The ‘White Rat’

I invented a matrix in which the upper left quadrant is reserved for films that simultaneously respect the gist of historical events and manage to be highly entertaining. It goes all the way back to Call Northside 777, the 1948 docudrama featuring Jimmy Stewart as a crusading reporter whose investigation frees a man wrongly convicted of murder. More recent examples include Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, about the ill-fated moon mission; Edward Zwick’s Glory, about a regiment of black soldiers in the Civil War; and Michael Mann’s portrait of the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, The Insider. In the lower left quadrant, you’ll find films that while respectful of the past are disappointing as drama. I’m thinking here of movies like 42, the syrupy Jackie Robinson biopic, and Valkyrie, which recounts the July Plot to assassinate Hitler.

The quadrants on the right side of the matrix are reserved for the pernicious films, distinct because they promote a big resounding lie. The bottom quadrant includes deservedly panned films like 1965’s The Battle of the Bulge—which Dwight Eisenhower felt compelled to condemn for its historical inaccuracies—and Brian De Palma’s account of Eliot Ness, The Untouchables. The top quadrant is dedicated to riveting features, ones made by filmmakers who are unfortunately at the top of their game. Selma would be an example for the way it falsely depicts Lyndon Johnson as an obstacle in the way of civil rights legislation. Oliver Stone’s entertaining and noxious JFK occupies its own special pedestal here.

The matrix is subjective, of course. And many films sit on the line dividing the wooden but accurate film from the wooden but inaccurate one. Thirteen Days, a depiction of the Cuban missile crisis, faithfully renders John F. Kennedy’s determination to avoid nuclear war while simultaneously perpetuating a big lie about Robert Kennedy being a dove from the start. All the President’s Men is another problematic case. This 1976 paean to investigative journalism has many fabulist elements. It demonizes or skirts the government’s role in uncovering Watergate (nobody is doing their job except the reporters at the Washington Post), and it greatly distorts what went on inside the Post. It is, nonetheless, a diverting drama: eminently watchable after 40 years. And it will be on the minds of everyone who goes to see Hollywood’s latest stab at portraying Watergate: Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, written and directed by Peter Landesman.

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Mark Felt was the No. 2 executive at the FBI during the Watergate investigation and a key source for the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—the one they famously dubbed “Deep Throat.” I was working on a book about Felt in 2010 when I first began hearing the name Peter Landesman. I was interviewing FBI agents involved in the Watergate investigation or who knew Felt, and, invariably, no matter whom I contacted, Landesman had been there first. More than one interviewee said Landesman had asked the exact same questions that I was asking now. I could not help but be impressed and a little unnerved. Landesman had been a globe-trotting investigative reporter before changing careers to write and direct films. This was no screenwriter searching for a little color, but someone who knew how to report.

Landesman had been aided by the late Craig L. Dotlo, an influential figure in the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. The society’s cooperation is not easy to come by because it carefully vets requests from authors and filmmakers, and it was doubly difficult in this case. After the 2005 Vanity Fair article in which Felt outed himself as Deep Throat appeared, his conduct became a matter of great controversy in the society, with the membership irrevocably split. Landesman went to great lengths to assure Dotlo that he wanted to tell the story of Watergate from the FBI’s perspective in a way that would “let the viewer decide what the reason was for Felt’s cooperation,” Dotlo told me. Persuaded by what Landesman called his “commitment to accuracy,” Dotlo vouched for him.

Director Peter Landesman (Photo credit: Earl Gibson III / Getty)

One of the most important FBI retirees Dotlo spoke to was Edward S. Miller, the assistant director in charge of the bureau’s domestic intelligence division from 1971 to 1973. Miller had initially rebuffed the screenwriter, but Dotlo had a particular influence. As a young agent in the New York field office, Dotlo had been the moving force behind the 1978 establishment of a legal defense fund to aid bureau personnel—most prominently Miller himself—put in legal jeopardy because of the aggressive counterintelligence tactics they had used against the Weather Underground in the early 1970s. The other FBI executive tried and convicted in 1980 alongside Miller was Mark Felt.

My book, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, came out in 2012 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. It posited that the “war of the FBI succession” was the context for Felt’s conduct and winning it provided his motive. As J. Edgar Hoover aged and refused to retire gracefully, a fight for the directorship had developed at the highest echelons of the bureau. The weapon of choice was the leak to the press. When Hoover died in May 1972, just seven weeks before the Watergate break-in, Felt, then the FBI’s No. 3 executive, expected to succeed him. Instead, Nixon unexpectedly appointed Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray as acting director. This surprise ascension exacerbated the bureau’s instability. After one director for 48 years, the FBI would have four in the space of 14 months, amid intense infighting. Much of it was due to Felt. As William Ruckelshaus, who temporarily succeeded Gray as acting director in 1973, put it, “Felt was a guy obsessed with taking Hoover’s place as FBI director. [By leaking], he was trying to feather his own nest and undercut his bosses at the FBI.”

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A week after my book appeared, I received an email from Peter Landesman, expressing an interest in comparing notes on the subject of our mutual fascination. I was open to doing so. More, I was curious. No one else had engaged, as far as I knew, in any serious investigation of Deep Throat besides Landesman and myself. Following the 2005 Vanity Fair article and Bob Woodward’s quickie book on Felt, The Secret Man, the subject of Deep Throat was regarded as exhausted.

What I found particularly intriguing was Landesman’s opening remark. “[I] had a fascinating dinner w[ith] Woodward and Bernstein last year,” he wrote in his email. “I was amazed how little they know outside their own ‘narrative.’ ” This accorded with my view. One of the points in my book was that the two Post reporters had exhibited a striking and convenient lack of curiosity about Felt. Woodward, lauded for his ability to plumb the innermost secrets of the White House, Supreme Court, Pentagon, and CIA, had turned a blind eye to the ferocious politics at the FBI. He even falsified the story of Felt’s abrupt departure from the bureau in May 1973. Woodward maintained that Felt “retired” from the FBI, even after Ruckelshaus called the reporter expressly to tell him that Felt had resigned overnight rather than be the subject of an internal investigation for leaking.

As Landesman and I exchanged messages, clear differences emerged. “Though I don’t discount Felt’s desire to run the FBI,” Landesman wrote, “I think his impulse to protect it as an institution” counted for more. The institutional explanation for Felt’s behavior dated back to 1992, when James Mann, a former colleague of Woodward and Bernstein at the Post, wrote a long speculative essay about Deep Throat’s identity for the Atlantic Monthly. The article didn’t flatly claim Felt was Deep Throat, but placed the source squarely inside the FBI. Mann—who had worked on several early Watergate stories with Woodward before the pairing with Bernstein was cemented—posited that bureaucratic politics, rather than noble whistleblowing, offered the most likely explanation of Deep Throat’s behavior. Woodward would himself adopt Mann’s theory when he came to write his Felt book in 2005.

But Landesman also mentioned two wrinkles that I hadn’t seriously considered. More important than Felt’s longing for the directorship or desire to protect the bureau from Nixon, suggested Landesman, was “what was going on at home with his wife (who was nuts and a drunk) and [with] his daughter (who was a counterculture runaway).” I had briefly mentioned Audrey, Felt’s wife, in my book. She was known for nursing her husband’s ambition and anticipating the day he would ascend to the top of the FBI pyramid. She was also a manic-depressive who killed herself with Felt’s revolver in 1984. But what was Landesman suggesting: Felt leaked because he was henpecked and his daughter, a Stanford graduate, had turned into a hippie?

He reiterated the personal motive in a subsequent email:

I didn’t understand this message. Deep Throat fed the cub reporter a lot of false information. To me, this underscored that the relationship was all about the war of the FBI succession. The outstanding example here was when Felt explained to Woodward ostensibly why Nixon had nominated Gray to be the permanent FBI director in February 1973. This appointment “didn’t make any sense” to Woodward; the confirmation hearings were bound to turn into an inquisition on the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. Nixon’s disenchantment with Gray over the issue of FBI leaks the previous fall, moreover, was no secret. Felt told Woodward that an angry Gray had marched into the White House and reminded Nixon that he had performed well in limiting the FBI’s probe and that “all hell could break loose” if he weren’t nominated. The suggestion that Gray had blackmailed Nixon was a lie. It was also emblematic of Felt’s schemes to discredit his rivals for the directorship.

Besides raising motives I considered extraneous, Landesman emphasized the importance of talking to Felt’s closest colleague, Ed Miller. According to Landesman, Miller would substantiate that there’s “a good deal more to this story than career and ambition.” When I had interviewed Miller in May 2011, I hadn’t learned anything remarkable. He had, though, mentioned writing an unvarnished account of that tumultuous Watergate period at the bureau that included an explanation of why Felt had leaked. (The 2005 revelation that Felt was Deep Throat had come as absolutely no news to Miller.) I cajoled and pleaded with Miller to share his testament, as he would do with Woodward. But Miller wouldn’t budge. Reading Landesman’s email, I presumed he had seen it and found it persuasive.

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In May 2012, despite our emerging differences, Landesman invited me to his home in the Hollywood Hills to compare notes. Our conversation ranged all over the place, and it became clear that he had cast his net far wider than the FBI, interviewing such people as CBS’s Lesley Stahl, who, in addition to covering Watergate, had dated Woodward at the time. Landesman talked about how difficult it must have been for Woodward and Bernstein to have this “false history hanging over their heads” all these years. His Deep Throat script was “congruent” with my book, he asserted, except that it was going to add the personal angle that I had ignored, including Felt’s rescue of his daughter, Joan, from a California commune in the early 1970s. He had arrived there, Landesman said, to find Joan sitting naked in a field nursing her newborn baby.

One finding of Landesman’s that genuinely surprised me was his claim that Felt had leaked to Carl Bernstein, too. It has long been part of Watergate lore that Felt dealt only with Woodward. Indeed, the first time Bernstein ever met Deep Throat was in November 2008, when the reporters traveled to California to see the 95-year-old Felt, who died the next month. Landesman insisted that Felt was the anonymous “government lawyer” described in the 1974 book All the President’s Men who telephoned Bernstein at the Post and tipped him off that a young lawyer named Donald Segretti had tried to hire another lawyer named Alex B. Shipley Jr. to engage in “dirty tricks” aimed at disrupting the Democratic primaries in 1972. Landesman was proud of this alleged discovery, which had come about only because of his dogged research. He triumphantly said he had shared it with Woodward and Bernstein.

This scoop, if true, constituted a substantial revision of history, not to mention my book. The 2006 reissue of Felt’s 1979 autobiography—revised to put Deep Throat in the best possible light—had not claimed that Felt called Bernstein. In Woodward’s archival notes from the famed October 9, 1972, meeting with Deep Throat in a Virginia parking garage, Felt specifically declines to talk about Segretti. If Landesman were right, Felt was simultaneously tipping off Bernstein anonymously and refusing to discuss the same subject with Woodward. Most importantly, what Felt purportedly told Bernstein was something the FBI did not even know at the time. After the Post’s story about Segretti was published on October 10, Pat Gray ordered an internal investigation because of all the references in the story to information from FBI reports. This internal probe found that while the bureau knew about Segretti, the FBI had had “no knowledge concerning Segretti’s attempts to recruit” Shipley.

This was important. If my book did well enough, I could insert a correction in the paperback edition. I asked Landesman about his source for this finding, which contradicted All the President’s Men and contemporaneous FBI documents. Landesman promptly put on his investigative-reporter hat. “I hate to pull this, because I hate when I get it, but I can’t [divulge my source], not just yet,” he wrote in an email. “One day I’ll be able to tell you who and how, but I do know it was [Felt]. No disrespect. I see us as allies and compatriots pure and simple on this. Bear with me. . . . Though anecdotally, you can see how it makes total sense, correct? Who else would it have been, esp[ecially] given what you found out and wrote in your book.”

Yet the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Felt calling Bernstein made no sense. I went back over all the primary and secondary evidence and conducted new interviews. Ultimately, I established to my satisfaction who called Bernstein after talking to Marietta Shipley, the wife of the now-deceased Alex Shipley. She told me a lawyer friend of Alex’s, who had been with him and Segretti in the Army’s judge advocate general’s corps, had been the person who called Bernstein. This friend was certainly not Mark Felt.

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During our conversation, Landesman disclosed his involvement in the project was via Tom Hanks’s production company, Playtone, which had purchased the film rights to Felt’s story soon after the Vanity Fair article appeared. Felt was to be a vehicle for another heroic turn by Hanks, and Landesman made it seem like production was imminent. In June 2012, he wrote, “We gotta get this movie made. The same way [the movie of All the President’s Men] solidified the false mythology, only a movie as big can correct it forever. I should know soon.” Instead, in August of that year, Landesman got the go-ahead for another one of Playtone’s based-on-actual-events film projects: Parkland, about the long weekend of the Kennedy assassination.

I heard infrequently from him after that. And when I did, he tended to emphasize the gap in our respective positions rather than any supposed congruence. Felt “was a complicated guy,” Landesman wrote in November 2013, just as Parkland was coming out, “and his motives on this were complicated. To reduce it to careerism dishonors not just the man but the event. Too simply [sic]. Too reductionist. Too easy.” Meanwhile, the Felt film appeared to be in limbo.

Delays are a common Hollywood malady, my brother-in-law assured me. But he also noted that Tom Hanks had sufficient clout to get any film into production promptly—that is, if he believed in the script. That there were snags was confirmed to me later in the year by two producers I met while working on a Hanks-produced documentary series on the sixties. They expressed doubt the film would ever be made, and if it were, they said, it wasn’t going to star Tom Hanks. Meanwhile, Landesman had moved on to writing and directing yet another film “based on actual events”: Concussion, about the NFL’s brain-injury problem.

In May 2015, out of the blue, Landesman reported to me that the Felt film was finally in preparation. He had corralled Liam Neeson into portraying Felt, and Diane Lane was playing Audrey. Their star power proved crucial to piecing together the “indie financing” needed to get the film out of Hollywood purgatory (Hanks and Playtone were still involved, but only marginally). Landesman wrote, “I know we don’t agree on all things Felt. . . . I would like to compare notes, making sure things are as right as they can be. I’ll start by re-reading your book. And then I’ll be in touch.” This cordiality was in marked contrast to his tone the last time I had heard from him. In November 2013, Landesman had taken exception to my blunt rejection, in an email to him, of Felt’s supposedly complex psychological and emotional realities. “How would you know,” he responded. “You have no access to the people who actually knew him. You’re just pulling that out [of] your ass.”

Ed Miller had died in July 2013, and I was finally able to procure from his daughter a copy of the text that supposedly explained everything—though I never did learn if Landesman had ever read this explanation. It turned out to be 25 inchoate pages, revealing only in the sense that it conspicuously avoided addressing the savage war of the FBI succession. I sent copies to Angelo Lano, the FBI’s Watergate case agent; John J. McDermott, Lano’s boss as the special agent in charge of the Washington field office; Daniel Armstrong, a special assistant to Pat Gray; and Earl J. Silbert, the attorney who prosecuted the five burglars caught red-handed at the Watergate and the two ringleaders of the break-in, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. All four agreed Miller’s testament was gibberish.

For good measure, I ran Landesman’s rationalization of Felt’s conduct by every FBI man I knew of from those days. When they didn’t laugh, they scoffed. Felt was renowned for his cold, detached, and calculating demeanor. He was called the “White Rat” at the bureau—a nickname owing to his thick mane of carefully coiffed hair and his penchant for tattling on subordinates and rivals to Hoover. Nor had Miller’s ramblings mentioned Audrey or Joan as contributing factors in Felt’s decision to leak. Indeed, Miller’s memoir could be read to suggest the opposite:

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The Felt movie finally began filming in May 2016. Judging from the Hollywood trades, Landesman’s view of his script was not modest. The movie will “change the accepted history of Watergate,” he told Deadline: Hollywood. “Right or wrong, [Deep Throat] felt what he did was the last defense of the American ideal. . . . The story has the components of a suspenseful spy thriller, but there are huge reveals about his motivations.” Landesman referred to a subplot involving daughter Joan as “Shakespearean.”

The film is focused on the eventful year from Hoover’s death to Felt’s departure from the bureau in June 1973, amid grateful applause from assembled employees. It is the story of how Felt had to betray the FBI—by leaking, which was otherwise against his character, training, and ethical code—to save the FBI. This is where the war of the FBI succession is folded into the plot, except that the facts are so distorted that the truth is unrecognizable. Felt’s lust for the directorship is depicted in a single scene, immediately following Hoover’s death, when he gingerly and respectfully tries on the director’s chair for size. We are supposed to believe Felt will serve honorably if only he is asked, but he is double-crossed by Richard Nixon. Neeson’s Felt promises his fidelity to Gray so long as Gray’s first loyalty is to the bureau. In truth, Felt acted like a sycophant in front of Gray and disparaged him at every opportunity behind his back. Landesman can make such distortions believable because Liam Neeson is an imposing presence on the screen, the personification of gravitas and high-mindedness—think Gregory Peck in the ’50s and ’60s. Neeson carries Mark Felt.

Liam Neeson as Mark Felt. (Photo credit: Bob Mahoney / Sony Pictures Classics)

Felt’s rivals for the directorship are the villains in the film: William C. Sullivan and Gray—with Nixon, of course, lurking in the background. Sullivan had been Hoover’s heir apparent until he became impatient and was fired for insolence and insubordination in October 1971. In the film, Sullivan represents the bad old FBI under Hoover, a serial violator of Americans’ constitutional rights on the flimsiest of pretexts. In a conspicuous piece of miscasting, Sullivan—a tightly wound, bantamweight Irishman—is portrayed as a sloth-footed, menacing hoodlum by Tom Sizemore.

Neeson’s Felt is hellbent on preventing Sullivan’s vengeful return. While this was indubitably true—Felt leaked to damage both his perceived rivals for the directorship, Sullivan and Gray—the line the film takes, that Sullivan was tainted by his association with the FBI’s abuses while Felt was a closeted proponent of civil liberties, is risible. Sullivan’s excesses are traceable to his responsibilities for the bureau’s domestic-intelligence gathering and internal security. He sought and oversaw aggressive measures—including wiretaps, infiltration, and even sabotage—to disrupt radical groups ranging from the KKK to the Weather Underground.

Former FBI officials Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller speak to reporters in late 1980 after a federal judge fined them $5,000 and $3,500 respectively upon their convictions for approving illegal break-ins in the early 1970s. (Photo credit: BETTMANN / Getty)

When Felt rose to a position of responsibility at the FBI, he too advocated vigorous countermeasures. He sanctioned illegal break-ins during the same period he was leaking to Woodward. The film doesn’t pretend otherwise, except that Landesman’s Felt orders the gloves-off approach with only the greatest reluctance, whereas his Sullivan delights in building a police state. There is good reason to believe, moreover, that Felt reinstituted the program of illegal break-ins—called black-bag jobs—to curry Nixon’s favor, hoping they would result in the capture of one or more of the Weather Underground terrorists who were proving maddeningly elusive and so garner him the directorship. In any event, what Sullivan had in common with Felt was far more telling than any alleged differences over bureau counterintelligence techniques. They shared, recalls Jack McDermott, a “hungry, needy drive to replace Hoover.”

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The even greater disservice is the film’s depiction of L. Patrick Gray. If there was one official who most definitely was not one of the president’s men, it was Gray. Named acting director the month before the June 1972 break-in, Gray was between the proverbial rock and hard place. If he did not keep the Watergate probe under control and out of the press, he was going to incur Nixon’s wrath and lose any hope of securing the nomination to be permanent director after the November election. Yet if he failed to let the investigation run its full course or was seen to have interfered with it in any way, Gray would stand no chance of being confirmed by what was sure to be a Democrat-controlled Senate. As CIA director Richard Helms later observed, almost in sympathy, “Can you imagine the predicament of a new FBI director coming into office and having this thing break over his head?”

Gray’s solution was to try to have it both ways. He largely absented himself from direct management of the investigation, leaving it to the professionals at the bureau—including his deputy, Mark Felt. Simultaneously, the acting director opened a private channel to White House counsel John Dean and kept him informed about the FBI’s progress—never realizing that Dean’s real function was desk officer for the cover-up.

In Landesman’s film, Gray is a Nixon hatchet man who poses an even greater existential danger to the FBI than Sullivan. “Crazy Billy” (as Sullivan was known) would merely return the bureau to the bad old days; Gray would compromise its very integrity. Gray orders the Watergate investigation shut down after 48 hours—a plot point based on a false story Felt leaked to the press in June 1972. Missing from the film is any indication that Gray alone warned Nixon about the attempt to obstruct justice in the first few weeks after the break-in—what would eventually become the first article in the House Judiciary Committee’s bill of impeachment against the president.

Dean (with full knowledge of the president and his chief of staff) was trying to invoke CIA privileges to block a particularly embarrassing aspect of the FBI’s Watergate investigation: the laundering of questionable campaign contributions through a Mexican lawyer to the president’s reelection committee, whereby they reached the bank account of one of the five Watergate burglars. In an exchange that would become famous, Gray and Nixon talked on July 6, 1972, about this aborted effort to deflect the FBI investigation. “People on your staff,” Gray warned the president, “are using the CIA and FBI” in an attempt to impede the investigation. After a perceptible pause, Nixon replied, “Pat, you just continue to conduct your aggressive and thorough investigation.” The actor Marton Csokas bears an uncanny resemblance to Gray. But thanks to Landesman’s script, a naïve, hapless man in a difficult position is portrayed as a simple thug in the employ of the federal government.

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Landesman is no Oliver Stone retailing paranoid history. But there are several touches in Mark Felt reminiscent of JFK. Like the earlier film’s Mr. X (played by Donald Sutherland), there is a mysterious, menacing CIA-figure (played by Eddie Marsan) who tries, in a brief appearance, to wrap up all the loose ends. Like Stone, Landesman purveys the concept of an unaccountable Deep State. “Presidents come and go,” Marsan intones. “The CIA stays. The FBI stays.” And like Stone’s JFK, Landesman’s film ends with a claim that is the opposite of the truth: Mark Felt’s “legacy is incalculable as one of the most important whistleblowers in American history.”

Liam Neeson as Mark Felt and Julian Morris as Bob Woodward reenact the pair’s secret meetings in an Arlington, Virginia, parking garage. (Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics)

Mark Felt is chock full of lesser falsehoods, misrepresentations, and elisions of fact. Neeson’s Felt arrives at the scene of the Watergate break-in as his personal presence is urgently required by investigators; never happened. Landesman has Woodward telling Felt that his newsroom sobriquet is Deep Throat; pure invention. Landesman leaves out that Gray’s confirmation testimony before the Senate led to backslapping in the Post newsroom. The words of Nixon’s ostensible hatchet man justified the Post’s singular devotion to the story, and as the paper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, put it, single-handedly “rescued the free press.” Most egregiously, Landesman includes his phony scoop about Felt leaking to Bernstein, in what amounts to a transparent attempt to give Felt whistleblower cred. One salutary element is that Landesman rightly makes much more of Felt’s relationship with Time’s Sandy Smith, a reporter who had many Watergate scoops thanks to his long-standing ties to the FBI, than he does of the encounters with Woodward. Indeed, Woodward’s screen time is so meager it may come as a shock to Watergate buffs, given that Woodward invented Deep Throat.

Mark Felt is fated to be juxtaposed with All the President’s Men, and it will suffer by the comparison. Alan J. Pakula made exceptional use of Washington’s architecture and symbolism in his account of the Watergate investigation. Mark Felt was not filmed on location, and the absence of Washington’s monumentalism is telling. There is a mismatch between the weightiness of the subject and the locale, as if the war over the FBI succession and the Watergate scandal had both taken place in Sacramento. Watching Landesman’s rendering of the iconic garage rendezvous between Felt and Woodward, one yearns for a cameo by Robert Redford, perhaps as the attendant, or even better, Hal Holbrook as an anonymous patron departing in his car. Even a bow to the beloved but apocryphal “follow the money” line is missing, and there is nothing memorable to take its place.

That scene also serves as a pointed reminder of what All the President’s Men is and what Mark Felt isn’t. Every sentient American already knew how the story turned out in 1976 when Pakula’s film premiered. But All the President’s Men was a crackling, gripping movie. Mark Felt is a plodding, unsubtle melodrama, guilty of the only cardinal sin in Hollywood: tedium. It is beyond rescue, even by Liam Neeson’s pensive looks.

Max Holland’s Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat is available in paperback.