Wilkins: Anonymous Sources Can Have Real Value
“The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was ‘Deep Throat,’ the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon,” William Branigin and David Von Drehle reported late this afternoon on the Washington Post Web site.
Watergate reporter Bob Woodward “said Felt helped The Post at a time of tense relations between the White House and much of the FBI hierarchy. He said the Watergate break-in came shortly after the death of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Felt’s mentor, and that Felt and other bureau officials wanted to see an FBI veteran promoted to succeed Hoover.”
Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post during Watergate, ” in an interview this afternoon, said that knowing that ‘Deep Throat’ was a high-ranking FBI official helped him feel confident about the information that the paper was publishing about Watergate. He said that he knew the ‘positional identity’ of ‘Deep Throat’ as the Post was breaking its Watergate stories and that he learned his name within a couple of weeks after Nixon’s resignation. . . .”
A “Vanity Fair article, by California attorney John D. O’Connor, described Felt as conflicted over his role in the Watergate revelations and over whether he should publicly reveal that he was the anonymous source whose identity has been a closely guarded secret for more than three decades.”
At least two African Americans had a piece of Watergate history.
Roger Wilkins was the lead writer of the Post’s Watergate editorials, and in 1973, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service “for its investigation of the Watergate case.”
“It speaks very well of Bob and Carl that they gave that man their word and they kept it for 30 years,” he told Journal-isms. “With all this yowling and howling, it is true that the press had gotten too promiscuous with unattributed quotes, but sometimes there is real information that you’re really not going to get unless you give the person that” anonymity, “and the country is better off.
“It’s a useful thing for a president to get knocked off for criminal behavior. It’s a warning to all the rest of them. Nixon would have stayed in office for a second term but that Felt believed he could trust those guys and he was disgusted by the criminality,” Wilkins said.
In his 1982 memoir, “A Man’s Life,” Wilkins wrote that “Bob and Carl and I became very close during those months. I had written almost all of my Watergate editorials off their stories. That is, I would read one of their stories and then go talk to them to clarify any facts that puzzled me. When I finished the editorial, I would show it to one of them, not for editorial slant, but to make sure that I hadn’t gotten any of the facts wrong. They appreciated my work, because as Bob told me once, the fact that the editorial page was backing them up made it easier for them to persuade their editors to print their stories. . . .
“In the spring of 1973 Bradlee, then a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, called the whole staff together a few days before the official announcement of the prizes and stood on a desk and announced that we had won the medal for public service. He named us all, including Barry Sussman, the man who edited Bob and Carl during the hard days. I was standing just behind the two young reporters when Ben made his announcement. It was a fine moment.”
Frank Wills, an $80-a-week security guard who detected the break-in at the Watergate office complex that prompted the Watergate story and Nixon’s resignation, died at 52 on Sept. 27, 2000. He had a brain tumor.
In 1997, an embittered Wills told a Boston Globe reporter: “I put my life on the line. I went out of my way. . . . If it wasn’t for me, Woodward and Bernstein would not have known anything about Watergate. This wasn’t finding a dollar under a couch somewhere.”
“I’m the Guy They Called Deep Throat” (PDF) (Vanity Fair)
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