(Simon & Schuster, £16.99)
In May it was revealed that Deep Throat was W Mark Felt, the FBI's second highest official during the Watergate affair. Bob Woodward's memoir of his relationship with Felt serves several purposes. It reassures Woodward's other secret sources that his acknowledgement of Felt's role was preceded by much hand-wringing. It also reveals Felt's own determination to cover his tracks while leaking to Woodward. And, perhaps unintentionally, it makes us wonder whether Watergate really matters any more.
Felt lied to L Patrick Gray III, the FBI acting director, when Gray confronted him about the leaks in early 1973. Felt even commissioned an investigation that concluded the leaks were coming from the White House or justice department.
Felt believed that his deception was justified by Gray's pusillanimity in the face of White House efforts to block the Watergate investigation. We are glad of the outcome in this case—but we should not overstate the nobility of Felt's actions. The FBI had a tradition of chafing at White House control, sometimes with less happy results. It defied President Truman by collaborating in McCarthyism, and stymied Robert Kennedy's efforts on organised crime and civil rights. Hoover-era officials like Felt also resisted Gray's efforts to hire more women in the agency.
In 2000, Woodward, at 57, attempted to reconnect with Felt so that he could understand Felt's motivation—and resolve intriguing smaller questions, such as how Felt left secret messages in the home-delivered copy of Woodward's New York Times. But it is clear that Felt's dementia made this impossible. "You remember the Nixon period?" asks Woodward. "Vaguely," says Felt.
He is not alone in this. Most Americans alive today were not yet teenagers when Nixon resigned in 1974. All they know is the myth of Watergate: the story of how two dogged journalists exposed the abuses of the Nixon presidency. For three decades this myth has encouraged a style of adversarial journalism and a popular distrust of the federal government.
But is the Watergate myth right? The Secret Man suggests not. In 1972, the real engine of accountability may have been dissenters within the bureaucracy itself. And Felt was not the indispensable man. Woodward later learned that over a dozen FBI field agents were prepared to resign if the White House persisted in its effort to impede the Watergate investigation. In a short coda to this book, Woodward's collaborator Carl Bernstein also reminds us that the pair had "an array of sources at all levels" in Washington.
The same is true today. FBI agents blew the whistle on the bureau's pre-9/11 botch-ups and on prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. CIA employees provided evidence of the White House's fiddling with intelligence on Iraqi WMD. Military personnel revealed how Donald Rumsfeld shifted policy on torture at Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld protests against leaking, but technology and law make it easier than ever.
The bureaucratic ethos has changed too. A few weeks after Felt's revelation, Gray broke a 32-year silence to sputter at the duplicity of his second in command. He died of cancer soon afterwards, going to the grave maintaining a stony silence about his own betrayal by a president who famously left him "twisting slowly in the wind" during his abortive 1973 confirmation hearing.
Gray's stoicism, perhaps unusual in 1973, is now wildly anachronistic. The Bush administration, said to be highly disciplined, has nevertheless suffered from a rash of tell-all books. In last year's American Soldier, retired general Tommy Franks, who endorsed Bush in the 2004 election, described Doug Feith, one of his former overseers, as "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet." Franks is said to have earned an advance of $5m for his memoirs; George Tenet, $4m; Richard Clarke, something in the "mid to high six figures." The Felt family sought to collaborate with Woodward in a revelatory book that would allow them to profit from the Watergate story (they have now sold the movie rights to Tom Hanks). "Follow the money": Woodward now says that Felt never actually uttered this injunction. But market pressure is undercutting bureaucratic solidarity.
The Watergate myth, while encouraging popular suspicion of government officials, was still reassuring: it held out the promise that justice would be done once investigative journalists had revealed the government's misdeeds. Certainly this was the case in 1974: Nixon resigned, and others went to jail. But is it true today? It is publicly known that the Bush administration manipulated evidence about Iraqi WMD; that it botched postwar planning; that it abused prisoners and turned others over to be tortured by other countries. But Bush has been re-elected, Rumsfeld is still defence secretary, and Tenet has received the presidential medal of freedom. Transparency without responsibility—perhaps that is the sad sequel to the Watergate fable.
