simply to demonstrate to the President that [then–FBI director L. Patrick] Gray could not control the FBI, and therefore would prove a severe embarrassment to his a
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