Duh.
Anyone with three working brain cells deduced that Felt’s motivation for singing to Woodward was that he was mad about Nixon standing him up when he thought he was the obvious replacement for Hoover as FBI Director, the moment that Felt outed himself and Woodward confirmed a few years ago. It’s one of the seven deadlies, plain as day even to morons.
Where this goes wrong:
It wasn’t until 2005, when nearly every senior official of the Nixon White House was dead and Deep Throat himself was disappearing into the mists of Alzheimer’s disease, that the reporters revealed that he was Felt. Even then, Woodward insisted Felt’s motives were pure, that he was a freedom fighter in “a war — organized, well-practiced and well-funded by President Richard Nixon — a war aimed at the system of justice. Mark’s great decision in all this was his refusal to be silenced. He was a truth-teller.”
As I recall, Felt outed himself. If the reporters did the work, it’s probably because Felt gave them the go-ahead. And I don’t think the timing as magnanimous and altruistic, waiting for “everyone else” to kick off — I think Felt was waiting for the statue of limitations to run out, because he knew he was illegally leaking material that was gathered as part of a confidential FBI investigation.
For a long time, a lot of people fingered PJB as Deep Throat. The only problem with that theory is that PJB’s Achilles Heel through most of his professional life was his insane and blind loyalty to the political party that did everything it could to toss him out on bum and baggage. Remember, PJB is a D.C. native, but his first journalism job was with the Globe here in STL, not with any D.C. paper, especially not the Post. I can ill imagine that PJB, loyal to the Republican Party to a fault, wouldn’t want to turn against his party on behalf of people working for a paper that wouldn’t have considered hiring him out of J-school, such that he had to move away from his native city where he had spent his whole life, and a third of the way across the country.
