The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women's Press Club

Holland, Max. Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Throat. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 302 pp. $29.95. When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men was published in 1974, immense speculation immediately surrounded the identity of Deep Throat, the anonymous government official who had provided them with invaluable information and guidance for their Watergate stories. They steadfasdy refused to identify him and said they would only do so after he died. That all changed, however, in May 2005 when Mark Felt, a high-ranking FBI official when the Watergate break-in occurred, admitted in a Vanity Fair article that he had been their secret source. Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Throat is written by Max Holland, who is editor of the website Decoded, a contributing editor to the Wihon Quarterly and The Nation, and the author of a book about the aftermath of President John Kennedy's assassination. He became interested in the subject of his current book in 2007 when the Watergate-related papers of Woodward and Bernstein were sold to the University of Texas. As he says in his acknowledgements, I thought any newly opened papers were likely to contain at least a few new insights into an old crisis. As it turns out, this book has one major insight: the reason Felt leaked information to Woodward, frequently in underground garage meetings at night, as well as other journalists, most notably Sandy Smith of Time magazine. Before publication of Holland's book, three reasons were posited for Felt helping the press with the Watergate story: he wanted to expose the unlawful behavior of President Richard Nixon and those around him in the White House before the office of the presidency was irrevocably harmed; he wanted to protect the FBI from being manipulated and controlled by the White House; and he was bitter at the White House for naming L. Patrick Gray rather than him the interim director of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972. In addressing the why question in Felt's behavior, Holland did extensive research. This included sixty-six interviews, not only with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Howard Sussman of the Washington Post, but also with Nixon insiders such as Charles Colson and John Dean. He also examined twenty-nine oral histories, documents in three presidential libraries (Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan) as well as at the National Archives, and material that he obtained from the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act request. The end result is a highly entertaining, compelling treatise by Holland that Felt's leaks to the press were designed solely to make him the next full-time FBI director. …

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