On W. Mark Felt

Literally a footnote of history—of one particular history anyway—you have to really look, in Robert Sam Ansen’s classic but out-of-print Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon, in order to find the goods on W. Mark Felt. The W is for I-don’t-know-what, except that I know it’s an affectation Felt shared with so many of Hoover’s henchmen, all those G-Men up-and-comers who started out imitating the great scumbag’s triple-decker name that began with the first initial: E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, L. Patrick Gray, W. Mark Felt—thank god those are the only ones we ever had to hear much about. (Hoover himself took the template from his own mentor, A Mitchell Palmer, but that's a whole other essay.)

When Hoover died, Nixon put one of his own guys, Gray, in there instead of Felt to take his place as director of the FBI, and Felt’s resentment ran so deep and so strong, he would have done just about anything to get back at the man who’d denied him the chance to become the next Hoover. In the meantime, as de facto director, he was playing out his Hoover fantasies of black-bag spycraft the best he could, breaking into the homes of relatives of the Weather Underground—and, for his crimes, living out much of his old age under the cloud of prison’s possibility.

In Bob Woodward's thoroughly absorbing book about his own relationship with the man previously known as Deep Throat, Woodward tells the story of Felt, at a grand-jury hearing on an unrelated matter, being asked point-blank by one of the jurors, “Are you Deep Throat?” When Felt answered in the negative, the only answer it could have possibly occurred to him to give, Justice Potter Stewart took him aside to privately remind him that he was under oath, but also told him that since the question wasn't pertinent, he’d have it stricken from the record if that’s what Felt wanted. Felt said have it struck. Potter had lunch with Woodward one day soon after this and told the story, gloating, to his stricken companion.

Nixon testified at Felt’s trial, on Felt’s behalf. He put in a good word; he also put in a sympathetic word. Felt got a slap on the wrist—he got a fine—and then President Reagan gave him a full pardon. In the summer of 2005, after Felt had finally stepped out of his dark closet looking like a man dug up from the grave, the story became famous of how Nixon had sent Felt and his co-defendant each a congratulatory bottle of wine. But it had been lying there in the footnotes of history all along, just waiting to be scooped and sifted from the bottom of an old book. The story was in one of Exile’s footnotes, along with the text of Nixon’s congratulatory message: “Justice ultimately prevails.”