Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Holland (The Kennedy Assassination Tapes) digs in to another great American mystery: the true character of Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, primum mobile of the Watergate scandal's spread to national consciousness and the 20th century's most fabled whistleblower. Holland maintains that Felt was motivated primarily by "self-interest, rather than a principle." The then second-in-charge of the FBI was seeking to discredit his boss L. Patrick Gray III, a perceived "crony" of Nixon, whose appointment from outside the bureau following the death of J. Edgar Hoover was cause for discord within-especially for Felt, the heir apparent. As opposed to the transgression itself, the public trauma known as Watergate seeped from insidious rivalries in and around the house that Hoover built. These were the same men who had been involved in COINTELPRO, then the most unrestrained invasion of domestic privacy to date; what the Nixon administration was guilty of could hardly be cause for moral outrage on their part. Holland's storytelling is often less than fluid, his analytical bent tending to intrude on the narrative. That his thesis of frustrated ambition has been around since the '70s is the least of it: no room is allowed the possibility that Felt's motivations evolved right along with public consciousness of the facts he relayed. Still, for the world's haggard realists, those who would seek out Kurtz in the jungle, Holland's attempt to illuminate Deep Throat's motives is compelling. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Bob Woodward's The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat concludes that the FBI's second in command, Mark Felt, likely became Woodward's mole because Felt worried that President Nixon might try to take over the agency. Here Holland (www.washingtondecoded.com; The Kennedy Assassination Tapes) claims Felt was a self-serving opportunist who became Deep Throat to sabotage acting FBI directors L. Patrick Gray III and William Ruckelshaus so that he would be appointed the permanent FBI director following J. Edgar Hoover's death. This exhaustively researched investigation (nearly a quarter of the book is source notes) draws on Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate files now held at the University of Texas-including interviews and correspondence with Watergate players-and FBI files on Felt and Gray to offer a compelling tale of skullduggery that reveals that Nixon learned about Felt's leaks in 1972 but was afraid to fire him because he might reveal even more damaging information. VERDICT This important and gripping addition to the Watergate saga challenges, if not discredits, heroic portrayals of Deep Throat in Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men. See L. Patrick Gray III's In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate for a work that takes a similarly dim view of Felt.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
