Woodward and Bernstein on Imus

DON IMUS:  Please welcome to the IMUS IN THE MORNING program from “The Washington Post,” Bob Woodward. 

Good morning, Mr. Woodward. 

BOB WOODWARD,  “WASHINGTON POST”:  Good morning.  How are you?

IMUS:  I’m fine, Bob.  How are you?     

WOODWARD:  Real well. 

IMUS:  Did you have any idea that Mark Felt was going to reveal his identity before he did?

WOODWARD:  You know, I had talked to him, and we were trying to get him to do it for decades, and he never would.  It looked like the story was not going to be told until he was deceased.  But he, his lawyer and family preempted us.  Scooped us. 

IMUS:  When you say “we were trying to get him to,” you mean you and the family were trying to?

WOODWARD:  No, I was.  I’d been out there and I’d been in telephone conversation with him, because I think this is an important piece of the Watergate puzzle and wanted to fill it in if he could-if he would do it voluntarily. 

IMUS:  Did he ever tell you why he wouldn’t?

WOODWARD:  Yes.  He was-this is a man who was in turmoil, not sure whether he did the right thing or the wrong thing.  And, you know, saw the cover-up, the Watergate cover-up, and chose the route to talk to me, but was so clandestine about the whole relationship to the point of paranoia. 

IMUS:  When did you first try to persuade him to reveal himself?

WOODWARD:  When Carl Bernstein and I wrote “All the President’s Men.”

IMUS:  Oh, that early?

WOODWARD:  Because we thought if we could say who this was, and I, you know, very interesting conversations in that period. 

IMUS:  There’s a certain sadness about the way this has emerged.  I mean, the fact that he’s 91.  He appears not to-he appears to have been coerced-coerced into doing this.  Is that the feeling you got?

WOODWARD:  No, I don’t.  I know his daughter, Joan Felt, and she’s looking out for his interests.  Obviously, he is a man who has dementia, seriously, at that age.  Joan always was looking out for him, and you see that one picture of him waving and happy, and I think it’s a burden lifted from him.  At the same time, his consciousness of, you know, what his role was in my-I mean, has really declined. 

IMUS:  There’s a snippy little article in “The New York Times” this morning suggesting that this is all about the money with the family. 

WOODWARD:  You know, I don’t know.  I had many conversations with Joan Felt.  She always was saying-I would never tell her that her father had been Deep Throat.  I did tell her that he had helped me at one point, and that’s why I was concerned about him and wanted to talk to him. 

But, you know, when we get to be 91, let’s all hope we have a son or a daughter who will take care of us the way she’s taking care of him. 

IMUS:  Well, I think she did say, or somebody said in one of the press conferences they had, that they hoped to make some money with this and to pay some bills and that sort of thing. 

WOODWARD:  Yes.  I think that’s in the background.  But I don’t think it’s the driving force, based on what I know of her. 

IMUS:  According to, again, Todd Purdum in “The New York Times” this morning, the family or Mr. Felt or somebody involved in it, or the-the lawyer who wrote the piece in “Vanity Fair,” that someone tried to make a collaborative deal with you.  And that that fell through.

WOODWARD:  No, I mean, they-they made some suggestions of that over the years, and my judgment was, in talking to him, to Mark Felt, that he-he wasn’t competent at that point. 

And we had-I had my lawyer, Bob Barnett, without knowing the identity of the source, deal with the issue of when does somebody do something really voluntarily, and Bob came up with some criteria which were the right ones, but certainly Mark Felt did not meet those criteria. 

IMUS:  Well, they’re suggesting this morning-we’re talking with Bob Woodward, by the way, from “The Washington Post” here on the IMUS IN THE MORNING program. 

But the suggestion is that they tried to make a book deal, that they tried to, in fact, sell it to “Vanity Fair” and other publications before settling on the publication “Vanity Fair,” which apparently the writers paid around 10 grand for. 

WOODWARD:  I don’t know.  I mean, the important issue here is that now we know who this person was, and I’ve always said over the years, once he’s identified, and then you go back and look at it, it’s obvious who it was.  You know, we worked very hard for over 30 years to protect him, because that was the deal. 

IMUS:  Did anyone other than you and Carl and Ben Bradlee know who Deep Throat was?

WOODWARD:  My wife, Elsa Walsh.  Sometimes you have to tell your wives these things. 

IMUS:  Well, I saw Carl in some interview saying that-maybe the both of you, that the smart thing you’ve done is not to tell your first wives. 

WOODWARD:  Yes, you’ve got that. 

IMUS:  There was a report that Carl’s son, who was 8 years old, was at a camp in, I believe someplace in the Hamptons, and told a friend of his, another 8-year-old, that it, in fact, was Mark Felt, and that this 8-year-old, a couple of-some years later, when he was either in high school or college, wrote a paper about it. 

WOODWARD:  Yes. 

IMUS:  Do you know if that’s true?  How would Carl Bernstein’s kid know this?

WOODWARD:  Well, he didn’t know.  You know, I think his wife at the time, Nora Ephron, that was her guess.  But it was not knowledge.  I mean, a lot of people had suggested this was who it was. 

And again, if you look at the stories Carl and I did and the coverage, and the people have asked the question, well, how did two young reporters on the metro staff convince Ben Bradlee to really jeopardize “The Post,” not only journalistically but economically.  And Ben knew we had a high level source in the FBI, and that was great comfort to him. 

IMUS:  I’m going to ask you some questions now that are-that are contained in your piece in “The Washington Post” this morning, because I’m just assuming that everybody who listens to the program probably doesn’t get a copy “The Washington Post,” including me out here in the middle of New Mexico.  How did you meet Felt?

WOODWARD:  In the White House.  When I was in the Navy, I did some courier work for the chief of naval operations.  And I went over there one day, bringing documents.  I don’t know what they were.  They were all sealed up. 

And I had to wait, and this guy came in and sat down, and he had to wait, too.  I think there was lots of waiting that goes on in the White House.  We were kind of like two passengers on a long airline flight who don’t know each other, so we started talking.  And that’s how I met him. 

IMUS:  And at that time, well, you said you were in the Navy.  So when did he first-he gave you-he provided you with information before the Watergate break-in, right?

WOODWARD:  Yes, he did.  The first thing that I used as a reporter or tried to use was information that Spiro Agnew, then vice president, had taken some money.  And a reporter and I went looking at it, and Richard Cohen of “The Washington Post,” who was then the top Maryland reporter, thought it was preposterous, but we checked, and couldn’t get anywhere.  And then, of course, we now know Agnew took these kind of bribes. 

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