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In the public imagination, Deep Throat, the official who secretly helped disclose the White House crimes that brought down President Nixon, will always be actor Hal Holbrook.
In the 1976 movie All the President's Men, Holbrook urges Robert Redford (playing Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward) to "follow the money."
It became one of Watergate's enduring lines, even if it was invented for the movie. It's not in the best seller of the same name by Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman in the movie).
Which brings us to real life and Mark Felt, who at the height of the scandal led a dual existence as No. 2 at the FBI and as Deep Throat, a secret he keep for 33 years.
Last May, John O'Connor, the Felt family lawyer, disclosed Deep Throat's identity in an article he wrote for Vanity Fair, ending the long-running political mystery.
Now, Felt and O'Connor have co-authored A G-Man's Life, published today. The cover gives Felt top billing. But at 92, he suffers from severe memory loss.
The book has been assembled on his behalf, using his earlier writing and occasional reminiscences. It treats him as a misunderstood hero and seeks to answer the other parts of the mystery: Why did he do it? And why did he keep it a secret so long, even when it might have helped him?
But much like Woodward's book on Felt, The Secret Man, published last year, A G-Man's Life raises as many questions as it answers.
It's an incremental addition to the literature of Watergate, which remains the greatest American political drama of the 20th century. The book does politics better than drama. It never mentions the movie or Holbrook. It's long on FBI operations and infighting, short on introspection.
It presents Felt as a lone ranger, seeking only to protect the FBI's integrity from political interference from the right and left.
The book defends J. Edgar Hoover, Felt's mentor, and seeks to seize some of the public glory that's gone to Woodward.
It's also personal: about Felt's estrangement and reconciliation with his daughter, a former "flower child," and the 1984 suicide of his wife, which is blamed on Felt's legal problems.
In 1980, he was convicted and fined $5,000 for his role in the FBI's warrantless break-ins of people associated with the Weathermen, the violent 1960s radicals. He was pardoned in 1981, and the book puts a post 9/11 spin on Felt's actions: "He took the appropriate, tough approach to foreign-inspired terrorism."
It's a book with three voices: O'Connor, Felt and an unnamed editor who adds intriguing footnotes. But committees don't write good books.
In a review in July of Woodward's The Secret Man, I wrote that the definitive book on Deep Throat had yet to be written. That's still true. Perhaps only a great spy novelist, such as John le Carr, could do this story justice.
A G-Man's Life
By Mark Felt and John O'Connor
PublicAffairs, 368 pp., $26.95
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