US: An accidental meeting in 1971 with a formal FBI official man in a White House waiting area was the beginning of more than just a long friendship, writes Bob Woodward.
In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the US Navy and assigned to Adm Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.
One evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly-combed gray hair came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older and was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very distinguished looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed instantly.
I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully. There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said, carefully appending a deferential "Sir".
"Mark Felt," he said.
I began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy and I was bringing documents from Admiral Moorer's office. Felt was in no hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.
This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale where I had a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship that required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year because of the Vietnam War.
During that year in Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger, and I made an effort to develop a friendship with him. To quell my angst and sense of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington University (GW). One course was in Shakespeare and another in international relations.
When I mentioned the graduate work to Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school at GW in the 1930s before joining - and this is the first time he mentioned it - the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked full time for a senator - his home-state senator from Idaho. I said that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican, from Wheaton, Ill., where I had been raised.
So we had two connections - graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.
Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J. Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and carrying out Hoover's orders. I later learned this was called the "goon squad".
Here was someone at the centre of the secret world I was only glimpsing in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter - one of the most important in my life - I see that my patter probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn't saying much about himself, I turned it into a career-counselling session.
I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most ways a product of Hoover's FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number and he gave me the direct line to his office.
I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in depth about my future, which now loomed more ominously as the date of my discharge from the Navy approached. At some point I called him, first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little desperate, and I'm sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to several law schools for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could really stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.
Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He said that after he had his law degree, his first job had been with the Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine if toilet paper with the Red Cross brand name was at an unfair competitive advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy - slow and leaden - and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be saying, but don't get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet paper investigation.
In August 1970 I was formally discharged from the Navy. I had subscribed to the Washington Post, which I knew was led by a colourful, hard-charging editor named Ben Bradlee. There was a toughness and edge to the news coverage that I liked; it seemed to fit the times, to fit with a general sense of where the world was, much more than law school. Maybe reporting was something I could do.
During my scramble and search for a future, I had sent a letter to the Post asking for a job as a reporter. Somehow - I don't remember exactly how - Harry Rosenfeld, the Post's metropolitan editor, agreed to see me. He stared at me through his glasses in some bewilderment. Why, he wondered, would I want to be a reporter? I had zero - zero! - experience. Why, he said, would the Washington Post want to hire someone with no experience? But this is just crazy enough, Rosenfeld finally said, that we ought to try it. We'll give you a two-week tryout.
After two weeks, I had written perhaps a dozen stories or fragments of stories. None had been published or come close to being published. None had even been edited.
See, you don't know how to do this, Rosenfeld said, bringing my tryout to a merciful close. But I left the newsroom more enthralled than ever. Though I had failed the tryout - it was a spectacular crash - I realised I had found something that I loved. The sense of immediacy in the newspaper was overwhelming to me and I took a job at the Montgomery Sentinel, where Rosenfeld said I could learn how to be a reporter.
I told my father that law school was off and that I was taking a job, at about $115 a week, as a reporter at a weekly newspaper. "You're crazy," my father said.
I also called Mark Felt, who, in a gentler way, indicated that he, too, thought this was crazy. He said he thought newspapers were too shallow and too quick on the draw. Newspapers didn't do in-depth work and rarely got to the bottom of events.
Well, I said, I was elated. Maybe he could help me with stories. He didn't answer, I recall.
During the year I spent on the Sentinel, I kept in touch with Felt through phone calls to his office or home. We were becoming friends of a sort. He was the mentor, keeping me from toilet-paper investigations, and I kept asking for advice. One weekend I drove out to his home in Virginia and met his wife, Audrey.
Somewhat to my astonishment Felt was an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover. He appreciated his orderliness and the way he ran the bureau with rigid procedures, and an iron fist. Felt said he appreciated that Hoover arrived at the office at 6:30 each morning and everyone knew what was expected. The Nixon White House was another matter, Felt said. The political pressures were immense, he said, without being specific. I believe he called it "corrupt" and sinister. Hoover, Felt and the old guard were the wall that protected the FBI, he said.
In his own memoir, The FBI Pyramid From the Inside, which received almost no attention when it was published in 1979, five years after President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, Felt angrily referred to a "White House-Justice Department cabal".
At the time, pre-Watergate, there was little or no public knowledge of the vast pushing, shoving and outright acrimony between the Nixon White House and Hoover's FBI. The Watergate investigations later revealed that in 1970, a young White House aide named Tom Charles Huston had come up with a plan to authorise the CIA, FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of "domestic security threats", authorise illegal opening of mail and lift the restrictions on surreptitious entries or break-ins to gather intelligence.
There is little doubt Felt thought the Nixon team were nazis. During this period, he had to stop efforts by others in the bureau to "identify every member of every hippie commune" in the Los Angles area, for example, or to open a file on every member of the Students for a Democratic Society.
None of this surfaced directly in our discussions, but clearly he was a man under pressure and the threat to the integrity and independence of the bureau was real and seemed uppermost in his mind.
On July 1st, 1971 - about a year before Hoover's death and the Watergate break-in - Hoover promoted Felt to be the No. 3 official in the FBI. Though Hoover's sidekick, Clyde Tolson, was technically the No. 2 official, Tolson was also ill and did not come to work many days, meaning he had no operational control of the bureau. Thus, my friend became the day-to-day manager of all FBI matters as long as he kept Hoover and Tolson informed or sought Hoover's approval on policy matters.
In August, a year after my failed tryout, Rosenfeld decided to hire me. I started at the Post the next month.
Though I was busy in my new job, I kept Felt on my call list and checked in with him. He was relatively free with me but insisted that he, the FBI and the Justice Department be kept out of anything I might use indirectly or pass onto others. He was stern and strict about those rules with a booming, insistent voice. I promised, and he said that it was essential that I be careful. The only way to ensure that was to tell no one that we knew each other or talked or that I knew someone in the FBI or Justice Department. No one.