Woodward as Bad as Nixon
So "The Secret Man" has been revealed, but I am not wasting $23.00 (or $15.64) on Woodwards book that he had so long to write. A mere 249 pages, I was surprised in person when the book itself was so tiny, and the print so large. Now, after catching up on my Bloggermann, I realized that 'Deep Throat' was a bigger cover up then Watergate.
It seems that Woodward became the thing he most hated.
There is also insight to the parallel irony of Woodward’s end of the Hunt For Throat — that Woodward, who made his bones unraveling a cover-up, later has to protect both himself and his source with a stonewall that would’ve made Richard Nixon applaud. In the early ’80s, Woodward writes (p 149-151) that when he was metropolitan editor for the Post, one of his columnists, Richard Cohen, came to him and revealed he was convinced Felt was Deep Throat, and intended to write about it. Woodward says he first “discouraged” Cohen, then said he had to protect his source, then “misled him,” then tried his best to “steer him away.”
Finally, when Cohen insists that the initials Woodward used internally at the paper to identify Throat (M.F. - for ‘My Friend’) and Mark Felt’s initials were no coincidence, Woodward throws the niceties overboard. “It’s not him, I said, adopting the well-tested Watergate strategy that when all else fails, lie. I lied, and insisted to Cohen that he had it wrong… A real, safe truth between friends, I indicated, suggesting that I was helping him from writing something monumentally stupid. Cohen didn’t do the column. I felt bad, but it had been an easy decision.”
It seems that Woodward became the thing he most hated.
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