This article first appeared in Vanity Fair, October 2005

WATERGATE’S LAST CHAPTER

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

For the two reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, Vanity Fair's May 31 declaration that Mark Felts was their "Deep Throat" source brought a day of confusion, soul-searching, and heated debate with the Washington Post top brass about conflicting loyalties. Confirm or keep silent? After contributing the afterword to Bob Woodward's just-published book on Felt, The Secret Man, CARL BERNSTEIN gives his account of those crucial discussions, the surprises the Watergate story still held for him three decades later, and whether his and Woodward's investigation would be possible today.

Deep Throat confirmed what the reporters' other sources had hinted The FBI's and the grand jury's investigations had been limited to the Watergate operation--and had ignored other espionage and sabotage....Deep Throat then issued an explicit warning. "They want to single out the Post. They want to go to court to get at your sources."
--All the President's Men

Len's not on board," Woodward said. It was one P.M., three hours after a Vanity Fair editor had called both of us to say the magazine would release a story that day ''definitively revealing the identity of Deep Throat. Mark Felt." ABC had cut away from live coverage of the president's press conference to report on the Vanity Fair account--and a statement I had issued that we would not disclose Deep Throat's identity until his death.

"You and I are going to have to do something," Woodward said. He was in Washington, at home. I was in New York, at home. "Len's all in orbit that the Post has to publish something. Bradlee wants to go on the record."

Len Downie was Ben Bradlee's successor as editor of The Washington Post. He was convinced that the Felt family, through its lawyer, had formally identified Mark Felt as Deep Throat with his consent--and that the Post had no choice but to confirm the accuracy of the Vanity Fair story. Bradlee agreed.

Woodward said he was trying to reach Don Graham, successor to his mother, the late Katharine Graham, as publisher of the Post, to get his reading.

In the end, it was like the beginning. Confusion. Then consultation. Then calm. Then the wait to see where the chips would fall. And, in the end, the editors probably had it right. Woodward and I went along with the greatest reluctance, with Bradlee casting the deciding vote.

During Watergate it was usually Woodward and I who agitated for publishing a story and Bradlee who held us back. Not this time.

For more than 30 years, Woodward and I, along with Bradlee, had kept secret the identity of Deep Throat. That was about to change. At five P.M., Woodward and I issued a statement:

"W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

"That's the last chapter, guys," Bradlee said later.

After reading the Vanity Fair article, Woodward and I reached the same conclusion: a lawyer had encouraged Mark Felt's family in their desire to see him recognized for his role in Watergate, and perhaps to make some money through subsequent book or film deals. It seemed understandable, perhaps even inevitable. We'd become famous, been honored, gotten rich because of Watergate. Mark Felt had not. He was a feeble old man, a pardoned felon, living at his daughter's house, in Santa Rosa, California, in a garage that had been turned into an apartment.

It seemed questionable from the article--or so Woodward and I both concluded in the absence of additional facts--whether the lawyer who wrote it, John O'Connor, knew with certainty that Felt was Deep Throat. Our reading of Vanity Fair's story left us dubious that a fully competent Mark Felt had ever unambiguously confirmed to either his family or the lawyer that he was.

Until the call came from Vanity Fair that morning, I had been fairly certain the secret would hold until Felt's death, and Woodward had, too. In our smugness about having kept Deep Throat's identity concealed for more than 30 years, we had forgotten an essential rule of journalism: reporters may believe they control the story, but the story always controls the reporters. Or should, as I noted in an afterword to Woodward's The Secret Man.

We still thought we could respond to Vanity Fair's account the same way we had to many other educated guesses and claims of certainty about Deep Throat's identity--some focusing on Felt, others on Nixon-administration officials from Henry Kissinger to Patrick Buchanan to Leonard Garment to William Rehnquist. We had always cited a deeply held conviction as to why we Wouldn't disclose the secret until the individual's death. The most basic of journalistic principles was involved: never betraying the identity of a confidential news source, even under threat of jail.

And that must continue to be our position, we decided, as media calls began overwhelming our phone lines and produced a frenzy at the Post.

Without confirmation from us, we still hoped, few reputable news organizations would accept this latest tale as definitive. Given the frequency of Deep Throat outings by others over the decades, if we held firm, this, too, would pass.

Though I am a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, I was totally unaware, as was Woodward, that the magazine had been working on its Deep Throat project for almost two years. There was only one direct quote from Felt in the eight-page article: "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." O'Connor acknowledged that Felt's memory had deteriorated, referring to "the decline of Felt's health and mental acuity."

Woodward phoned Bradlee. He, too, had been forwarded a copy of the story.

"They've got it!" he said, always the editor, and at 83 hardly a step off his game from his heyday in the newsroom. He still spent many of his weekends clearing brush from his country property on the Potomac in Maryland. He'd lost little of the trim or muscle--or the swagger. He was far more willing to recognize a scoop in this instance than either Woodward or I. The lawyer's and the family's wishes were more than sufficient, he insisted, to release us from our commitment to Felt. Bradlee was obviously excited--too excited, it seemed to Woodward and me--about the prospect of finally being able to tell the whole story.

One way or another, Felt had given his O.K., Bradlee seemed to be saying, a proposition that appeared quite unlikely to us, given our knowledge of Felt's health and Vanity Fair's rather qualified assertion.
Woodward leaned hard on his close friendship with Bradlee, applying uncharacteristic pressure on the bond forged in the experience of Watergate. The only honorable thing was to maintain silence, he argued over the phone. His unequivocal declaration and invocation of honor seemed to catch Bradlee by surprise.

Woodward then asked Bradlee to hold the phone a moment, and went to a file cabinet to retrieve a manuscript he'd written three years earlier about his relationship with Deep Throat. The manuscript had, in part, been Bradlee's idea. He'd suggested that Woodward get something down on paper, in preparation for the day when Deep Throat died--or in case something happened to Woodward first. Upon Deep Throat's death, a book could be issued telling the full story, and the Post could excerpt it--the same arrangement Bob had had with the paper for his books for more than 30 years, including the two we'd written together, All the President's Men and The Final Days.

From the manuscript notes, Woodward quoted back Bradlee's own words from three years earlier, when the editor had read the description of Felt's failing memory and had posed a hypothetical question: "Do you owe allegiance to a man who is no longer that man who you knew and gave your word to?" Now Woodward reminded Bradlee of the answer to his own question: "An unequivocal YES!" There was no way to establish Felt's real wishes, given his mental decline. It was clearly worse now than when Woodward had last visited him, in 2000. All of us had to hold fast. Articles, books, and every manner of speculation--even university studies--on this topic abounded. We'd seen it before. If we held the line, the Vanity Fair article would go on the shelf with all the other inconclusive Deep Throat hunts.

Very hesitantly--an unusual reaction from someone so certain in his decision-making-­Bradlee agreed to stay silent. "Well...yeah...O.K.," he finally said. Woodward recognized that this was against every instinct Bradlee possessed. But Downie, who had been executive editor for 14 years, would have a different view, warned his predecessor.

Len Downie, 63, had come to work at the paper around the same time as I, in the mid-1960s. Together with half a dozen other reporters in their 20s hired by Metro editor Steve Isaacs, we were known as "Isaacs' Boys"--and though fiercely competitive with one another, we were a tight group of colleagues. After Katharine and Don Graham chose Downie to succeed Bradlee, in 1990, Woodward and Downie established an easy working relationship; yet they could hardly be described as close friends: Woodward had great confidence in Downie as an editor, and believed, as I did, that he had steered the paper with unusual skill and an eye for excellence through a particularly difficult era in American journalism.

Downie was insistent that the paper be adequately prepared for the death of Deep Throat--whoever he was. During the past year, he'd pressed Woodward to tell him the name, arguing that the current editor should know the identity of our source. Woodward had resisted.

During Watergate and after, we had asked Felt to give us permission to disclose his secret. He had always refused. But given his importance to the Post's Watergate coverage, it was essential that his role be made known upon his death--in the interest of history and the proper evaluation of our own work. Felt had seemed to agree.

In February, I postponed a trip to Washington to read Woodward's manuscript after he had checked on Felt's condition with his daughter. Deep Throat, he said, was hardly on the verge of death, but, at 91, was in frail health and his memory was all but erased.

In March, Bradlee told Woodward that Downie was right: the time had come to tell the current Post editor who Deep Throat was; then appropriate plans could be made to cover Felt's death. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the paper, consented, uneasily. On March 3, 2005, Downie arrived at Woodward's house in Georgetown and began reading the manuscript. He was not surprised to learn that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. In November 2002, Downie had given Woodward a short, handwritten note in a sealed envelope. The note said that since the early stages of our Watergate reporting, in 1972, Felt had been at the top of his list of candidates. Woodward had not responded one way or another to Downie's informed and correct guess.

Downie was accustomed to editing Woodward. He had a number of suggestions for how to tell the story--in book form--that Woodward had drafted. Woodward told Downie that the book should come out several weeks after Felt's death, and that the Post could run a pre­publication excerpt and break the news at that time. In retrospect, it was a ridiculously haphazard plan, given the excitement that would inevitably and immediately follow Felt's death without a confirmation or denial from Woodward and myself. Too much speculation was already focused on Felt. Woodward argued that it was important to tell the whole story of the relationship, and that no book could be produced fast enough to immediately follow Felt's death. He feared that if the story of their relationship and our interaction with Felt appeared in fragments it could easily be misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Downie disagreed. He was adamant that the Post make the disclosure immediately after receiving news of Felt's death. First of all, it might leak, and he didn't want to get scooped. Second, now that he knew Deep Throat's identity for certain, he could not foresee allowing an obituary of Felt to appear in the Post that did not include this rather vital news. The Post, Woodward, Bradlee, myself--and now Downie--would be criticized severely if Felt's identity as Deep Throat was withheld for more than a few hours after he died. Among other considerations, it would appear that the delay was related to a commercial proposition-the marketing of a book--and Downie declared he would have no part in that. He would not hold news, "and this would be news," he said. Period. Frankly, he said, he could not comprehend how Woodward could consider any delay--nor, in such circumstances, could I.

"You have always said that the identity of Deep Throat would be disclosed upon his death," he said, implying strongly, and perhaps in this instance correctly, that Woodward was losing touch with the daily flow of news.

Downie decreed that when Felt died another reporter with no relationship to the Watergate coverage would do the story and Woodward could write a 5,000-word piece about his relationship with Felt--no more than 10 percent of the long version Downie had just read. It could then be published as a book on whatever timetable Woodward and his publisher desired.

Until Woodward and I received calls from Vanity Fair within 12 minutes of each other that Tuesday, I knew none of this recent back-and-forth history. I'd left the paper in 1977, but Woodward and I remained extraordinarily close. The proverbial tale of two guys who'd been in a foxhole together was part of it, but over the years there had been moments when we'd counseled each other on some big questions. There had also been arguments--during Watergate and after, some of them heated--but the bond always held strong. I was well aware that Woodward had seen Felt a few years before, and I got periodic reports of his communications with Felts daughter, Joan. They'd spoken a couple of times a year. He had had many good things to say about Joan Felt, and that would remain unchanged through the whole episode.

With the Vanity Fair article now released to the press, we had new imperatives. When Woodward reached Downie, who was at a corporate retreat in St. Michaels, Maryland, the editor was obviously eager for the Post to confirm the story immediately.

Woodward strongly disagreed. Had Downie read the Vanity Fair piece? No, he had not.

After Woodward told me of Downie's unrelenting position and the pressure from Bradlee--perhaps in abeyance for the moment--I insisted, "This changes nothing." Whose confirmation would the Post base a story on? Bradlee's? Downie's? Certainly not ours.

Woodward concurred. Could The Washington Post really permit a break with us over the most basic of journalistic principles? we reasoned. We'd deserve the opprobrium of our colleagues if we capitulated. The principle was especially important in the current atmosphere, with journalists in jeopardy as never before for protecting their sources of information. Seven reporters were already facing jail time or fines after being held in contempt of court for refusing to discuss their sources with federal grand juries or prosecutors. A larger, undetermined number had been subpoenaed in the previous six months. Defending the principle of keeping sources confidential, and upholding our responsibility to Felt, far outweighed any other obligation, even to the Post.

We agreed before we hung up that we'd do everything we could to convince Downie, Bradlee, and the Post not to confirm the Vanity Fair story. "I want to do this right," Woodward said. "I had no idea Vanity Fair was doing this. This definitely doesn't change the terms of the agreement."

But with the article coming as close as it had--actually just inside the bull's-eye--we both recognized that time was running out despite our desire to pretend that the shot was wide of its mark. At some point in the near future we'd have to confirm that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, if we could get definitively released from our commitment--either by a demonstrably competent Mark Felt or by an unequivocal statement from his family that he wanted his secret unsealed in his lifetime.

I told Woodward, "We can't be the assholes, out there on our own, denying what is readily apparent to everybody else." In our conviction to uphold one fundamental principle we risked violating another--loyalty to the larger truth—an offense that would damage the reputation of all involved: the Post, Felt, ourselves. Or perhaps we were coming to recognize the significance of an equally weighty factor: "There's a time to hold 'em and a time to fold 'em."

I left for the airport. I wanted to be at the Post for the decision-making. On the plane, I booted up my laptop and began typing:

For more than 30 years, we have kept secret the identity of the source known as Deep Throat in deference to the express wishes of that source--XX.

Through that period, he repeatedly expressed the desire that his identity not be disclosed by us until after his death.

However, through a combination of circumstances, it has become obvious that members of Mr. Felt's family--to whom he confirmed that he is Deep Throat--acting ostensibly on his behalf, wish at this time that his identity be revealed. Reluctantly, we affirm that Mr. Felt is Deep Throat.

I believe it was the first time in 33 years I had ever typed Mark Felt's name in the same sentence as the words "Deep Throat."

The moment the plane's wheels touched down in Washington, I called Woodward. He was sitting with Bradlee and Downie. They had been convincing, he said. Don Graham agreed with them: Joan Felt and John O'Connor were two people Woodward had stayed in contact with for several years on this. They hadn't drifted onto the scene accidentally and without our knowledge. They were Felt's caregiver daughter and the family lawyer. "Clearly, clearly," their actions had freed us from the confidentiality commitment, Downie argued. What more could we want?
Should we allow these family surrogates and Vanity Fair to make our decision? Woodward had asked.

"They already have," Downie said. "Bob, it's over."

O.K., Woodward finally conceded. But first he'd have to discuss it with me and make sure I agreed. Then he'd go along.

On the phone from the tarmac, I told Woodward the confirmation should come from us, not the Post, in our names. He agreed.

Perhaps a dozen photographers and cameramen were staked out in front of the Post building when I arrived, at about six P.M. Walter Pincus, at age 72 still one of the paper's premier reporters on intelligence matters, was exiting as I was going in. He and I had worked together at The Washington Star, where I'd been hired as a copyboy at age 16, in 1960, six years before I went to the Post.

Walter was one of Bradlee's great picks. I asked Walter if he thought we were doing the right thing. No question, he said. There was no choice, given the substance of Vanity Fair's report.

The newsroom--on the fifth floor, a vast space with color-coordinated desks set symmetrically on an acre of industrial carpet, with 400 people working at them with no partitions--was strangely silent when I got out of the elevator. Hardly anyone seemed to be talking, nor were people on the phones. Whether it was because of the approaching first-edition deadline or the strangeness of the moment, I couldn't tell. When I'd worked at the Post, the clatter of typewriters was incessant. Woodward and I (he was now walking across the room toward me with Downie a few steps behind) had typed all of our Watergate stories on six-ply paper. Now the only sounds were clicks, barely audible, from the keyboards of computers, and the subdued, whooshing white noise of their hard drives.

I'd been back to the newsroom perhaps a dozen times over the years, but this was definitely different--not least because Downie grabbed my bag to carry it into his office, which was furnished in a little more up-to-date style than during Bradlee's occupancy, but not much. Woodward and I gave each other a long hug, then exchanged looks of "Well, we fought the good fight." But the solemnity of our manner was obvious, as was the shared emotion of our strange, solitary experience together in a lifetime of journalism.

They brought me up to speed with a blow-by-blow of the morning and afternoon. The paper's photo editor and a photographer entered to record the moment, and then Bradlee strode in, deeply tanned, wearing a blue work shirt, elegant tie, and tweed jacket, exuberant.

"Well, how 'bout them apples?" is my memory of what he said. I may be wrong, though I'm sure that was the gist. And then a bear hug.

There was talk about wives. More pictures were taken. And then Bradlee addressed the real question. Not even a close call, he said. No way to go but to confirm it. We got beat on our own story. And we had gotten lucky--again. The denouement was good for the things we cared about the most: the profession, the principle, the paper, and what we'd tried to maintain together through these 33 years of silence. The secret had held for almost a generation and a half. Nobody had ever seen anything like it in this town, Bradlee said, and nobody ever would again.

I caught a glimpse of the clock just after seven P.M. and suggested we turn on the television in Woodward's office to watch the news. On the screen were pictures of all of us a lot younger--we were now 83, 62, and 61--and then Brian Williams, 46, the NBC Nightly News anchor, said something about the reaction. The next thing we witnessed struck the three of us dumb: interviews with G. Gordon Liddy, Charles Colson, and Patrick Buchanan, who chanted a mantra that would gain momentum over the next week, a new company line cast by die-hard Nixon loyalists who saw Felt's unmasking as yet another chance to rehabilitate their disgraced leader.

Liddy, the operational chief of Nixon's burglary squad and himself a onetime F.B.I. agent, was saying that if Mark Felt had been a stand-up F.B.I. man he'd have addressed his concerns not to The Washington Post but to the appropriate authorities.

"[Felt] was a very, very highly placed law-enforcement official, number two at the F.B.I." Liddy was sneering. "If such an official gains knowledge and evidence of a crime having been committed, what he is ethically bound to do is go to a grand jury and get an indictment, not selectively leak some information to one source."

Bradlee regarded Liddy's pate and shook his head. "Didn't he get out of the slammer not too long ago?" he noted.

Where would Felt have gone if not to the press? To the prosecutors who were being manipulated by John Dean? To the head of the F.B.I., who was burning evidence? To Nixon, who was orchestrating the cover-up?

Colson, who became a born-again Christian 11 months before his imprisonment for his role in Watergate, was now one of the most important evangelical voices in the country. He was not turning the other cheek. During the reporting of Watergate, I'd thought the most emblematic moment of all was when we learned that Nixon had repeatedly ordered Colson and others to arrange for the firebombing of the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington-presumably to be blown up by Liddy and the same squad of White House "Plumbers" who had broken into the Watergate.

About Mark Felt, Colson said, "He'll be always known, instead of being deputy director of the F.B.I. with the highest esteem of his colleagues and professional reputation, he'll be known as the--as Deep Throat. And I think it's a--it's a sad legacy, I believe."

Buchanan, who had been Nixon's speechwriter and opposition-research specialist and who recommended that the president burn his tapes on the White House lawn, asserted that Felt had acted from "malicious motives" because he had been passed over for F.B.I. director. "I don't think Deep Throat is a hero, I think Deep Throat is a snake." On the next night's broadcast Buchanan said, "He lied and lied and lied for years because he was ashamed of what he did. And what he did was help destroy an enormously popular president, and partly as a consequence of that, what 58,000 Americans died for in Vietnam was poured down a sewer."

Peggy Noonan, writing on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page on June 2, added a new count to the indictment: not only had Felt's actions figured large in the loss of the war in Vietnam, but he should also be held responsible for the genocide in Cambodia by Pol Pot, she implied. The former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, my close friend and childhood next-door neighbor (and like Buchanan a sometime candidate in the Deep Throat sweepstakes), had reached into the revisionist Indo-Chinese handbag, too, and written on the Web that Felt had interfered with the agenda of Nixon "the Peacemaker" and cleared the road for Pol Pot.

The unmasking of Deep Throat had touched a raw nerve in the post-millennial culture wars. "Watergate will never end," Buchanan promised. It now seemed possible that Nixon's abdication could be blamed by the take-no-prisoners New Right on Deep Throat--not on Nixon's crimes. The salvo from Liddy, Noonan, Stein, Buchanan, and others failed to take into account the most important fact about The Washington Post's reporting on Watergate: very little of the information Woodward and I reported had come originally from Deep Throat but rather from officials high and low in the White House and Nixon campaign, some of whom were to do the loudest braying over the next couple of weeks about Mark Felt.

Times had changed. Deep Throat's unveiling came at a new media moment, at the apogee of talk TV, which hews to a value system predicated on who can shout simplistic syllogisms the loudest and make the most outlandish ahistorical pronouncements. The new media model routinely accords equal time and weight to two opposing points of view without regard to whether one might be factually demonstrable and the other off the deep end. Thus, the day after Deep Throat's unmasking, Bernard Barker, one of the Watergate burglars, who'd gone to jail, weighed in. He could tell, he said, what kind of guy Deep Throat was because he had a weak chin.

Pol Pot? Deep Throat? Gordon Liddy on situational ethics? Again, the Nixon men had found a way to make someone else's conduct the issue in Watergate, instead of a criminal president's. In 1972 it had been our conduct at The Washington Post. Now it was Deep Throat's.

When I read Woodward's account of his relationship with Deep Throat, now The Secret Man, there was one big surprise to me: the degree to which Felt, even before we began work on the Watergate story, had confided the "switchblade mentality" that permeated the Nixon White House; Felt's beliefs about this were so intense that he had dared to compare the tactics of Nixon's men to those of the Nazis.

The summer of 1972 was the first time I'd heard about Woodward's secret source, whom he called "my friend" and who he said worked in the Justice Department, in a position that enabled him to see all the paperwork that reached the desk of the director of the F.B.I. Woodward said he was an old friend from his navy days--a clean-cut, newly minted G-man, I'd imagined. Later, when I told Woodward I needed to know the name of his source, he said it was Mark Felt. The name was less important to me than the fact that he was the number-two man in the bureau. It meant that our source could provide all-important context. Yet even then Woodward's contacts with Felt were few and far between, and their result was primarily to confirm information obtained from other sources.

Woodward did not convey Deep Throat's vehemence about the venality of the Nixon men to me until much later and certainly never in terms quite as emotional (as opposed to professional) as those quoted in The Secret Man. In the first week after the break-in, a former official in the Nixon high command (another individual mentioned later as a Deep Throat candidate) told me, "I know the president well enough to know if he needed something like this [the Watergate bugging] done it certainly wouldn't be a shoddy job.... There was always a great preoccupation at the White House with all this intelligence nonsense. Some of those people are dumb enough to think there would be something there...Mitchell wouldn't let go of a decision like that"--the hiring of the security director for the president's re-election committee.

As we slogged through our reporting and learned of one unthinkable crime after another undertaken by the president and his aides, as each new fact moved us toward Watergate's denouement, I was reluctant--and I thought Bob was, too--to believe the lengths to which Nixon and his men would go. As we wrote in All the President's Men, "This picture of the White House was in sharp contrast to the smooth, well-oiled machine Bernstein was accustomed to reading about in the newspapers."

When we learned in the fall of 1972 that John Mitchell, the president's former law partner, attorney general, and campaign manager, was one of the keepers of a secret fund used to pay the Watergate burglars and finance other intelligence-gathering activities, I turned to Bob and, almost as if struck by lightning, said, "Oh my God, this president is going to be impeached." It was only three months after the break-in at the Watergate, a year before an impeachment resolution would be introduced in Congress, but Woodward--to my surprise--concurred with my bolt from the blue. "Jesus, I think you're right," he said, and we vowed never to mention the notion in the newsroom, lest our editors or someone else think we had an agenda beyond reporting the story.

I did not realize at the time the extent to which Woodward had already been alerted by Deep Throat to the general aura of paranoia and criminality in the White House. My first awareness of Felt's intensity on the subject didn't come for another eight months, on the eve of the hearings of the Senate Watergate committee. Then Felt shook us to the core with his warning that "everyone's life is in danger" and outlined the breathtaking dimensions of Nixon's conspiracy.

Eventually I came to regard Mark Felt as the ultimate tormented man. Having recognized on his watch the existence of a rogue presidency, an extra-constitutional, criminal presidency unique in American history (though other presidents had gone off the legal tracks occasionally and run afoul of a particular aspect of the law), Felt had determined that the only repository for his knowledge was the single institution unquestionably beyond the corruptive reach of the criminal president himself: the press. Yet Felt had spent his professional life climbing the ladder in another rogue institution, J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. Indeed, after Felt had performed his singular act of serving justice and the country, he was ignominiously convicted in the same courthouse as the Watergate burglars of authorizing the most symbolic of Hoover-inspired crimes: breaking and entering, ostensibly in the name of national security. In this instance, it was breaking, into the homes of families of members of the Weather Underground. Felt's claim that he had been protecting national security rested on the very same weak subterranean fault line that Nixon had exploited in his attempt to entangle the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the conspiracy to cover up Watergate itself. As Bradlee said in an interview after the identification of Deep Throat, "It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth."

At Felt's trial, a small army of his fellow G-men had shown up at the courthouse to endorse the conduct he had authorized as one of Hoover's loyal, lawbreaking deputies: he'd been following orders; black-bag jobs were just another part of the Hoover M.O. He was merely carrying out "government" policy, their argument went, protecting the nation against radicals.

Until I read Woodward's manuscript, I had never thought to examine the extent to which the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover hung over Watergate. Not just Hoover's hostage-taking of presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy to Nixon through his obsessive amassing of files about their personal lives and (un)presidential acts, but also his slippery crimes against the Constitution. Hoover believed that wiretapping, break-ins, electronic surveillance, "evidence" planting, and other extra-legal methods were permissible against individuals, institutions, and even whole political and social movements--including the civil-rights movement--that he perceived to be enemies of the state or the F.B.I., or merely undesirable or inconvenient to the objective immediately at hand.

This became the Nixonian mentality, too. Hoover had pursued his own national agenda, while keeping tabs on the private doings of members of Congress and Cabinet secretaries for more than 40 years. Previous presidents had been unnerved by what they feared Hoover had in his files on them, and had been either too timid politically or fearful personally to get rid of him or even oppose him or his methods. Nixon was the first president to actually bring Hoover's methodology and value system of routine, self-sanctioned lawbreaking into the White House itself. The targets selected by Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt, Charles Colson, other aides--and Nixon--were the president's enemies, real and perceived: reporters, Democrats, Kennedys, think tanks, war protesters, liberals. Hoover had died only six weeks before the Watergate break-in. What might he have done later with his knowledge of those activities? He had been in a far more commanding position than Mark Felt.

"Well, I never knew if Nixon thought Hoover had something on him in all those files or not. It was always clear that Hoover would die with his boots on," said William Satire, the former Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist, in response to the revelation of Deep Throat's identity.

"Did Nixon misuse and abuse his power? Yes, he did," Patrick Buchanan had written on the 25th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, in 1997. "Instead of creating a 'Plumbers' unit in the White House to run down national security leaks, he should have left the black-bag jobs, as his predecessors did, to J. Edgar Hoover."

The burgeoning field of revisionist Nixonia--the presidential library in Yorba Linda is dedicated largely to the subject--holds that Richard Nixon was an honorable man, a great patriot who did some things wrong on his way to China, was sidetracked by Watergate in ending the war in Vietnam through some kind of "peace with honor," and was brought low by his enemies, especially those in the press and the Democratic Party.

There is no question on any side of the argument about the formidable power of Nixon's intellect, his unusually skillful writing (for a president), the acuity of his analysis of domestic politics (right up there with Bill Clinton's), his sophisticated knowledge of foreign affairs (as opposed to a successful foreign policy, with the exception of his opening of U.S.-China relations), his prescient wooing of disaffected white Democrats in the South and blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt, on which his party was able to build--as he had foreseen--the emerging Republican majority. It emerged.

But what of his pervasive criminality, the crimes against the Constitution, the specter of a president orchestrating a criminal conspiracy to pay hush money to burglars employed by the White House as an extension of presidential policy? Nixon's closest aides ran a massive political-espionage-and-sabotage campaign to undermine the very concept of free elections--to ensure that neither Edward Kennedy nor Edmund Muskie would be the 1972 nominee of the Democratic Party, and that George McGovern would be. Whether Nixon was responsible for bringing about the result he wanted--McGovern's nomination, which probably was inevitable--is not as important as the attempt to undermine the electoral process itself. Charles Colson and Howard Hunt were in the business of manufacturing smears and disseminating false information to the press, among other enterprises. The same Watergate burglary team-headed by Hunt and Liddy and presided over by John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic-policy adviser--also physically attacked antiwar demonstrators and broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press.

Instead of ending the long era of black-bag jobs, Nixon made them the business of the president of the United States and invoked the Vietnam War and his bogus claim of national-security concerns to justify his crimes. As Deep Throat told us, "The whole U.S. intelligence community"--C.I.A., F.B.I., military--had been used as instruments of Nixon's personal covert activities.

And when it was discovered that Nixon had tape-recorded virtually all of his utterances in meetings and on the telephone, the conversations that were then disclosed (and hundreds more that have continued to be disclosed) revealed a president who spewed venom and hate and demonstrated a shocking lack of faith in democratic principles, and--as Woodward has often noted--a discomfort and a disdain, really, for people. This is not the stuff of greatness.

"Nixon had epithets for whole sections of humanity," his first presidential counselor, Arthur Burns, whom Nixon later made chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, told me when Woodward and I were researching The Final Days. I had asked Burns about the anti-Semitic slurs known to so many members of his staff but not yet revealed publicly on his tapes.

Something had damaged Nixon's psyche, Burns was sure. Nixon had changed for the worse as he drew nearer to achieving his lifelong goal of election to the presidency, and when he finally reached the Oval Office, darkness prevailed.

And it was the tapes that were his ultimate undoing--not just during Watergate but also later in life and even after his death, as more tapes were unspooled and transcribed, revealing and betraying him, their index numbers a catalogue of his character.

It was Woodward who, years later, wrote compellingly about the tapes' most troubling aspect: virtually never is there talk about the lofty goals of a nation, of liberal democracy, of the grieving families of America's young men killed in Vietnam, of justice or compassion for the poor. There is some grand geopolitical strategizing, but mostly there is smallness and mean-spiritedness and terminal self-involvement: Nixon's destiny and the country's regarded as one and the same. The tapes also documented the remarkable extent to which the president was preoccupied with our reporting in The Washington Post and with our sources.

On October 10, 1972, we had written a 3,000-word story that may have been our most important: it finally made sense out of "Watergate"; instead of the inexplicable "third-rate burglary" described by White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, the break-in had been only part of a massive campaign of political espionage and sabotage directed from the White House. Nine days later, in a conversation with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, the president speculated about where The Washington Post was getting its information.

Haldeman reported that he had learned authoritatively from his own secret source-he didn't name him--that there was a leak in the F.B.I.

"Somebody next to Gray?" Nixon asked, referring to the acting F.B.I. director whom the president had chosen to succeed Hoover, L. Patrick Gray III.

"Mark Felt," said Haldeman.

"Now, why the hell would he do that?" the president asked.

"You can't say anything about this, because it will screw up our source and there's a real concern. Mitchell is the only one that knows this and he feels very strongly that we better not do anything because--"

The Oval Office tapes were running.

"Do anything? Never?" Nixon was incredulous.

"If we move on him" Haldeman cautioned, "he'll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that's to be known in the F.B.I. He has access to absolutely everything."

Haldeman had asked John Dean what could be done about Felt. "He says you can't prosecute him, that he hasn't committed a crime...Dean's concerned if you let him know now, he'll go out and go on network television."

"You know what I'd do with him, the bastard," said the president of the United States. "Well, that's all I want to hear about it."

Haldeman noted that Felt had wanted to succeed Hoover as F.B.I. director. "Is he Catholic?" Nixon inquired.

"No, sir. He's Jewish."

"Christ, put a Jew in there?" Nixon responded.

"Well, that could explain it, too," Haldeman said.

"What's the conveyor belt for Felt?" Nixon asked later.

"The Post," said Haldeman.

On the day John Mitchell was to testify before Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate committee, I took my seat at a green-baize-covered press table in anticipation. Before Ervin called the hearing to order, Mitchell's lawyer, William G. Hundley, an old acquaintance of mine, asked if I'd like to meet Mr. Mitchell.

I'd heard that Mitchell was an amiable man, with a sense of humor, and I said if Mr. Mitchell wouldn't be uncomfortable I'd be pleased to be introduced. I had talked to Mitchell on the telephone, famously, as it turned out, when Woodward and I had written the story of his control of the secret espionage slush fund.

I'd phoned him for a comment and read him the story. He'd thundered, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." Then he'd slammed down the phone after saying that as soon as the Watergate situation was over "we're going to do a story on all of you." I took him to mean me and Woodward.

Hundley led me to Mitchell, who shook my hand warmly. "John, I don't believe you've ever met Mr. Bernstein," he said.

"No," Mitchell replied, "but we talk on the phone."

In fact, Mitchell and other presidential deputies had attempted to put Katharine Graham and her newspaper through the wringer. Deep Throat had told us the White House intended to force us to reveal our sources through subpoenas and court action. The afternoon a subpoena server arrived at the Post to hand me legal papers commanding my appearance and delivery of my notes in a suit brought by the Nixon re-election committee, I was hustled out of the office by Bradlee and Howard Simons, the managing editor.

"Get out of the building. Go see a movie," Bradlee ordered. (I headed to a theater showing, actually, the film Deep Throat.) Bradlee had explained the strategy. Before I accepted the subpoena, later in the day, he wanted legal custody of my notes and Woodward's to pass formally to Katharine Graham. Woodward was out of town. I told Bradlee the location of the file cabinet where our notes were kept. The scene was described in All the President's Men.

"Of course, we're going to fight this one all the way up, and if the judge wants to send anyone to jail, he's going to have to send Mrs. Graham," Bradlee said. "And, my God, the lady says she'll go! Then the judge can have that on his conscience. Can't you see the pictures of her limousine pulling up at the Women's Detention Center and out gets our gal, going to jail to uphold the First Amendment? That's a picture that would run in every newspaper in the world. There might be a revolution."

"The main thing is the Post is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one," the president told John Dean on the Nixon tapes in September 1972. "They have a television station...And they're going to have to get it renewed...Well, the game has to be played awfully rough."

In addition to trying to discover our sources, the Nixon White House hoped to break the Post financially by seeking revocation of the company's television licenses by the Federal Communications Commission. The Post's TV stations were the profit center for the company, which had just gone public with its stock, The shares went on the market at the height of our Watergate coverage. The stock went south in a hurry.

The Nixon White House, with great success for a disturbingly long time, made the conduct of the press the issue in Watergate, instead of the conduct of the president and his men. Today, a whole political movement--often appearing utterly unconcerned with the truth, seeing an easy scapegoat in the press, angry at its perceived enemies, rapturous at its unprecedented power in all three branches of government--has had great success doing the same, as has the White House of another president.

John Mitchell's testimony to the Watergate committee focused on what he called "the White House horrors," which included burglaries ordered by the president, illegal wiretapping (of reporters, among others), political espionage and sabotage, use of the I.R.S. to punish Nixon's supposed enemies, and the smearing of the president's opponents through false news stories and planted evidence. Mitchell blamed the men closest to the president in the White House.

Whatever the differences in mentality between Richard Nixon, whose actions were overtly criminal, and the more affable George W. Bush, who has displayed a careful legal circuitousness three decades afterward, there is something profoundly dangerous and dismaying about the even greater success of the Bush administration (not to mention its allies) in again making the conduct of the press the issue--again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines, and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security. This president and the people around him have devised a basic strategy of disingenuous response and lethal attack to undermine truthful reporting. Oddly, special venom has been reserved for critics who have made sacrifices perhaps unimaginable to a president and vice president who were careful to safely avoid service in Vietnam. Among them: Senators John McCain and John Kerry, former senator Max Cleland, Cindy Sheehan, and army specialist Thomas Wilson, the young soldier who dared challenge Donald Rumsfeld about insufficiently armored vehicles in Iraq.

The Bush White House operates a media apparatus far more sophisticated in fighting and discrediting the press and political opponents than the little shop directed by Haldeman and Ehrlichman and Colson and Ziegler. (The reach of the White House's hirelings now extends even into the press itself, exemplified by the Bush administration's use of Armstrong Williams, a black conservative commentator, to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. He was paid $241,000 by the Department of Education through a P.R. firm. Another payment, by the Department of Health and Human Services, was made to conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher. Meanwhile, the Bush administration concocted a concept called "pre­packaged news releases": White House-produced "newsclips" designed to look like legitimate broadcast segments and run uncut and unedited on hundreds of pliable, ignorant, and/or unprincipled local television stations across the country, possibly in violation of laws prohibiting government agencies from disseminating domestic propaganda.)

The Bush White House (not altogether unlike its opponents, it should be noted in fairness) commands an ideological battlefield, with a vast number of troops strategically positioned in the K Street lobbying corridor and around the country, in outposts manned by the party faithful and professional P.R. firms, and--unlike its opponents--a whole army of conscripts from the religious right.

Like Nixon during the Vietnam era, George W. Bush and the people around him have often relied on outfight denial and adept manipulation of the media in response to uncomfortable truths. In more straightforward times and circumstances, and absent the trappings of the presidency (and vice-presidency) and the desire of citizens to believe their leaders in wartime, this mind-set would have been more obvious early on. The signposts were already evident, from pre-9/11 (non)preparedness to (nonexistent) W.M.D., to Saddam Hussein's (non)role in the attack on the World Trade Center, to MISSION (UN)ACCOMPLISHED, to the (in)visible coffins of America's dead warriors. Since then, the flashing red lights have been harder to ignore, from responsibility at the highest levels of the chain of command for policies leading to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, to the Karl Rove-Scooter Libby-Ari Fleischer-Scott McClellan convolutions around Joseph Wilson, his wife, Valerie Plame, and columnist Robert Novak.

The irony of the current, overdue disintegration of this presidency's immunity to the consequences of lying is that it arrived on the wings of the least weighty instance--relatively speaking--of White House mendacity: the attempt to avoid responsibility in the Wilson affair.

As in Watergate, the issue that has left the emperor's clothing hanging by a thread while indelibly staining the uniforms of the commander in chief's top aides is the outright denial for months of now established fact. After almost two years of their insistent running to the metaphorical high ground of "Nobody here was involved," it turns out some people around the Oval Office were aware and involved. In the Rove-Wilson cover-up, as in 1972, leveling in the first place would have caused far less damage than the eventual seepage of the truth.

Now, as in Watergate, the Bush presidency has created the unpredictable conditions (to quote Woodward's recent observation) of a "perfect storm." These conditions include nonpartisan recognition of institutional deceit from the top down, a special prosecutor beyond the control of the White House, and rising public indignation (even, ever so slowly, in the president's own party). Whipping the winds is a re-invigorated White House press corps that senses vindication after years of being lied to and played for fools.

As in the case of White House denials of involvement in the Watergate break-in, the initial uncovering of the Bush administration's untruths in the Wilson imbroglio is leading to the discovery of endemic denial of larger, more important truths.

The danger to the White House--any president's White House--of a nonpartisan special prosecutor in this atmosphere is the almost infinite investigatory latitude of his charter and a corresponding desire to deliver the goods. Nixon was not laid low by the bugging at the Watergate. It was the cover-up of the "White House horrors" that undid him.

Denials by the White House of potentially damaging assertions and accusations are very powerful and very effective--until the denials are demonstrated to be false. The problem for the Bush presidency is not that Karl Rove may have committed a crime (he probably didn't); it's that the White House did not tell the truth. The blanket denials of the president's top aides are now chewed full of holes. Worse, while repeating these denials, the White House and its allies sought (successfully for a very long time, as in Watergate) to attack the press when reporters refused to move on. Then, having been found out, the White House was confronted, almost hourly it seemed, by the video of NBC's David Gregory making hash of Scott McClellan and his refusal to discuss what the White House had been all too eager to discuss before it got caught lying. The example of Ron Ziegler rendering his previous denials "inoperative" is something not easily forgotten in Washington, especially in the press corps, even generations later.

The disingenuousness of this president, vice president, and their aides on their way to war--and through the post-invasion disasters--has inevitably invited parallels with the discredited words of Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry Kissinger in the Vietnam era.

Perhaps to a lesser extent than Nixon did, Bush also attempted to bend the Constitution on his watch. And when his methods and truthfulness were questioned, he responded with retribution and mendacity and all their Nixonian overtones.

"What did the president know and when did he know it?" the Republican senator Howard Baker asked momentously during the hearings of the Senate Watergate committee. In Nixon's case, it had been Republicans-particularly conservative Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater, House minority leader Bob Michel, Senate minority leader Hugh Scott, and G.O.P. members of the House Judiciary Committee--who decided that Nixon must be held responsible for high crimes and misdemeanors and was unfit for office. But long before Nixon's resignation, many loyal Republicans had put aside partisanship to inquire about the policies and activities of the Nixon White House and the president. Democrats had done the same during the Vietnam War, in response to Johnson and his secretary of defense, McNamara.

But among Republicans today, there seems to be scant interest in asking tough questions-or honoring the example of courageous leaders of Congress who, not long ago, stepped forward, setting principle before party, to hold presidents accountable for their actions--not with impeachment in mind but accountability to the Constitution and the truth.

It was Woodward who first used the phrase "the best obtainable version of the truth"--initially in All the President's Men, to describe the state of Deep Throat's knowledge about the Nixon White House, and then in defining what real reporting is, which he did almost as an aside in answer to a question asked us in 1978 at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. Like many phrases and ideas that originated with one of us and were appropriated by the other, I ran with this one and have kept running. "The best obtainable version of the truth" remains the essential goal of good reporting.

In 1992, on the 20th anniversary of Watergate, I attempted a kind of status report on the changing conditions of post-Watergate journalism with the unsubtle title of "The Idiot Culture." The piece, written for The New Republic, was, in retrospect, perhaps a bit pompous and presumptuous, but also anticipatory of the tawdry media culture that now surrounds us. "The lowest form of popular culture--lack of information, misinformation,, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives--has overrun real journalism," I wrote then.

In 2005 we live in a hothouse media atmosphere in which superheated controversy-over, say, Deep Throat's patriotism or Dan Rather's "mistake" or Newsweek's "mistake" relating to the treatment of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo (the latter two being real instances of journalistic lapses)—is used by the White House and its ideological allies to bury the larger issues the stories had attempted to address. The most significant "story" of the 2004 presidential election was the unstoppable (and largely untrue) Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack that (with considerable assistance from the candidate himself) helped sink the campaign of John Kerry.

Three days after we confirmed that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, I went into my little village on Long Island to buy the newspapers on Main Street and encountered Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter. "Good timing," she greeted me. "Maybe the Deep Throat story will help." It didn't.

A few weeks later, after the Supreme Court declined to hear her case, Miller was jailed for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury investigating whether White House aides had violated the law in identifying a C.I.A. undercover operative. The C.I.A. employee, Valerie Name, had reportedly been identified by Karl Rove, among others, because her husband--a former ambassador--had written a piece for the op-ed page of The New York Times casting doubt on the claims of President Bush that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Niger for his nuclear ambitions. (Meanwhile, columnist Robert Novak, instead of reporting the real story--that White House officials were trying desperately to discredit the writer of an op-ed piece critical of Bush's truthfulness and the administration's case for invading Iraq during the run-up to war--eagerly carried the White House water and smeared it into print.)

To be absolutely clear: there is no way our reporting on Watergate could have been done without the use of anonymous sources. In fact, in our first 100 stories, there is not a single named source who revealed anything of substance about the undercover activities of the Nixon White House. Only a few of those stories were based on information confirmed or provided by Deep Throat. And the few individuals in the Nixon administration who were quoted by name were almost always lying or misleading.

The basic process of reporting in Washington--good reporting and bad reporting--is dependent on the use of anonymous sources. Unfortunate, yes, but inevitable in a culture where even the most human of mistakes, missteps, or gaffes can cost someone his job, reelection, or stature. On July 17, 2005, less than two months after we confirmed Felt's identity as Deep Throat, Woodward and I appeared on Meet the Press. The special prosecutor in the so-called Karl Rove case, Woodward noted, had "discovered that there is an underground railroad of information in Washington. [In] my view...this investigation, though properly empowered, is an assault on that process that we have not just in Washington [but] in any other community in this country where we have a First Amendment, and he will wind up crippling that process by dragging reporters before the grand jury. And I wonder if he and the judge have really sat down and said, 'Now, what are we going to gain here versus what are we going to lose?' And the loss might be immense."

Does every source deserve a reporter's protection regardless of how unsavory or even criminal? Absolutely, as long as the source has kept his part of the bargain and dealt faithfully and honestly with the reporter. Even Karl Rove.

When the Nixon re-election committee sent its subpoena server to The Washington Post in 1972, Katharine Graham did the opposite of what Time editor in chief Norman Pearlstine did in 2005. She took formal control of our notes and unequivocally declared she would go to jail rather than give them up or reveal their contents--as would we. Pearlstine turned over the notes of Time reporter Matt Cooper, leaving Cooper to fend for himself before the special prosecutor and grand jury without the backing of his boss. Pearlstine's actions suggested that he had a responsibility to protect the profits and corporate interests of Time Warner first--and journalistic principle second. The Post's financial future was headed toward John Mitchell's wringer, but journalistic principle was Graham's bottom line.

When the Time Warner media conglomerate was subpoenaed in the Rove case, it was awaiting F.C.C. review of its joint acquisition (with Comcast) of a bankrupt cable-television company--a type of F.C.C. review similar to what The Washington Post was facing for its television licenses in 1972.

"Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?" David Halberstam asked rhetorically about Time Inc. in another era. In the Pearlstine era of Time Warner, the question has been answered definitively.

Most great reporting has been done by resourceful journalists relying on, and protecting, their anonymous sources, including Halberstam's reportage from Vietnam. When we published The Final Days, in 1976, we were attacked by many journalistic colleagues for using anonymous sources so extensively. They claimed we were practicing some kind of irresponsible "new journalism." How could we have possibly known that Nixon and Kissinger had really gotten on their knees and prayed together in the Oval Office? Perhaps we had made up the story, or heard something eighth-hand and used a ruse of anonymous sourcing to hide our carelessness or inventions. (Later, both Nixon and Kissinger confirmed our account in their own books.)

In response to the controversy over the use of anonymous sources in The Final Days, Woodward and I appeared on Meet the Press in May of 1976. I'd taken with me a journalism classic: a book by two preeminent journalists of another era--the columnist Joseph Alsop and The New York Times's Turner Catledge--about F.D.R.'s packing of the Supreme Court. It remains the definitive account. I began reading from it on the air. Its revelations were based almost entirely on anonymous sources.

Today, the press is under assault as never before, particularly for relying on anonymous sources. The Bush administration has opposed a federal shield law for reporters. Inevitably, there will come a time when those now doing the attacking--usually ideologues or unswerving partisans displeased by real reporting--will be the victims of injustice or a smear or some other offense, and wish for reporters committed to the truth and with the means (including the use of confidential sources) to find it. One hopes the credibility of the press will not be shredded by then.

The accident of myth figures huge in Watergate and the tale of Deep Throat: the myth that The Washington Post or the press in general dispatched Richard Nixon; the myth that other presidents had committed crimes on a Nixonian scale; the myth that Deep Throat was our primary source.

Read through The Secret Man or All the President's Men and note that Woodward and Felt communicated fewer than a dozen times in the two years of our Watergate coverage. There were no "leaks." Getting information from Felt, as from most sources, involved drawing out a reluctant witness. And most of what Felt imparted was context for and confirmation of information we'd already obtained elsewhere. Perhaps most important, he gave us a certitude about much of our reporting. He gave us--and our editors--confidence that what was going into the paper was factually unimpeachable.

It was the convergence of information from firsthand witnesses, at all levels of the Nixon White House and campaign, and Deep Throat that enabled us to penetrate the secrecy of the Nixon presidency.

There has been considerable criticism since Watergate that reporters are "too close" to their sources, especially in Washington, where the ostensibly comfortable dialogue between the feeder and the fed goes on. Woodward and I subscribed to this belief during Watergate, thinking at the time that the reason so many reporters in the Washington press corps, and especially our senior colleagues on the national staff at the Post, were skeptical of the facts we were reporting was this coziness of our elders with the people they covered.

Today, other more insidious habits may afflict the pack and contribute to the malaise of the press corps: the hazard of holding firm to a preconceived notion of a story, an unwillingness to think beyond the ordinary parameters of institutional precedent, oftentimes because reporters are not close enough to their sources, are not hanging out with them, listening to them, picking up clues, pestering them, finding the people who make institutions work--including those who handle the flow of paper and observe the bosses.

In the afterword to The Secret Man, I noted that we have maintained for decades that for a reporter most good work is done in the defiance of management. That means the reporter has to set his or her own course, to push against editors at times, to roam and be free to explore, to defy the conventional wisdom if necessary. And to find the sources to help him get to the bottom of things, and to protect those sources. At the same time, as Woodward and I had learned, reporters need good editors and courageous publishers and brave broadcast executives. In the end, this collaboration is what anchors the credibility of the press.

There is a tendency to regard the press as different from other institutions in American culture. More likely, we reflect the larger values of the society itself. When I began work in the newspaper business, mainstream journalistic culture was rooted in a concept of serving the public good by simply reporting "the best obtainable version of the truth." That ethic infused The Washington Star when I went to work there, as it did the Post, across town—however inferior a paper it was at the time.

It would remain so until Ben Bradlee came on board. Bradlee brought to the Post great journalistic values and a hunger for the big stories, obtained with care and in context.

Bradlee also brought a sweeping sense of his time, a willingness to listen to young reporters, and an esteem for the experience of older ones. At the Post, these two groups coexisted uneasily in a state of "creative tension," to use a phrase heard often in Bradlee's newsroom, but usually with regard and respect for each other.

Newspapers existed to make money for their publishers, no doubt, but at least at those two Washington papers--and The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and many smaller, independent hometown newspapers--it wasn't at the expense of serving the common good. The costly, difficult business of tough reporting was built into the budget and was sacrosanct.

Today, in too much of our journalism, the public good is no longer the bottom line. The bottom line has itself become the bottom line. Just glance at tabloid television, or formulaic local broadcast news ("If it bleeds it leads," as they say in the business), or stripped-down newspapers owned by chains headquartered in distant cities.

The most important decision a reporter or news organization makes is to determine what is news. "The best obtainable version of the truth" in today's media atmosphere is increasingly an anachronistic notion. Thus it seems more American reporters covered the Michael Jackson circus than the war in Iraq, and far more airtime on cable television was devoted to the Jackson trial than serious reporting on any subject. The highest-rated cable news show in recent months has been Fox's On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, boosted by her exploitative, wall-to-wall coverage--often on the scene in Aruba--of the disappearance of a teenage girl from Alabama.

The overwhelming trends in journalism since Watergate have favored the sensational, the coarse, the stupid, the strange, and—especially—manufactured and overamplified controversy and overheated debate, as on Crossfire and its mutant offspring. Yet, the best American newspapers, whatever their shortcomings--The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times among them--are more comprehensive than ever before. Much of their reporting is better. But they are the exceptions, as papers all over America have gone downmarket to stay in business or boost profits for the chains that run them. Reportorial budgets as a percentage of income at most papers are at an all-time low.

The big-three networks of the broadcast era--ABC, NBC, and CBS--are all owned today by mega-conglomerates, shorn of managements that once protected their news divisions from political intimidation, tabloid sensibility, and profit ratios as the measure of news values.

One of the determining moments of Watergate came in October 1972, when the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite devoted half of one night's broadcast (15 minutes) and 7 minutes of the next to the cumulative revelations that, until then, had been confined almost exclusively to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Time magazine. Until those two broadcasts, which reported heavily on what the Post in particular had been running in its pages, the White House had been unrelentingly effective in undermining the credibility of our stories and others. Only after Cronkite's special reports aired did the Watergate story become a matter of true national consequence. Charles Colson had personally tried to derail the two lengthy Evening News segments through pressure on CBS chairman William Paley. He was not successful, though Cronkite's second report was cut back from a planned 15 minutes to 7.

Compare the backbone of the CBS management--its commitment to real news values--of that era to today's corporate executives of the network who have made abundantly clear their fear of criticism by the Bush White House and efforts to tar the network with false claims of "liberal bias."

Meanwhile, at ABC, the managers of the Disney entertainment empire that owns the network were confident there would be no public outcry in 2001 if they dumped Ted Koppel and Nightline--the best news broadcast in television for more than two decades-for a late-night comic. Only because Koppel refused to capitulate and David Letterman publicly shamed Disney by supporting Koppel and refusing to negotiate with ABC for the time slot did Koppel remain on the air. And he has decided that, upon the expiration of his contract in December, he will leave the network where he has been a fixture for more than 30 years.

Worse than Watergate was the title of John Dean's 2004 book about the policies, prevarications, and personnel of the presidency of Bush the younger.

True? I would say, rather, apples and oranges: different time (Cold War/terrorism), different place (Vietnam/Iraq), different political culture (still reasonable/blindly ideological), different media configuration (independent newspapers and rational columnists dominant/conglomerates and cacophony dominant--i.e., Internet-and-talk-TV immediacy, ignorance, ideology, and, sometimes, long-overdue inquiry).

It is impossible to separate the media today from the larger ethos of contemporary culture. This is particularly true when a dozen or so huge corporations own most of the media and entertainment outlets in the world--and encourage the often opposing values of journalism and entertainment to mingle. Similarly, it is impossible to separate the media from a political culture in which truth holds less and less value, especially for elected officials whose bottom fine often has little to do with the public good and more to do with winning or ideology or raising money for re-election.

The press operates in a take-no-prisoners political environment in which members of Congress expend far more time and intellectual energy in their battles against partisan or ideological enemies than, say, against terrorism. In these battles, the press has become fodder for both sides of the culture wars: expendable, an object to be corrupted, itself compliantly susceptible by ignoring its commitment to the public good. First-rate reporting is monetarily costly, and in today's atmosphere too often an outdated concept. Meanwhile, a new element in the mainstream media has taken root: ideology as the underpinning for a whole news network (Fox) and a separate industry (talk radio), both of which propagate a myth of pervasive "liberal bias" in the traditional mainstream press, presumably meaning The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, and the other broadcast networks.

Columnist Richard Reeves, a former New York Times political reporter who has written important histories of the Nixon and Kennedy presidencies, was one of the participants in February 2005 at a University of Texas symposium on the press and the Nixon White House, in conjunction with the opening of the Watergate papers of Woodward and myself.

"Whatever the...papers show...a critical part of the story is nowhere in the boxes opened here," Reeves wrote in a subsequent column.

"It was about the willingness of The Washington Post (and later other outlets) to continue publishing less-than-sensational stories attacking or chipping away at the power of government-week after week, month after month. That was done even as the government denied it all and threatened the owners of the Post with the loss of things like the Federal Communications Commission licenses of Post-owned television stations.

"...Above and behind the often confused and sometimes inaccurate young men [that would be us, correctly described] were the publisher of the Post, Katharine Graham, and her editor, Ben Bradlee, who hung tough when it counted."

Reeves then asked, "Would that happen today?"

My answer would be yes. The reporters would get the information; the Post or half a dozen other big-name journalistic entities would publish it, day after day. Would such reporting originate in a paper or magazine or network owned by one of the media conglomerates? I doubt it.

Assuming that the information was published, would it spur the political, judicial, and legislative processes to action, as the Watergate stories did? And the citizenry itself? I doubt it.

But those are not the concerns of the journalist: the story is.