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On May 31, 2005, former FBI associate director W. Mark Felt revealed that he was "Deep Throat," the shadowy high official whose leaks to the Washington Post helped to provoke the Watergate crisis and topple the Nixon presidency. Felt's confession ended one of the capital's longest-running guessing games; the hushed phone calls and parking-garage trysts of All the President's Men, co-author Bob Woodward confirmed, were based on encounters with Felt. Media outlets framed the revelation as a drama of individual derring-do, assigning Felt the role of noble whistleblower or despicable traitor, liberal ally or conservative nemesis. As a result, they missed an opportunity to reconsider the larger story of Watergate, perhaps the most mythologized political scandal of the twentieth century. This article argues that Felt's actions--and, by extension, Watergate itself--must be understood in the context of a long-standing institutional conflict between the Nixon administration and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.1
As an event, Watergate occupies an uneasy place in American political history. Nearly all historians agree that the crisis marked a pivotal moment--"the most serious scandal in the history of U.S. presidential politics," in the words of Nixon scholar Michael Genovese.2 And yet our understanding of Watergate has remained largely fixed since the mid-1970s, when highly politicized narratives of virtue and criminality first took root. Popular accounts tend to devolve into blow-by-blow descriptions of who said what to whom--on White House tapes, in congressional testimony, or in the dozens of memoirs by minor players. To most of the public, Watergate remains the character-driven showdown of All the President's Men, with scrappy young reporters facing off against a uniquely duplicitous president. In this narrative, Nixon occupies center stage as a power-hungry but paranoid chief executive, seeking absolute control over his enemies and political opponents.3
Academic historians tend to be less convinced of Nixon's singular evil. But they have struggled in recent decades to reconcile the Watergate scandal with broader narratives of political change in the 1970s. One interpretation describes Watergate as a social crisis, a flashpoint for enmities born of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Nixon's lifelong clash with liberals. A second takes a more structural approach, framing Nixon's actions as a particularly dramatic example of...