The FBI Informant

...The grand jury that spooked Dean and Jeb Magruder into plea bargains, used their testimony to indict Nixon's top aides, and subpoenaed his incriminating tapes, was given new life in March 1973 not because of anything the Post reported, but because of the letter that Watergate burglar James McCord sent to Judge John J. Sirica that month, confessing that higherups were involved in the break-in, and that pressure had been placed on the original defendants to remain silent...

...Bradlee's frequent claim that "everything he told us was true," as he declared in an online chat this summer, is now flatly contradicted by Woodward's own (belated) acknowledgment in The Secret Man: "Decades later, reviewing everything Felt said to me, it is apparent he was wrong on a number of things...

...dishonesty, as required, to keep Felt's identity secret...

...These include the small matters of how Felt was able to observe the younger man's balcony every day...

...I never found out how Felt had learned this significant detail," Woodward shrugs, before moving on...

...Post itself—in Nixon's downfall...

...CNN's Paula Zahn touted "a top FBI man that brought down a president...

...James McCord should have sued for libel...

...overweening ambition...

...For that matter, nowhere in those two books, or in The Secret Man (for which Bernstein contributes a wistful, unquestioning coda, described on the cover as a "reporter's assessment"), will be found even a game attempt to explain why Oliver's telephone was tapped...

...attorney at the time of his investigation, not U.S...

...It was, then, a combination of disinformation and its essential accomplice, ignorance, that produced all the breathless hype that accompanied Vanity Fair's disclosure of Felt's identity in May...

...and what role in these intrigues (if any) was played by the Central Intelligence Agency...

...Woodward's newfound penchant for self-examination might have gone further...

...and convey information about erasures on Nixon's tapes that was unknown even to the FBI from which Felt had, in any case, already retired...

...shame" over his impositions on Felt and occasional violations of their deal...

...At bottom appears an iconic image of America's 37th president, driven from office by the Watergate scandal, his arms outstretched in the defiant victory wave he gave before boarding the helicopter that spirited him to exile...

...Not that Woodward didn't try...

...Most questionable is Woodward's assertion that history's "autopsy" on Watergate "seems nearly complete...

...Chief among this book's flaws is factual sloppiness that cannot be blamed on an ill-informed, or amnesiac, Felt...

...Absent from All the President's Men and The Final Days, the immovable corpus of the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate text, is any mention of Spencer Oliver, the Democratic National Committee official whose telephone was the only instrument successfully monitored during the three-week lifespan of the surveillance operation McCord and company conducted...

...Among those who long ago deflated the myth that Benjamin Bradlee's boys unraveled the Watergate cover-up was the plot's admitted ringleader, John Dean, who wrote in 1975 that if he "had had to contend only with the Washington Post, the Watergate cover-up would probably have succeeded...

...Repeatedly, Woodward misidenti-fies the original Watergate prosecutor, Earl Silbert...

...Part of John Mitchell's conviction in the Watergate cover-up trial in 1975 was based on his lying to FBI agents," Woodward also writes...

...Here, for the first time, is Woodward conceding some shortcomings, then and now: immaturity...

...attorney...

...In the days before the McCord letter, Woodward had ruefully concluded "there was going to be no additional disclosure" in the case, as he admitted to CBS News in May 1973...

...who ordered the operation, and why...

...The book's ugliest section recounts his dogged attempt to tape the elderly Felt discussing Watergate, despite the old man's painfully obvious amnesia...

...but Bradlee need only reread All the President's Men to see how fertile the ground would be for an ambitious grad student unafraid to challenge convention (and induce cardiac arrest in his professors...

...The jacket copy identifies this lower photograph as "Former President Richard M. Nixon after resigning office on August 9, 1974...

...v. Mitchell trial transcript, Woodward would have known that this charge against Mitchell was thrown out by Judge Sirica, and that prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, in a futile attempt to make the charge stick, proposed the compulsion of testimony by Woodward and Bernstein...

...On Good Morning America, ABC's Charlie Gibson crowned Felt "the secret source who brought down a president...

...Such assertions are specious...

...scribble on his home-delivered copy of the New York Times...

...To recount all the matters on which Deep Throat and the Post proved inaccurate during Watergate would exhaust available space here...

...Had Nixon's men found a way to funnel $1 million in untraceable cash to the original break-in defendants, an option that remained open for nine months, Nixon would have served as president until January 1977, when his second term expired, and several momentous events and trends in modern American history—the fall of Saigon, for example, or the intelligence community's emasculation in the period between Watergate and 9/11—would likely have unfolded rather differently...

...He was assistant U.S...

...Had he bothered to review the U.S...

...and an odd inability to unravel certain aspects of their dealings, cavalierly dismissed here as "technical, wiring-diagram issues...

...his resignation did not take effect until Air Force One was aloft...

...and Anderson Cooper displayed a tad more judiciousness, noting that Felt "helped topple a president...

...Why, then, should anyone bother to read an entire book about an individual who was immaterial to the arc and resolution of Watergate, who was often grossly uninformed about it, and who—far from having "remained silent" all these years, as was routinely stated in recent days—repeatedly lied about his role, both in interviews and his own memoir, even in grand jury proceedings...

...For the back cover of this slender, charitably padded volume conveys virtually everything you need to know about both the author's familiar take on events and his surprising disregard for the facts...

...At top, sporting his Charley Pride hair and Elton John eyeglasses, appears W. Mark Felt, the former number-two man in the FBI, now unmasked as "Deep Throat," the mysterious source for Woodward's Watergate-era reporting...

...More to the point, the juxtaposition of Felt's photograph with one of Nixon leaving office is meant to assert some causal connection between the two, to reaffirm the centrality of Felt, Woodward, and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein—and the Washington James Rosen, a Fox News Washington correspondent, is author of the forthcoming The Strong Man: John Mitchell, Nixon, and Watergate...

...Dean elaborated in 1982: I can say without equivocation that not one story written by Woodward and Bernstein for the Washington Post, from the time of the arrest[s] on June 17, 1972 until the election in November 1972, gave anyone in the Nixon White House or the reelection committee the slightest concern that "Woodstein" was on to the real story of Watergate...

...These are the central, unresolved mysteries of Watergate, not the rigged parlor game of Deep Throat's identity, so relentlessly pushed to the forefront of discussion every few years by people who have always known better, and always profited handsomely...

...Not only were the Washington Post and Deep Throat largely extraneous to the outcome of Watergate, the celebrated source was often wrong—wildly wrong—in the "information" he supplied Woodward...

...to handle the same problem one imagines latter-day White Houses taking no more than 20 minutes, inquiring only about the denominations required...

...The answer is that The Secret Man tells readers much more about Bob Woodward than about Mark Felt, whose motivations and inner psyche were rendered unknowable by a recent stroke, even to the reporter he made famous...

...BY JAMES ROSEN Children learn early never to judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Bob Woodward's latest, the practice would hardly lead one astray...

...That the president and his men could not manage so trivial a feat seems almost quaint today, and perhaps more than anything else justified their removal from power...

...In fact, when Nixon bounded the steps of Marine One that day, he was still president...