Monday, June 27, 2005
June 26, 2005
The Newspaper of the Future
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN
Lawrence, Kan.
EVERY Little League player in this town of about 85,000 people can be a star. Regardless of how he or she hits or fields, each tyke and teenager is eligible for a personalized electronic trading card - replete with a picture, biography, statistics and an audio clip of the player philosophizing about the game - that can be posted on the Web site of the local newspaper, The Lawrence Journal-World.
Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium's 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases - sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.
A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs, including the Gay Kansan in China Blogger, who recently had his first "disgusting" experience with a woman, to the Born-Again Christian Blogger, who offers videotaped huzzahs to the Nascar legend Dale Earnhardt Sr.
The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. "I don't think of us as being in the newspaper business," said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper's parent. "Information is our business and we're trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible."
Owned by the Simons family since 1891, The Journal-World is a small-town paper emphasizing small-town news, but it is hardly restrained by a small-town mentality. Indeed, at a time when newspapers big and small are facing financial and journalistic crossroads, media analysts say The Journal-World, with a circulation of just 20,000, offers guidelines for moving forward.
The Simons family, through the World Company, enjoys an unfettered and often-criticized media monopoly in Lawrence. But the family has used that advantage to cross-pollinate its properties, ranging from cable to telephone service to newspaper and online publishing, and to take technological and financial risks that other owners might have avoided.
Mr. Simons and his associates describe their overall goals as a shared belief in quality, a deep attachment to Lawrence as a community and a constant reinvention of their business's relationship with readers, viewers and advertisers.
"We believe that journalism has been a monologue for so long and now is the perfect time for it to become a dialogue with our readers," said Rob Curley, 34, the World Company's director of new media. "We want readers to think of this as their paper, not our paper."
LAWRENCE has a long history as an independent, contrarian town. Founded in 1854 by New England abolitionists, it became one of the most violent, bloody battlegrounds in the slavery debate and was burned to the ground by pro-slavery raiders in 1861.
The University of Kansas opened its doors here just after the Civil War; women made up almost half of its first class. Haskell Indian Nations University, a college for Native Americans, opened here in 1884. After Mr. Simons's grandfather arrived in town more than a century ago, he bought the local paper for $50.
Today, Lawrence is a regional anomaly, anchoring a Democratic county in a solidly Republican state. Its large student population brings spunk to Lawrence, the university adds academic sophistication and sports fanaticism, and the town, dotted with funky restaurants and boutiques, has become a favorite of artists and activists.
Lawrence is also peppered with tidy, attractive homes and schools that draw middle- and upper-class families headed by professionals who commute to work in Topeka and Kansas City. "It's a real town with a real soul where people like to get involved," said Paul Carttar, a Lawrence native who is executive vice chancellor for external affairs at the University of Kansas. "People here care about what Lawrence will become."
Mr. Simons says his family takes its Lawrence roots seriously. "My dad told me that if you take care of Lawrence, Lawrence will take care of you," he said.
To that end, Mr. Simons has been an aggressive consolidator of local news and information services while resisting what he described as repeated offers over the years from larger companies wanting to buy him out. He has also been an early adopter of new technologies. The World Company began laying cable in 1968 and offered cable programming to residents in 1971, paying for the expansion with profits from The Journal-World - long before most larger media companies would embrace cable.
Today, about 80 percent of homes in Lawrence have cable connections. The Journal-World began publishing on the Internet in 1995, the same year that Sunflower, the broadband subsidiary of the World Company, first offered cable modems to customers. In 1999, the newspaper and its television station began sharing talent, using reporters to write for The Journal-World and appear on the company's news stations.
"We're not afraid to jump outside of the box, and that's because of who our owners are," said Patrick Knorr, 32, Sunflower's general manager, who also oversees strategic planning for the World Company. "They're determined not to lose because they were asleep at the switch."
Mr. Knorr said that World, which employs a total of about 600 people, did not try to offer new content to broadband subscribers until it had solid relationships with its customers and a robust pipeline through which it could pump media offerings.
"Content is absolutely critical and king," Mr. Knorr said. "But consumers have more power than ever over who gets crowned."
On a sweltering midsummer morning in 2001, Mr. Simons convened most of his media staff in the basement of a handsomely restored former post office at the corner of New Hampshire and Seventh Streets. The building was World's new "converged news center," where the company's television, newspaper and online staffs would all be housed.
Mr. Simons told his editors and reporters that they were going to do more than merely work shoulder to shoulder; they were going to share reporting assignments, tasks and scoops - whether they liked it or not.
Many did not like it at all, and some World reporters say they sometimes still feel taken advantage of - when they are asked to squeeze multiple print, television and online duties into the course of a single day. Print reporters and their editors have, at times, been reluctant to share scoops or ideas with their television counterparts, and vice versa. But many reporters also said that, over time, they have adapted.
"You can really teeter on the edge of, 'I'm not enjoying this and it's not fair,' to, 'This is one of the coolest things I've ever done,' " said Deanna Richards, a television reporter who works in World's converged newsroom. The company currently has 81 news employees, an unusually large number for an operation of its size.
In 1993, Mr. Simons recruited Bill Snead, an award-winning photographer from The Washington Post, to oversee the Journal-World newsroom. Now a senior editor, Mr. Snead, 67, has written, photographed and shot video for feature assignments on topics such as farm strife, cheerleaders and cowboys. He said that while he had never shot video before arriving at The Journal-World, he had no trouble adapting.
"Technology is our servant; it's our valet; it gets our stuff out there - but it's still about the content," he said, adding that his company's online and cable properties have helped to forge a closer relationship with readers. "If you show people respect and don't treat them like a novelty, you'll have free rein. That's what we're doing here."
For as ambitious and creative as the Journal-World team is, the newspaper still offers a menu of stories that is relentlessly, sometimes numbingly, local. Weather, local trials, local sports and other local comings and goings dominate. Some critics say that controversial topics, like divisive land-use debates, are soft-pedaled in the paper's pages.
"They control the dialogue on local news," said Charles Goff III, 46, a political activist and artist in Lawrence. "Every viewpoint goes through their filter and is tied to the Chamber of Commerce and the moneyed elite."
Mr. Goff conceded, however, that he was unaware of the depth of offerings on the Web site of The Journal-World. He also said that while he felt that the paper's editorial and opinion pages were staunchly and unsparingly conservative, he thought that the news pages usually offered more balanced viewpoints.
Mr. Simons and his news staff vehemently deny that controversial topics are sidestepped.
And while some residents bemoan The Journal-World's local navel-gazing, those overseeing the publication are unapologetic and enthusiastic examiners of all things Lawrence. "When the space shuttle blew up, we didn't have it on our home page; when the war in Iraq started, we didn't have it on our home page," Mr. Curley said. "It's focusing entirely on local stories that we think made our Web traffic go crazy."
Mr. Simons recruited Mr. Curley to the World Company three years ago, when The Journal-World's Web site snared about 500,000 page views a month. Mr. Curley says the number is now about seven million. The company said its online operation was losing about $15,000 a month when Mr. Curley arrived; it expects the online business to become profitable this year.
Ralph Gage, World's chief operating officer, is a no-nonsense taskmaster whom Mr. Simons deputized to make sure the company's trains ran on time. Online revenue comprises only about 1.5 percent of World's total revenue, he said, while the bulk comes from broadband, at 53 percent, and the newspaper operation, at 37 percent.
But Mr. Gage says the company expects newspaper revenue to slacken over time, with online ventures eventually being a much more significant source of sales. For that reason, World has been willing to use its broadband funds to underwrite its online ventures until the online profits become more meaningful, probably by the end of the decade.
ACCORDING to a recent survey by Nielsen/NetRatings, newspaper Web sites nationwide had a 12 percent increase in unique visitors from May 2004 to May 2005, with a significant portion of readers aged 35 to 44 switching from a newspaper to the same paper's Web edition for their daily read.
"Newspaper circulation has been tanking since the 60's and now we're finally growing our audience online, so when I hear people complain about having to give their content away for free on the Internet I think they just don't get it," Mr. Curley said. "I'm a capitalist, and I respect people who want to make a ton of money, but, dude, I'm a journalist and I want to build cool things."
Of course, building cool things simply for the sake of building cool things suffered a notable national flameout during the dot-com bust. But through the newspaper Web site and lawrence.com, Lawrence comes alive in a fashion rare for a town of its size. (Lawrence.com is also published as a print weekly.)
The town, once home to the poet Langston Hughes and the novelist William S. Burroughs, has a rich literary tradition. Journalists at World are assembling a lushly embroidered Web site devoted to Mr. Burroughs that includes rare letters, photographs and other archival material.
During a local election, a list of questions reporters had asked of all candidates as part of a voter's guide were posted online. That allowed voters to answer the same questions themselves. Then they could use an online tool to find the candidates whose answers most closely matched their own - an example of civic journalism on steroids.
The paper also routinely files local freedom-of-information requests and uploads piles of public records to its Web site. In 2003, World installed about 30 wireless hot spots around Lawrence. That same year, it began sending daily content to cellphones. For example, subscribers can have real-time scores and statistics from the University of Kansas's football and basketball games delivered on demand.
The company has begun offering daily "podcasts" of news and other information to Apple iPod owners or anyone else carrying an MP3 player. It plans to offer a service that automatically loads information onto a docked MP3 player in the early-morning hours before students head to school.
About a third of the 18 employees in the online operation are interns, and their presence allows Mr. Curley to have data, video, photos and other material collected and uploaded at little cost, a process he grinningly refers to as "internology."
"People come here from thousands of miles away expecting to see something very high tech and expensive, but a lot of what we do we do on the cheap," Mr. Curley said. "So it just amazes me when people say they can't do what we do because they don't have the resources."
Still, it is financial resources, not content, that is behind the handwringing in newspaper circles everywhere.
While print advertising stagnates or slips, it is not yet being replaced in a meaningful way by online advertising revenue - especially at companies that lack a source of bridge financing like World's broadband operation. Although journalists may cringe to hear it, the near-term battle for corporate survival is likely to be waged and won primarily by inventive business and advertising teams at media companies.
The World Company's advertising staff said that its sales force had embraced convergence enthusiastically and that offering customers multiple advertising platforms - on TV, on the Internet and in print - has become a strong pitch.
But the company is still finding it difficult to persuade readers to interact with online display ads. And, while willing to adapt to news advertising demands, the company refuses to turn its Web site into an advertising billboard, believing that the clutter would undermine the quality and integrity of its journalism.
"I think as we've converged the content we're going to converge the advertising," said Dan Simons, president of the company's broadband operations and a son of the chairman. "I think you'll have to adapt to how buyers want to convey their messages so we're not just sellers of space and time. We have to be both advertisers and public relations advisers so we can help companies create their messages."
As effervescent as the new media are in Lawrence, analysts balk at making grand extrapolations from World's efforts.
"It's a market dominated by one company so you have to be very careful when holding them up as a paragon," said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning at the Poynter Institute, which operates a Web site devoted to journalism. "Are they creative? Without a doubt, but I'm cautious about it being seen as a single solution or a model."
Others are more laudatory but equally cautious about Lawrence's online innovations. "Nobody else is close to doing what they've done," said David Card, a new-media analyst at Jupiter Research. "But you also wouldn't necessarily be able to duplicate what they're doing in towns like San Francisco or New York."
Dolph Simons, who writes a cantankerous Saturday column that draws barbs from Lawrence's liberals, is a gentle, self-effacing man who still serves Thanksgiving turkey to his newsroom employees. He says he considers himself a "little fish in a big pond" and is reluctant to be seen as a know-it-all by colleagues and competitors in the news business.
Even so, his opinion about the future of the news business is clear.
"I'm terribly concerned about readership in the country and I think we all have to learn new things as fast as we can. Otherwise other people are going to beat us to it," he said. "We need to be driving with our brights, because if we're driving with our dims somebody's going to come in from the side of the road and knock us off."
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Friday, June 24, 2005
Gen. John P. Abizaid
June 24, 2005
U.S. General Sees No Ebb in Fight
By DAVID S. CLOUD and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, June 23 - The top American commander for the Middle East said Thursday that the insurgency in Iraq had not diminished, seeming to contradict statements by Vice President Dick Cheney in recent days that the insurgents were in their "last throes."
Though he declined during his Congressional testimony to comment directly on Mr. Cheney's statements, the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said that more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq and that the insurgency's "overall strength is about the same" as it was six months ago. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency," he added.
His more pessimistic assessment, made during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, reflected a difference of emphasis between military officers, who battle the intractable insurgency every day, and civilian officials intent on accentuating what they say is unacknowledged progress in Iraq.
Mr. Cheney, in an interview with CNN after General Abizaid spoke, repeated his assertion that the insurgency was facing defeat, which he said was driving it to increase attacks to disrupt the United States-backed political process aimed at defusing the violence.
"If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period," he said in the interview. "The terrorists understand if we're successful at accomplishing our objective, standing up a democracy in Iraq, that that's a huge defeat for them. They'll do everything they can to stop it."
Persuading the public that the American-led effort in Iraq is succeeding is a White House priority this month. President Bush will meet Friday with the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, at the White House, and on Tuesday, he will give a speech on the first anniversary of the end of the American occupation.
Dr. Jaafari, speaking at the Council of Foreign Relations here, supported the White House argument that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, despite continuing attacks. He also warned against setting a timetable for troop withdrawal. When he was asked Thursday evening about Mr. Cheney's recent comments, he sidestepped the issue.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his top commanders appeared at all-day hearings, starting with the Senate Armed Services Committee in the morning and continuing with the House Armed Services Committee in the afternoon.
"Any who say that we've lost this war, or that we're losing this war, are wrong - we are not," Mr. Rumsfeld said in the morning session.
He added that consideration of troop reductions in Iraq, as some Democrats have called for, would "throw a lifeline to terrorists, who in recent months have suffered significant losses and casualties, been denied havens and suffered weakened popular support."
General Abizaid had just returned from a visit to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, where he said he was surprised at how many American commanders and soldiers asked whether the military was losing support at home for their missions overseas. "It was a real concern," he said.
He added that Afghan and Iraqi military officers had raised the same concern. "They worry we don't have the staying power to see the mission through," he said.
Several lawmakers warned that public support for the American troop presence in Iraq would continue to decline, which could eventually force a withdrawal of the troops, unless progress could be made at stemming the violence.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told Mr. Rumsfeld at the Senate Committee hearing: "We will lose this war if we leave too soon, and what is likely to make us leave too soon? The public going south. That is happening, and it worries me greatly."
No senator called for an American withdrawal, but several Democrats urged the administration to consider setting a timetable for troop reductions if Iraqi officials fail to approve a constitution by a self-imposed August deadline, which could be extended for six months. The constitution is scheduled to be voted on in October, and if it is approved, a national election would be held in December.
"An open-ended commitment to the Iraqis that we will be there even if they fail to agree on a constitution would lessen the chances that the Iraqis will make the political compromises necessary to defeat the jihadists and end the insurgency," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.
Dr. Jaafari urged the United States on Thursday night not to set a timetable for a troop withdrawal, saying insurgents would seize on the action to "spread terror across the nation to weaken the country."
He said the only viable military strategy was to wait until Iraqi troops are "trained to a very high level," a process he insisted was already well under way.
His reluctance to set deadlines appeared synchronized with the position taken by Mr. Bush, who has declined to set a goal for withdrawal.
Yet despite his care not to differ with the White House, Dr. Jaafari appeared at one point to side with General Abizaid, who told Congress that foreign fighters were still entering Iraq. Mr. Jaafari agreed that Iraq's borders were still not secure and that terrorists continued to flow into Iraq. He made no effort to quantify how many have entered the country, or how important they have been in the insurgency.
In the afternoon session, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat, repeatedly pressed Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, on whether the insurgency was in its final throes, as Mr. Cheney said, or was essentially holding its own, as another top American officer, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, stated this week.
Pressed repeatedly to choose between the two, General Casey said: "There's a long way to go here. Things in Iraq are hard."
But General Casey insisted that the allied forces had significantly weakened the insurgency even though the number of attacks against American forces has remaining steady at about 60 a day for the last several weeks.
The most heated exchange of the day occurred between Mr. Rumsfeld and Senator Edward M. Kennedy. After a six-minute recitation of what he said were Mr. Rumsfeld's mistakes and misjudgments, the senator, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused him of putting "our forces and our national security in danger" and called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign, as he has several times previously.
"Well, that is quite a statement," Mr. Rumsfeld responded, saying Mr. Bush has rebuffed his offers to resign twice.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.
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Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Watergate and the Two Lives of Mark Felt
Roles as FBI Official, 'Deep Throat' Clashed
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; A01
The Watergate scandal had reached a peak, and President Richard M. Nixon was furious about press leaks. His suspicions focused on the number two man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt, a 31-year bureau veteran. He ordered his aides to "confront" the presumed traitor.
Another man may have panicked. Over the previous six months, Felt had been meeting secretly with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, helping him and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein with a series of sensational scoops about the abuse of presidential power. But the former World War II spymaster had an exquisite sense of how to play the bureaucratic game.
In a Feb. 21, 1973, FBI memo, Felt denounced the Post stories as an amalgam of "fiction and half truths," combined with some genuine information from "sources either in the FBI or the Department of Justice." To deflect attention from himself, he ordered an investigation into the latest leak.
"Expedite," he instructed.
Recently identified as the secret Watergate source known as "Deep Throat," Felt is the last and most mysterious of a colorful cast of characters who have captured the national imagination. Now 91, and in shaky health, the former FBI man joins a pantheon of Watergate figures ranging from H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy to John J. Sirica and Archibald Cox.
Unlike many of the heroes and villains of the Watergate saga, Felt defies easy pigeonholing. Admirers, beginning with his family, have presented him as a courageous whistle-blower. Detractors depict him as driven by overreaching personal ambition. Neither description captures the bravura, almost reckless, performance of a man leading two very different lives.
By day, Felt was the loyal, super-efficient government executive, ordering leak investigations and writing obsequious notes to acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. By night, in 2 a.m. meetings with Woodward in an underground parking garage, he fulminated against the dirty tricks of the Nixon White House and worried about threats to the U.S. Constitution.
A review of tens of thousands of pages of declassified White House and FBI documents, and interviews with more than two dozen people who had dealings with Felt, reveal an exceptionally complicated personality. It is impossible to disentangle Felt's sense of outrage over what was happening to the country from his own desire to scramble to the top of "the FBI Pyramid," a phrase he later used as the title of a little-noticed autobiography.
As a protege and ardent supporter of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's legendary first director, Felt was determined to perpetuate Hoover's vision of the bureau as an almost autonomous institution, feared by criminals and politicians alike. In nighttime conversations with Woodward, and later in his own book, he made clear that he resented attempts by Nixon and his acolytes to turn the world's premier law enforcement agency into "an adjunct of the White House."
In some ways, Felt comes across as that archetypal Washington figure, the master manipulator more concerned with bureaucratic turf than constitutional principle. At the same time that he was blowing the whistle on Nixon for illegal break-ins, he was authorizing similar "black-bag jobs" against left-wing radicals, according to evidence presented at his 1980 conspiracy trial.
Declassified documents and White House tapes show that Nixon aides initially saw Felt as "our boy," but became suspicious after hearing through the bureaucratic grapevine that he was leaking information to Woodward and other reporters. Nixon ordered his aides to "set traps" for Felt, but held back from moving against him for fear that the FBI man would "go out and unload everything."
Felt is as "cool as a cucumber," marveled White House counsel John W. Dean III, in a Feb. 27, 1973, conversation with the president in the Oval Office. Felt was eventually forced to resign from the FBI in June 1973 on suspicion of leaking a story about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.
A combination of patriot and turncoat, Hoover loyalist and truth teller, Felt never achieved his long-cherished dream of becoming FBI director. But for a crucial year in his life and the country's life, he was at the vortex of the greatest political scandal in modern American history.
It all began with the death of J. Edgar Hoover.
A Funeral
"I have strong ideas about this damn funeral," Nixon told his aides on the morning of May 2, 1972, on hearing of Hoover's death at the age of 77. "I want it to be big."
A lying-in-state on Capitol Hill. A presidential eulogy. A Marine band. Taps. Nixon made sure that Hoover received all the honors that America could bestow on a fallen hero. In his mind, this was not just a funeral for Hoover, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to reassert presidential authority over an agency that was "out of control."
Nixon praised Hoover in public. But in private, he referred to the FBI director as "a morally depraved son of a bitch," declassified White House tapes show.
The man chosen by Nixon for "cleaning house" at the FBI was a former World War II submarine commander named L. Patrick Gray III, a longtime political loyalist who had held a succession of positions at the Justice Department. Nixon's one concern about Gray was that he was "a little na�ve."
Gray was soon reporting back about the internal power struggles that were taking place within the FBI. The upper ranks of the bureau were a hive of gossip and intrigue, in his opinion. "Those people over there are like little old ladies in tennis shoes and they've got some of the most vicious vendettas going on," Gray told Nixon in amazement.
The one senior FBI man trusted implicitly by Gray was his deputy, Felt. Smooth and debonair, with an extraordinary command of detail, Felt had been involved in counterespionage operations in World War II, and had run the FBI field office in Kansas City, a hotbed of political corruption. Hoover had plucked Felt out of the bureau's internal inspection division in 1971 and made him his heir apparent.
Declassified FBI and White House documents show that Felt praised Gray for his "magnificent" performance at a meet-and-greet session with the FBI's executive committee. He later sent Gray surveys of laudatory comments from FBI field offices such as "morale outstanding, never higher," and "99 per cent of agents highly disposed toward innovative changes made by Mr Gray."
Felt's private view of Gray was very different. In his autobiography, he makes no secret of his disappointment about not getting the top job, which, he thought, should have gone to a career FBI man. He refers to his boss as "three-day Gray," because of his "constant absence from his command post in Washington," visiting FBI offices around the country or spending long weekends at his home in Connecticut.
Like most senior FBI officials, Felt strongly opposed Gray's decision to recruit female agents to what had been an exclusively male preserve.
Gray's frequent absences meant that his deputy was effectively running the bureau when police apprehended five burglars in the Democratic Party's national campaign office at the Watergate complex at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972.
Early White House Support
"Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he's ambitious," Haldeman told Nixon four days after the Watergate break-in on what later became known as "the smoking gun tape," because it demonstrated presidential involvement in a White House cover-up.
One reason that the White House had confidence in Felt, according to Dean, was his sensitive handling of a potentially embarrassing case early in the Nixon presidency. As reported by Curt Gentry in a 1992 biography of Hoover, the FBI chief had heard of "a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels of the White House." Hoover told Nixon he was sending over Felt, one of his "most discreet executives," to investigate.
The alleged "homosexualists" included Haldeman and fellow White House aide John D. Ehrlichman. After interviewing the suspects, Felt found no evidence to support the allegations and recommended that the case be closed. The investigation provided Felt with valuable contacts at the highest levels of the administration and with first-hand insights into how the White House was organized.
Nixon and Haldeman hoped to put a lid on the Watergate investigation by suggesting a CIA link to the burglary, putting it off-limits to the FBI. Contrary to their expectations, Felt persuaded Gray not to go along with the plan.
In the meantime, Felt had begun to talk off the record about the Watergate case to Woodward. He had first met Woodward, then a U.S. Navy courier, outside the White House Situation Room in 1970. After Woodward joined The Post in 1971, Felt became a valued source.
On June 19, two days after the break-in, Felt helped steer Woodward to his first big scoop in the Watergate investigation. After Woodward telephoned him at the FBI, a nervous-sounding Felt confirmed that a former White House consultant named E. Howard Hunt was a "prime suspect" in the case.
As the Watergate scandal heated up, Felt stopped taking telephone calls from Woodward, and insisted on conspiratorial meetings. If the reporter wanted to request a meeting, he would move a flowerpot to the back of his sixth-floor balcony.
At the same time Felt was meeting with Woodward, he was having to deal with complaints from the White House that the bureau was "leaking like a sieve." He did not want to reveal any information about the investigation that would compromise himself as the likely source.
One way that Felt covered his tracks was to demand leak investigations into Post stories that appeared to rely on FBI interviews. On Sept. 11, for example, after a Woodward and Bernstein story about illegal wiretaps, he wrote a memo forcefully reminding "all agents of the need to be most circumspect in talking about this case with anyone outside the Bureau."
Felt was walking a tightrope. A single misstep would result in his own destruction.
Under Scrutiny
"We know what's leaked and we know who leaked it," Haldeman told Nixon in a soft, almost painful, whisper on the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1972, that was picked up by hidden microphones. They were sitting in Nixon's hideaway in the Executive Office Building, across the alley from the White House.
"Somebody in the FBI?" Nixon murmured back.
"Yes, sir."
"Somebody next to Gray?"
"Mark Felt."
Nixon was shocked. "Now why the hell would he do that?"
Haldeman thought about this, as the conversation whirled around in a circle.
"I think he wants to be in the top spot."
Haldeman speculated that Felt was trying to engineer a victory for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, in which case Felt would have a good chance of succeeding Gray. Nixon had a different explanation. Perhaps there was a Kennedy connection.
"Is he Catholic?"
"Jewish."
"Christ, [they] put a Jew in there," exploded Nixon, who had long suspected that a cabal of liberal Jewish bureaucrats was out to undermine his administration.
"That could explain it, too."
Contrary to Haldeman's assertion, there is no evidence Felt is Jewish.
Nixon was feeling more than usually paranoid. Nine days previously, The Post had run a blockbuster article by Woodward and Bernstein outlining "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" by the Nixon reelection effort. The article had been inspired, at least in part, by a four-hour conversation between Woodward and Felt in the underground parking garage on Oct. 8.
The tip about Felt had come to the White House via a roundabout route. According to comments by Haldeman and other Nixon aides captured on White House tapes, the original source was Sandy Smith of Time magazine, widely considered to be the best-informed reporter covering the FBI. A Time lawyer had passed the information to Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson, who in turn passed it on to the White House, according to the tapes.
Smith, who has Alzheimer's disease, has consistently declined to talk about his Watergate sources.
The White House tapes do not directly name the lawyer who purportedly tipped off Peterson, but they provide some strong hints. The person who best fits the description provided by Haldeman and other White House aides is Washington attorney William G. Hundley, now a partner with the firm of Akin Gump. Hundley had been retained by Time to represent Smith. He was also Peterson's best friend and frequent golfing companion.
In an interview last week, Hundley denied tipping off Peterson about Felt. He said he was "very surprised" to learn this month that Felt was Deep Throat.
On the very day that Haldeman was voicing his suspicions about Felt to Nixon, Woodward was preparing to write an explosive story naming Haldeman as one of the controllers of a secret fund used to finance political espionage. The White House seized on errors in an Oct. 25 Post story as proof that the paper's reporting on Watergate was fatally flawed. Felt was furious. When he next met Woodward in the parking garage, he scolded him for sloppy reporting.
"When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you've got to be sure you're on solid ground," Felt complained. "What a royal screw-up."
Feeling the Heat
Felt was under huge pressure to deflect White House suspicions about FBI leaks away from himself. Fortunately for Felt, the Post reporters had been talking to other sources in the bureau, including Angelo J. Lano, the Washington field office agent directly responsible for the Watergate investigation. Woodward and Bernstein were angry with Lano for allegedly providing them with bad information on the Haldeman story. They decided to get even with him by reporting him to a superior, in violation of the confidentiality understanding.
(Woodward and Bernstein provide a detailed account of this incident in "All the President's Men," without naming the agent involved. Lano's version of the incident is contained in declassified FBI files.)
In a four-page memo to Attorney General Richard D. Kleindienst, Felt came to Lano's defense, depicting him as the victim of a "vicious fabrication." He accused Woodward and Bernstein of taking Lano's comments about Haldeman "completely out of context."
Felt was feeling the heat on other fronts as well, on matters that had nothing to do with Watergate. The FBI was busy waging war against a radical group known as the Weather Underground, which had asserted responsibility for a series of bomb attacks against federal buildings. In late 1972 and early 1973, Felt approved nine black-bag jobs at homes of Weather Underground sympathizers in the New York area.
During his trial in 1980, Felt was unable to satisfactorily explain whose authority he was acting on, beyond a general instruction from Gray to hunt down the Weather Underground, "no holds barred." Convicted on a conspiracy charge, he was fined $8,500, only to be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Prosecutors later described how agents dressed in old clothes or disguised as telephone repairmen gained access to apartments by picking the locks or paying bribes to landlords. Once inside the apartments, they rummaged through desks and closets, photographing old address books, love letters and pages from diaries, in an ultimately fruitless search for clues to the hiding places of Weather Underground fugitives.
"It's hard for me to see Felt as a hero," said Jennifer Dohrn, sister of fugitive Bernardine Dohrn and one of the targets of the New York break-ins. "At the same time he was whistle-blowing against Nixon, he was authorizing FBI agents to break into my apartment. It was outrageous."
Putting Felt to the Test
Gray brushed aside the White House's suspicions of Felt. He could not believe that his loyal, supremely competent deputy was capable of such betrayal. As an old Navy man, he was inclined to take subordinates at their word. Felt flatly denied leaking "anything to anybody" when Gray finally confronted him with the allegations in January 1973.
Nixon's anger over FBI leaks reached a boiling point in a Feb. 16, 1973, meeting with Gray. The president told the acting FBI director that he needed to stop being "Mr. Nice Guy" and clean out "the whole damn place." The Germans had the right idea during World War II, Nixon told Gray, according to a declassified White House tape. If they went through a town, and one of their soldiers was hit by a sniper, "they'd line up the whole goddamned town and say, until you talk you're all getting shot. I really think that's what has to be done." At the very least, Felt should be made to take a lie detector test.
Gray, who is preparing his own account of his relationship with Felt, declined a request for an interview through his family. But Ed Gray said that his father ignored the president's demand: "He wasn't going to polygraph his own people. It was all about mutual trust, and a presumption of regularity."
Gray's refusal to administer a lie-detector test to Felt did not prevent Felt from ordering one for at least one subordinate suspected of leaking to the press, FBI records show. "He was a very, very tough guy," recalled Bob Gast, a supervisor in the espionage and intelligence division. "God forbid if you made any mistakes."
A complicating factor, according to Gray's former chief of staff, David Kinley, was that Gray was awaiting his Senate confirmation hearing as director of the FBI. He could not risk Felt going public with all the dirt about the FBI at such a politically sensitive time.
"By January 1973, we knew that Felt was leaking information about the internal workings of the FBI in an attempt to undermine Gray," Kinley said. "By that time, however, it was too late to do very much about it."
The confirmation hearings were a disaster. Gray acknowledged early on that he had been sharing FBI interviews of Watergate suspects with the White House. The final blow to his nomination came after he acknowledged destroying files that had come out of Hunt's safe in the Executive Office Building. He resigned on April 27.
The night before Gray's resignation, Felt telephoned Woodward at The Post to tell him what had happened. As Felt relayed the story, Ehrlichman and Dean had urged Gray to ensure the files "never see the light of day."
For a few brief hours, Felt allowed himself to think that he had a shot at the number one position. Both Kleindienst and Gray recommended that he be named acting director. But Nixon was adamantly opposed to the idea, and turned instead to William D. Ruckelshaus, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In his autobiography, Felt notes proudly that he stood at "the top of the FBI pyramid" for 2 hours 50 minutes, the length of the interregnum between the resignation of Gray and the appointment of Ruckelshaus.
Felt and Ruckelshaus soon clashed. In his autobiography, Felt makes clear that he saw himself as the guardian of Hoover's FBI, and was "jarred by the sight of Ruckelshaus lolling in an easy chair with his feet on what I still felt was J. Edgar Hoover's desk." For his part, Ruckelshaus accused Felt of leaking information about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.
Felt indignantly denied the charge. He in turn suspected Ruckelshaus of "playing politics" and buckling to White House demands, according to his autobiography. Ruckelshaus, now a venture capital consultant in Seattle, declines to detail the evidence against Felt, but says it was "certainly strong enough to convince me."
"I told him that I was very angry with him and suggested that he sleep on it overnight, and decide what he wanted to do," Ruckelshaus recalled. Felt resigned from the FBI the next day.
A Final Mystery
Retirement was painful for Felt. An inveterate gossip, he loved being at the center of things. After he retired, he continued to call former subordinates with tips and speculation about the latest Watergate developments, FBI records show.
Felt also kept in touch with his reporter friends. According to Woodward's account in "All the President's Men," he met with Deep Throat one last time in November 1973, five months after Felt's retirement. By now, Washington was abuzz with talk of secret White House tape recordings that could either exonerate Nixon or force him out of office. Felt told Woodward that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."
As the search for Deep Throat turned into a Washington parlor game in the decades after Nixon's resignation, the November 1973 scoop deflected suspicions away from Felt. Several Deep Throat sleuths excluded Felt from consideration on the grounds that he could not have been informed about the erasures on the tapes, as he was long retired.
Even Nixon was fooled, according to his British biographer, Jonathan Aitken. Reassured that Felt could not have been the master leaker, he turned his attention to other candidates, including White House staff members.
In "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein leave the impression that the final meeting with Deep Throat was set up in the same manner as the meetings before Felt's retirement. "In the first week of November," they write, "Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage."
This version of events assumes that Felt kept Woodward's apartment under daily observation long after he left the FBI, at a time when they were living on opposite sides of the Potomac.
Woodward, who has written a book about his relationship with Felt, to be published in early July, declined to explain this curiosity except to say that everything he wrote in "All the President's Men" is "accurate."
A possible explanation is suggested by Scott Armstrong, a former Senate staffer who worked with Woodward on two books, including one about Nixon's final days as president. Armstrong says it is quite likely that Felt continued to have access to inside information months after he left the FBI. But he believes that Woodward employed a literary sleight of hand to protect the identity of his source.
Armstrong says that Woodward likely did move a flowerpot around on his balcony in early November 1973. There is no reason to doubt his assertion that he traveled to an underground parking garage around the same time. But neither event was related to his meeting with Felt.
To reach the retired FBI man, Woodward probably just picked up the phone or dropped by to see him, Armstrong said.
An ironic coda to Felt's double life as loyal FBI employee and master leaker came in November 1980, when he sat across a D.C. courtroom from Nixon.
The former president had come to testify at Felt's illegal break-in trial. Interrupted by shouts of "liar" and "war criminal" from spectators, who were swiftly bundled out of the courtroom, Nixon made clear that he believed that Felt had acted properly in approving the break-ins.
A few days later, Felt received a copy of Nixon's latest book, "The Real War." On an inside page, he found the following inscription: "To Mark Felt. With appreciation for his years of service to the nation. Richard Nixon."
Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
� 2005 The Washington Post Company
Roles as FBI Official, 'Deep Throat' Clashed
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; A01
The Watergate scandal had reached a peak, and President Richard M. Nixon was furious about press leaks. His suspicions focused on the number two man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt, a 31-year bureau veteran. He ordered his aides to "confront" the presumed traitor.
Another man may have panicked. Over the previous six months, Felt had been meeting secretly with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, helping him and fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein with a series of sensational scoops about the abuse of presidential power. But the former World War II spymaster had an exquisite sense of how to play the bureaucratic game.
In a Feb. 21, 1973, FBI memo, Felt denounced the Post stories as an amalgam of "fiction and half truths," combined with some genuine information from "sources either in the FBI or the Department of Justice." To deflect attention from himself, he ordered an investigation into the latest leak.
"Expedite," he instructed.
Recently identified as the secret Watergate source known as "Deep Throat," Felt is the last and most mysterious of a colorful cast of characters who have captured the national imagination. Now 91, and in shaky health, the former FBI man joins a pantheon of Watergate figures ranging from H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and G. Gordon Liddy to John J. Sirica and Archibald Cox.
Unlike many of the heroes and villains of the Watergate saga, Felt defies easy pigeonholing. Admirers, beginning with his family, have presented him as a courageous whistle-blower. Detractors depict him as driven by overreaching personal ambition. Neither description captures the bravura, almost reckless, performance of a man leading two very different lives.
By day, Felt was the loyal, super-efficient government executive, ordering leak investigations and writing obsequious notes to acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray. By night, in 2 a.m. meetings with Woodward in an underground parking garage, he fulminated against the dirty tricks of the Nixon White House and worried about threats to the U.S. Constitution.
A review of tens of thousands of pages of declassified White House and FBI documents, and interviews with more than two dozen people who had dealings with Felt, reveal an exceptionally complicated personality. It is impossible to disentangle Felt's sense of outrage over what was happening to the country from his own desire to scramble to the top of "the FBI Pyramid," a phrase he later used as the title of a little-noticed autobiography.
As a protege and ardent supporter of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's legendary first director, Felt was determined to perpetuate Hoover's vision of the bureau as an almost autonomous institution, feared by criminals and politicians alike. In nighttime conversations with Woodward, and later in his own book, he made clear that he resented attempts by Nixon and his acolytes to turn the world's premier law enforcement agency into "an adjunct of the White House."
In some ways, Felt comes across as that archetypal Washington figure, the master manipulator more concerned with bureaucratic turf than constitutional principle. At the same time that he was blowing the whistle on Nixon for illegal break-ins, he was authorizing similar "black-bag jobs" against left-wing radicals, according to evidence presented at his 1980 conspiracy trial.
Declassified documents and White House tapes show that Nixon aides initially saw Felt as "our boy," but became suspicious after hearing through the bureaucratic grapevine that he was leaking information to Woodward and other reporters. Nixon ordered his aides to "set traps" for Felt, but held back from moving against him for fear that the FBI man would "go out and unload everything."
Felt is as "cool as a cucumber," marveled White House counsel John W. Dean III, in a Feb. 27, 1973, conversation with the president in the Oval Office. Felt was eventually forced to resign from the FBI in June 1973 on suspicion of leaking a story about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.
A combination of patriot and turncoat, Hoover loyalist and truth teller, Felt never achieved his long-cherished dream of becoming FBI director. But for a crucial year in his life and the country's life, he was at the vortex of the greatest political scandal in modern American history.
It all began with the death of J. Edgar Hoover.
A Funeral
"I have strong ideas about this damn funeral," Nixon told his aides on the morning of May 2, 1972, on hearing of Hoover's death at the age of 77. "I want it to be big."
A lying-in-state on Capitol Hill. A presidential eulogy. A Marine band. Taps. Nixon made sure that Hoover received all the honors that America could bestow on a fallen hero. In his mind, this was not just a funeral for Hoover, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to reassert presidential authority over an agency that was "out of control."
Nixon praised Hoover in public. But in private, he referred to the FBI director as "a morally depraved son of a bitch," declassified White House tapes show.
The man chosen by Nixon for "cleaning house" at the FBI was a former World War II submarine commander named L. Patrick Gray III, a longtime political loyalist who had held a succession of positions at the Justice Department. Nixon's one concern about Gray was that he was "a little na�ve."
Gray was soon reporting back about the internal power struggles that were taking place within the FBI. The upper ranks of the bureau were a hive of gossip and intrigue, in his opinion. "Those people over there are like little old ladies in tennis shoes and they've got some of the most vicious vendettas going on," Gray told Nixon in amazement.
The one senior FBI man trusted implicitly by Gray was his deputy, Felt. Smooth and debonair, with an extraordinary command of detail, Felt had been involved in counterespionage operations in World War II, and had run the FBI field office in Kansas City, a hotbed of political corruption. Hoover had plucked Felt out of the bureau's internal inspection division in 1971 and made him his heir apparent.
Declassified FBI and White House documents show that Felt praised Gray for his "magnificent" performance at a meet-and-greet session with the FBI's executive committee. He later sent Gray surveys of laudatory comments from FBI field offices such as "morale outstanding, never higher," and "99 per cent of agents highly disposed toward innovative changes made by Mr Gray."
Felt's private view of Gray was very different. In his autobiography, he makes no secret of his disappointment about not getting the top job, which, he thought, should have gone to a career FBI man. He refers to his boss as "three-day Gray," because of his "constant absence from his command post in Washington," visiting FBI offices around the country or spending long weekends at his home in Connecticut.
Like most senior FBI officials, Felt strongly opposed Gray's decision to recruit female agents to what had been an exclusively male preserve.
Gray's frequent absences meant that his deputy was effectively running the bureau when police apprehended five burglars in the Democratic Party's national campaign office at the Watergate complex at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972.
Early White House Support
"Mark Felt wants to cooperate because he's ambitious," Haldeman told Nixon four days after the Watergate break-in on what later became known as "the smoking gun tape," because it demonstrated presidential involvement in a White House cover-up.
One reason that the White House had confidence in Felt, according to Dean, was his sensitive handling of a potentially embarrassing case early in the Nixon presidency. As reported by Curt Gentry in a 1992 biography of Hoover, the FBI chief had heard of "a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels of the White House." Hoover told Nixon he was sending over Felt, one of his "most discreet executives," to investigate.
The alleged "homosexualists" included Haldeman and fellow White House aide John D. Ehrlichman. After interviewing the suspects, Felt found no evidence to support the allegations and recommended that the case be closed. The investigation provided Felt with valuable contacts at the highest levels of the administration and with first-hand insights into how the White House was organized.
Nixon and Haldeman hoped to put a lid on the Watergate investigation by suggesting a CIA link to the burglary, putting it off-limits to the FBI. Contrary to their expectations, Felt persuaded Gray not to go along with the plan.
In the meantime, Felt had begun to talk off the record about the Watergate case to Woodward. He had first met Woodward, then a U.S. Navy courier, outside the White House Situation Room in 1970. After Woodward joined The Post in 1971, Felt became a valued source.
On June 19, two days after the break-in, Felt helped steer Woodward to his first big scoop in the Watergate investigation. After Woodward telephoned him at the FBI, a nervous-sounding Felt confirmed that a former White House consultant named E. Howard Hunt was a "prime suspect" in the case.
As the Watergate scandal heated up, Felt stopped taking telephone calls from Woodward, and insisted on conspiratorial meetings. If the reporter wanted to request a meeting, he would move a flowerpot to the back of his sixth-floor balcony.
At the same time Felt was meeting with Woodward, he was having to deal with complaints from the White House that the bureau was "leaking like a sieve." He did not want to reveal any information about the investigation that would compromise himself as the likely source.
One way that Felt covered his tracks was to demand leak investigations into Post stories that appeared to rely on FBI interviews. On Sept. 11, for example, after a Woodward and Bernstein story about illegal wiretaps, he wrote a memo forcefully reminding "all agents of the need to be most circumspect in talking about this case with anyone outside the Bureau."
Felt was walking a tightrope. A single misstep would result in his own destruction.
Under Scrutiny
"We know what's leaked and we know who leaked it," Haldeman told Nixon in a soft, almost painful, whisper on the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1972, that was picked up by hidden microphones. They were sitting in Nixon's hideaway in the Executive Office Building, across the alley from the White House.
"Somebody in the FBI?" Nixon murmured back.
"Yes, sir."
"Somebody next to Gray?"
"Mark Felt."
Nixon was shocked. "Now why the hell would he do that?"
Haldeman thought about this, as the conversation whirled around in a circle.
"I think he wants to be in the top spot."
Haldeman speculated that Felt was trying to engineer a victory for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, in which case Felt would have a good chance of succeeding Gray. Nixon had a different explanation. Perhaps there was a Kennedy connection.
"Is he Catholic?"
"Jewish."
"Christ, [they] put a Jew in there," exploded Nixon, who had long suspected that a cabal of liberal Jewish bureaucrats was out to undermine his administration.
"That could explain it, too."
Contrary to Haldeman's assertion, there is no evidence Felt is Jewish.
Nixon was feeling more than usually paranoid. Nine days previously, The Post had run a blockbuster article by Woodward and Bernstein outlining "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" by the Nixon reelection effort. The article had been inspired, at least in part, by a four-hour conversation between Woodward and Felt in the underground parking garage on Oct. 8.
The tip about Felt had come to the White House via a roundabout route. According to comments by Haldeman and other Nixon aides captured on White House tapes, the original source was Sandy Smith of Time magazine, widely considered to be the best-informed reporter covering the FBI. A Time lawyer had passed the information to Assistant Attorney General Henry Peterson, who in turn passed it on to the White House, according to the tapes.
Smith, who has Alzheimer's disease, has consistently declined to talk about his Watergate sources.
The White House tapes do not directly name the lawyer who purportedly tipped off Peterson, but they provide some strong hints. The person who best fits the description provided by Haldeman and other White House aides is Washington attorney William G. Hundley, now a partner with the firm of Akin Gump. Hundley had been retained by Time to represent Smith. He was also Peterson's best friend and frequent golfing companion.
In an interview last week, Hundley denied tipping off Peterson about Felt. He said he was "very surprised" to learn this month that Felt was Deep Throat.
On the very day that Haldeman was voicing his suspicions about Felt to Nixon, Woodward was preparing to write an explosive story naming Haldeman as one of the controllers of a secret fund used to finance political espionage. The White House seized on errors in an Oct. 25 Post story as proof that the paper's reporting on Watergate was fatally flawed. Felt was furious. When he next met Woodward in the parking garage, he scolded him for sloppy reporting.
"When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you've got to be sure you're on solid ground," Felt complained. "What a royal screw-up."
Feeling the Heat
Felt was under huge pressure to deflect White House suspicions about FBI leaks away from himself. Fortunately for Felt, the Post reporters had been talking to other sources in the bureau, including Angelo J. Lano, the Washington field office agent directly responsible for the Watergate investigation. Woodward and Bernstein were angry with Lano for allegedly providing them with bad information on the Haldeman story. They decided to get even with him by reporting him to a superior, in violation of the confidentiality understanding.
(Woodward and Bernstein provide a detailed account of this incident in "All the President's Men," without naming the agent involved. Lano's version of the incident is contained in declassified FBI files.)
In a four-page memo to Attorney General Richard D. Kleindienst, Felt came to Lano's defense, depicting him as the victim of a "vicious fabrication." He accused Woodward and Bernstein of taking Lano's comments about Haldeman "completely out of context."
Felt was feeling the heat on other fronts as well, on matters that had nothing to do with Watergate. The FBI was busy waging war against a radical group known as the Weather Underground, which had asserted responsibility for a series of bomb attacks against federal buildings. In late 1972 and early 1973, Felt approved nine black-bag jobs at homes of Weather Underground sympathizers in the New York area.
During his trial in 1980, Felt was unable to satisfactorily explain whose authority he was acting on, beyond a general instruction from Gray to hunt down the Weather Underground, "no holds barred." Convicted on a conspiracy charge, he was fined $8,500, only to be pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Prosecutors later described how agents dressed in old clothes or disguised as telephone repairmen gained access to apartments by picking the locks or paying bribes to landlords. Once inside the apartments, they rummaged through desks and closets, photographing old address books, love letters and pages from diaries, in an ultimately fruitless search for clues to the hiding places of Weather Underground fugitives.
"It's hard for me to see Felt as a hero," said Jennifer Dohrn, sister of fugitive Bernardine Dohrn and one of the targets of the New York break-ins. "At the same time he was whistle-blowing against Nixon, he was authorizing FBI agents to break into my apartment. It was outrageous."
Putting Felt to the Test
Gray brushed aside the White House's suspicions of Felt. He could not believe that his loyal, supremely competent deputy was capable of such betrayal. As an old Navy man, he was inclined to take subordinates at their word. Felt flatly denied leaking "anything to anybody" when Gray finally confronted him with the allegations in January 1973.
Nixon's anger over FBI leaks reached a boiling point in a Feb. 16, 1973, meeting with Gray. The president told the acting FBI director that he needed to stop being "Mr. Nice Guy" and clean out "the whole damn place." The Germans had the right idea during World War II, Nixon told Gray, according to a declassified White House tape. If they went through a town, and one of their soldiers was hit by a sniper, "they'd line up the whole goddamned town and say, until you talk you're all getting shot. I really think that's what has to be done." At the very least, Felt should be made to take a lie detector test.
Gray, who is preparing his own account of his relationship with Felt, declined a request for an interview through his family. But Ed Gray said that his father ignored the president's demand: "He wasn't going to polygraph his own people. It was all about mutual trust, and a presumption of regularity."
Gray's refusal to administer a lie-detector test to Felt did not prevent Felt from ordering one for at least one subordinate suspected of leaking to the press, FBI records show. "He was a very, very tough guy," recalled Bob Gast, a supervisor in the espionage and intelligence division. "God forbid if you made any mistakes."
A complicating factor, according to Gray's former chief of staff, David Kinley, was that Gray was awaiting his Senate confirmation hearing as director of the FBI. He could not risk Felt going public with all the dirt about the FBI at such a politically sensitive time.
"By January 1973, we knew that Felt was leaking information about the internal workings of the FBI in an attempt to undermine Gray," Kinley said. "By that time, however, it was too late to do very much about it."
The confirmation hearings were a disaster. Gray acknowledged early on that he had been sharing FBI interviews of Watergate suspects with the White House. The final blow to his nomination came after he acknowledged destroying files that had come out of Hunt's safe in the Executive Office Building. He resigned on April 27.
The night before Gray's resignation, Felt telephoned Woodward at The Post to tell him what had happened. As Felt relayed the story, Ehrlichman and Dean had urged Gray to ensure the files "never see the light of day."
For a few brief hours, Felt allowed himself to think that he had a shot at the number one position. Both Kleindienst and Gray recommended that he be named acting director. But Nixon was adamantly opposed to the idea, and turned instead to William D. Ruckelshaus, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In his autobiography, Felt notes proudly that he stood at "the top of the FBI pyramid" for 2 hours 50 minutes, the length of the interregnum between the resignation of Gray and the appointment of Ruckelshaus.
Felt and Ruckelshaus soon clashed. In his autobiography, Felt makes clear that he saw himself as the guardian of Hoover's FBI, and was "jarred by the sight of Ruckelshaus lolling in an easy chair with his feet on what I still felt was J. Edgar Hoover's desk." For his part, Ruckelshaus accused Felt of leaking information about illegal wiretaps to the New York Times.
Felt indignantly denied the charge. He in turn suspected Ruckelshaus of "playing politics" and buckling to White House demands, according to his autobiography. Ruckelshaus, now a venture capital consultant in Seattle, declines to detail the evidence against Felt, but says it was "certainly strong enough to convince me."
"I told him that I was very angry with him and suggested that he sleep on it overnight, and decide what he wanted to do," Ruckelshaus recalled. Felt resigned from the FBI the next day.
A Final Mystery
Retirement was painful for Felt. An inveterate gossip, he loved being at the center of things. After he retired, he continued to call former subordinates with tips and speculation about the latest Watergate developments, FBI records show.
Felt also kept in touch with his reporter friends. According to Woodward's account in "All the President's Men," he met with Deep Throat one last time in November 1973, five months after Felt's retirement. By now, Washington was abuzz with talk of secret White House tape recordings that could either exonerate Nixon or force him out of office. Felt told Woodward that "one or more of the tapes contained deliberate erasures."
As the search for Deep Throat turned into a Washington parlor game in the decades after Nixon's resignation, the November 1973 scoop deflected suspicions away from Felt. Several Deep Throat sleuths excluded Felt from consideration on the grounds that he could not have been informed about the erasures on the tapes, as he was long retired.
Even Nixon was fooled, according to his British biographer, Jonathan Aitken. Reassured that Felt could not have been the master leaker, he turned his attention to other candidates, including White House staff members.
In "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein leave the impression that the final meeting with Deep Throat was set up in the same manner as the meetings before Felt's retirement. "In the first week of November," they write, "Woodward moved the flower pot and traveled to the underground garage."
This version of events assumes that Felt kept Woodward's apartment under daily observation long after he left the FBI, at a time when they were living on opposite sides of the Potomac.
Woodward, who has written a book about his relationship with Felt, to be published in early July, declined to explain this curiosity except to say that everything he wrote in "All the President's Men" is "accurate."
A possible explanation is suggested by Scott Armstrong, a former Senate staffer who worked with Woodward on two books, including one about Nixon's final days as president. Armstrong says it is quite likely that Felt continued to have access to inside information months after he left the FBI. But he believes that Woodward employed a literary sleight of hand to protect the identity of his source.
Armstrong says that Woodward likely did move a flowerpot around on his balcony in early November 1973. There is no reason to doubt his assertion that he traveled to an underground parking garage around the same time. But neither event was related to his meeting with Felt.
To reach the retired FBI man, Woodward probably just picked up the phone or dropped by to see him, Armstrong said.
An ironic coda to Felt's double life as loyal FBI employee and master leaker came in November 1980, when he sat across a D.C. courtroom from Nixon.
The former president had come to testify at Felt's illegal break-in trial. Interrupted by shouts of "liar" and "war criminal" from spectators, who were swiftly bundled out of the courtroom, Nixon made clear that he believed that Felt had acted properly in approving the break-ins.
A few days later, Felt received a copy of Nixon's latest book, "The Real War." On an inside page, he found the following inscription: "To Mark Felt. With appreciation for his years of service to the nation. Richard Nixon."
Research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
� 2005 The Washington Post Company
Checkered Flag at United States Grand Prix, 2005
Think motor racing in the USA and you invariably think of ovals.
You think of NASCAR - stock car silhouettes of production models turning left a few hundred times at 200mph.
Or Indy-cars; F1 lookalikes lapping the 'Brickyard' at astonishing speeds in close company, slipstreaming in packs or slamming into concrete walls in spectacular fashion.
But you don't tend to think of Formula One.
In fact the category has a long and illustrious history in the US.
From the start of the World Championship in 1950, until 1960, the fabled Indianapolis '500' counted towards the world title. Few European teams entered, however.
To compete against the Indy 'specials' of the time was too costly, and perhaps the environment itself too alien, for the likes of Ferrari, Maserati and the other great teams of the 'fifties.
So our tale begins in the year 1959, with the first United States Grand Prix, held at Sebring, one of America's fine road courses.
That race was won by Bruce McLaren driving the revolutionary Cooper-Climax, the little machine that was then in the process of revolutionising Grand Prix car design for ever.
To emphasise the importance of the Cooper it is worth noting that veteran Maurice Trintignant finished second in a sister car, and Jack Brabham fourth in another.
The revolution had truly begun, for it had the engine behind the driver!
1960 saw the US GP at Riverside, another fine road course, with victory for Stirling Moss, before the race moved in 1961 to the circuit that was to become home to the race for the next twenty years, the legendary Watkins Glen.
'The Glen', as the circuit is commonly termed, became one of the best loved venues on the calendar.
Situated a few hours north-west of New York, the undulating course with swooping curves provided a challenge for the drivers and a delight for the spectators.
Interestingly, in 1971 the circuit was re-profiled, and became one of the first in the world to be designed using computer technology.
The parameters of contemporary Grand Prix machinery were fed into the computer to ascertain suitable curvature and situation of bends! (Incidentally, the computer calculated that cars would reach 178mph at the end of the the straight; Jackie Stewarts Tyrrell did exactly that.)
Following Innes Ireland's victory in a Lotus in 1961, the roll-call of winners at The Glen reads like a biography of World Champions; Jim Clark won in '62, then again in '66 and '67; Graham Hill scored a hat-trick in '63, '64 and '65; Jackie Stewart took '68 and '72, Jochen Rindt '69 and Emmerson Fittipaldi 1970.
The talented Frenchman Francois Cevert, a protege of Stewart at Tyrrell, took the spoils in 1971, and it was his death at The Glen in practice for the '73 race (won by Ronnie Peterson) that prompted Stewart to hang up his helmet.
1974 saw victory for wily Argentine Carlos Reutemann, and '75 for World Champion elect Niki Lauda, but 1976 saw a turning point in the history of Formula One in the United States.
With the popularity of the sport growing dramatically, due in part at least to the presence on the grid of the great Mario Andretti, America gained a second Grand Prix; The Long Beach Grand prix was born.
Long Beach lent itself perfectly to the glamour of the sport, the backdrop provided by the permanently berthed ocean liner Queen Mary, a glamourous reminder of glamourous times, standing tall and proud on the skyline, dramatic and picturesque.
And the circuit itself was tremendous, fast straights tempered with typical street circuit tight hairpins providing exciting racing.
The opening race ('76) was won by the genial Swiss Clay Regazzoni in a Ferrari (and it would be at this circuit, sadly and ironically, that he suffered the injuries that have confined him to a wheelchair ever since, just a few years later).
At The Glen, later in the season, James Hunt would take another victory in his successful quest for the title. '77 saw 'local' hero Andretti sweep all before him in his Lotus at Long Beach, with Hunt again triumphant at The Glen, while '78 witnessed Reutemann, now at Ferrari, take a US clean sweep with wins at both races.
1979 was another clean sweep year, this time the property of the mercurial Gilles Villeneuve, Canada's favourite son concluding the year with victory at The Glen, having won in California earlier in the season, while 1980, where Nelson Piquet took Long Beach, saw Alan Jones victorious at the final Watkins Glen Grand Prix.
The circuit owners could not afford to update the facilities as required, and one of the best loved tracks in the history of Grand Prix racing fell by the wayside.
To help form a picture, this is from a guidebook current in the early 1970's:
"To find out how important a race here is..... take a stroll through the spectator accomodation on the evening before the race. The Glen resembles a huge pop festival, thronged with young people, students and hippies, enjoying the last warm days of the year...."
And so to the 1980's, the decade where Formula One came into its own as a commercial sport. Money became the byword, hence F1 in the US went from the sublime of Long Beach, the season opener in '81 where Jones carried on as he left off, to the frankly ridiculous - the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
This 'circuit', actually a series of tight corners marked out by barriers and white lines in the car park (yes, honestly) of the Caesers Palace casino, ranks as arguably the most ridiculous venue to have hosted a World Championship event.
That it actually ran for two years is beyond belief. The drivers hated it, the spectators failed to show, and the 'racing' was non existent. For the record, Jones won in '81, Michele Alboreto in '82.
Long Beach '82 saw Niki Lauda, returning with McLaren after a two year absence, take the chequered flag, while the 1983 race saw one of the most unexpected performances of all time when the McLarens of John Watson and Niki Lauda, having qualified on the back two rows of the grid, came through the field to finish first and second.
Sadly, this was to be the final GP for Long Beach. (The circuit, in a modified form, was resurrected some years later for the Indy-car series.)
Joining the calendar in 1983 was the city of Detroit; Motor City. This street circuit, typically tight and slow, was a vast improvement on the Las Vegas effort, and would become the sole US GP from 1985. Alboreto, something of a US street circuit specialist, won in '83, providing Ken Tyrrell with the last victory his esteemed marque would ever attain.
The '84 Detroit race was won by Piquet, and joining it in a back-to-back US GP double came the Dallas GP. Mercifully short lived (this would be the only running), the race was won by Keke Rosberg, the canny Finn helped by an ice-cooled skull cap he had acquired in order to combat the searing heat.
Needless to say, Keke appeared somewhat bemused to be presented with the winners trophy by the actress who played the part of 'Sue-Ellen' in the popular TV series named after the host city. (And to think, now we have the King of Spain..)
Rosberg triumphed in 'Motor City' in 1985, before the US race became something of an Ayrton Senna benefit. The great Brazillian won the next three Detroit Grands Prix, before the circus abandoned the city in favour of a difficult round-the-streets affair in Phoenix, Arizona.
Here, Alain Prost spoiled Ayrton's party in 1989, with Senna claiming the 1990 and '91 events. Then, without fanfare, the United States Grand Prix was dropped from the calendar.
Falling interest was officially to blame (in fact, the latter running of the Phoenix event drew a smaller crowd than an Ostrich race run locally the same day), along with a lack of home drivers and an upsurge in profile for the 'domestic' Indy-car series.
In hindsight, perhaps a failure to settle in a permanent home, such as The Glen had provided for those earlier glorious twenty years, added to the public indifference to the fixture.
The remedy, in fact, was obvious, but it was to be the best part of a decade before a United Stated Grand Prix would once again be a part of the show.
And so the wheel turned full circle, and we found ourselves, in the year 2000, back at the hallowed ground that is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
This arena can easily justify the claim to be the most famous racing circuit in the world. For almost a whole century men have raced cars of some kind around the magnificent 'oval', testing skills untested anywhere else, facing challenges like the steep banking and the stupendously high average speeds, pushing the limits as far as one can go.
But here was something different; Formula One, in all its colourful and commercial glory, was finally coming to rest at what has to be its spiritual United States home.
The circuit itself is impressive, with a new 'infield' built inside the great circuit itself, utilising one of the wonderful banked corners to provide the longest full-throttle experience in a modern F1 car in the world today.
And the fans come too, the sport having undergone something of a resurrection in recent years, perhaps thanks to the split in the ranks that tore Indy-car racing into two separate factions a few years ago.
The first year of running produced an apt result; Michael Schumacher, current king of F1, winning in style.
2001 saw a great race, the soon to be retired Mika Hakkinen taking a deserved and popular victory, a far cry from the acrimony of the following year, where Ferrari attempts to 'stage manage' a dead heat resulted in a narrow victory for Rubens Barrichello, the whole affair leaving an unpleasant taste so soon after the farce in Austria earlier in the season.
2003 was another Schumacher benefit, as was 2004, and so to the present.
It is heartening that Formula One appears, finally, to have settled at Indianapolis, for this is where it belongs and, in fact, where it has always belonged.
The great Bill Vukovich, one of the finest 'Indy' drivers of US lore, twice winner of the '500' during the 1950's (and, therefore, two times Grand Prix winner) would surely approve of the arrival of the World Championship at his beloved stalking ground.
It was, after all, the arrival here of the Lotus and Cooper rear-engined marvels during the 1960's that proved to the Indianapolis specialists that rear-engined was the way to go, moving the trend away from the magnificent Offenhauser front-engined beasts that had henceforth dominated America's Great Race.
The final word goes to Jim Clark, Scottish sheep-farmer extraordinaire, who ventured 'across the pond' with a Lotus to take on the 'Indy' boys in 1962, and finished an impressive, some say unlucky, second. Here, he is talking with the '500' in mind, but the sentiment is the same:
"....the golden reward offered at Indianapolis, and to me Indianapolis is almost indescribable. It is one big holiday fair and motor race rolled into one, a national institution with the circuit almost a shrine. I was totally unprepared for it and, as it happened, Indianapolis was totally unprepared for me."
Woe betide those who may be unprepared now
Start: Michael Schumacher takes the lead
F1 > United States GP, 2005-06-19 (Indianapolis Motor Speedway): Sunday race
PEOPLE: BERNIE ECCLESTONE
Name: Bernie Ecclestone
Nationality: Great Britain
Bernie Ecclestone,Born in Ipswich in Suffolk, Ecclestone was the son of a trawler captain and he spent his childhood in the town of Wangford, near Southwold. The family then moved to Bexleyheath in southeast London and Ecclestone left school at 16 and went to work at the local gasworks where his father had a friend who was in charge of the chemical laboratory. He was employed as an assistant there.
His passion was motorcycle scrambling and he began competing in the immediate postwar era. As machinery was scarce he began buying and selling motorcycle spare parts, doing the business during his lunch break. He built up the spares business and then went into business with Fred Compton to form the Compton & Ecclestone motorcycle dealership. He later bought out Crompton and built the business into one of Britain's biggest motorcycle dealers. In 1949 he tried his hand a four-wheeled racing in the 500cc Formula 3 series but after a big accident at Brands Hatch, in which he ended up hitting a car in the car park behind Paddock Hill Bend, he decided to concentrate on business which grew to include the Weekend Car Auctions firm (which he eventually sold to British Car Auctions), loan financing and property.
In 1957 Ecclestone returned to the sport as manager of Welsh racing driver Stuart Lewis-Evans. He bought the F1 Connaught team and ran the cars for Lewis-Evans, Roy Salvadori, Archie Scott-Brown and Ivor Bueb. He even tried to qualify one of the cars himself at Monaco in 1958.
At the end of that year Lewis-Evans, who was by then driving a Vanwall, suffered serious burns when his engine blew up during the Moroccan GP and he later died as a result. Ecclestone abandoned the sport again but in the early 1960s his friendship with Salvadori, who was by then running the Cooper team, led to a meeting with Jochen Rindt. Ecclestone became Rindt's manager and business partner and in 1968 and 1969 he was involved in running the Lotus Formula 2 factory team which was running Rindt and Graham Hill.
In September 1970 Rindt was on his way to winning the World Championship for Lotus when he was killed in an accident at Monza. He became posthumous World Champion. Ecclestone again quit the sport but at the start of 1972 he decided to buy the Brabham team from Ron Tauranac and set about turning it into a winning force. In an effort to get the sport more organized he was one of the founders of the Formula 1 Constructors Association in 1974, along with Colin Chapman, Teddy Mayer, Max Mosley, Ken Tyrrell and Frank Williams. He led the team owners in a battle with the FIA in 1975 for a new system of entries and appearance money being paid to all the teams. In 1976 the teams won the battle and there began to be trouble over the sale of TV rights. In January 1978 Ecclestone became chief executive of FOCA with Mosley as his legal advisor and a new battle began with the FIA's new affiliate FISA which was the brainchild of Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre. The battle for the commercial control of the sport continued until March 1981 when the Concorde Agreement gave FOCA the right to negotiate TV contracts. That year Brabham won the World Championship with Nelson Piquet driving. There would be a second victory in 1983 with BMW engines.
At the end of the first Concorde Agreement in 1987 Ecclestone became the FIA Vice-President in charge of Promotional Affairs and began to spend less time on Brabham. At the end of that year the team lost its sponsorship and Ecclestone decided to take a year out of racing. He sold the team to Alfa Romeo in preparation for the new Procar Championship. When the new series failed to get off the ground Alfa Romeo had no use for the team and so it was sold to a Swiss businessman Joachim Luhti.
The sale of the F1 TV rights originally belonged to all the teams but in the early days the business was risky and not very profitable. Ecclestone gradually distanced himself from the other team owners and eventually they allowed him to establish Formula One Promotions and Administration to manage the rights for them. TV revenues were split with 47% going to the teams, 30% to the FIA and 23% to FOPA. FOPA, however, received all the fees paid by promoters. In exchange for this FOPA paid prize money to the teams.
In 1995 the FIA decided to grant the commercial rights to F1 to Formula One Management for a period of 14 years, in exchange for an annual payment from Ecclestone. The F1 teams were upset as they found that they had lost the rights. McLaren, Williams and Tyrrell refused to sign the new 1997 Concorde Agreement but the other eighth teams backed down.Eventually an agreement was reached for a 10-year deal with the teams and a 15-year deal with the FIA. Once this has been agreed Ecclestone began to plan for the flotation of his company.
The European Commission began an investigation into the Formula 1 business and eventually this led to the flotation being cancelled and in 1999 Ecclestone issued a $1.4bn Eurobond, secured on the future profits of the company. Later that year he sold 12.5% of the business to the venture capitalist company Morgan Grenfell Private Equity for $325m. In February 2000 sold another 37.5% to the San Francisco investment company Hellman & Friedman for $725.5m. These two then combined their shares and sold them to Thomas Haffa of EM.TV in exchange for $1.65bn in cash and shares.
When EM.TV ran into trouble the shares passed to Leo Kirch who acquired another 25% of the business leaving the Ecclestone Family with only 25% of the business but despite heart surgery in June 1999 Ecclestone remains firmly in charge of F1.
Schumacher, World Formula 1 Grand Prix Driving Champion, 2004
F1 begins to count the cost of its darkest hour
20/06/05
After the shame of the day before, F1 woke on Monday to begin counting the cost of what is being described as 'the most catastrophic public relations disaster in the 56-year history of the official world championship.' Or, to put it another way, F1's darkest hour.
The sight of 14 F1 cars pulling off the track at the end of the formation lap for the U.S GP and returning to the Indianapolis pits instead of racing is already being regarded as the death knell of the sport in the American market.
'Simply stated, this race is done. Forget what the contract says about future events,' read the Indianapolis Star�s obituary.
Tellingly, Speedway President Joie Chitwood immediately announced that the circuit held no commitment to invite F1 back in 2006.
"We're as much a victim of what transpired today as the fans are," he said. "Mr. Ecclestone is aware of our position and our unhappiness today."
Even Bernie, desperate to break the American market, admitted the sport's future on the other side of the Atlantic is bleak.
"I'm furious at the stupidity of it all. There should have been a compromise but we could not get one. I tried a million things and thought that if we could get them on the grid we were halfway there. But it did not happen," he complained. "We were just starting to build a great image in America on TV and with the fans. All of that has gone out of the window."
Such sombre realisation spread as far as the drivers.
"I find it hard to put into words how damaging this is for F1. It throws into doubt the future of the race in US," admitted David Coulthard. "Even if we do come back, half the crowd in the stands won't."
"It is a disaster for Formula One in the United States," added Nick Heidfeld.
The first bills for F1's most shameful episode are expected to be issued in the next few hours.
'Sponsors will be lining up to claim millions in compensation from the teams that did not run, while Bernie Ecclestone, the sport's ringmaster, could also be liable to pay huge compensation,' reported The Times.
The scene of this shameful debacle, dare F1 forget, was the most ligitous nation on the planet.
Although there was no immediate announcement that refunds would or would not be issued, on Sunday night a notice on the front door of the Speedway's administration building indicated more information about refunds would be available on Monday.
With Bernie conceding "they've been cheated", F1 will be under huge pressure, both moral and legal, to issue full refunds to all the Indy spectators on Sunday.
Michelin, however, are likely to bear the immediate brunt of F1's shame.
The FIA are expected to charge the French tyre manufacturers, whose admission that their rubber was unsafe to use at Indy precipitated Sunday's shambles, with bringing the sport into disrepute this week.
The withering response of Charlie Whiting, the FIA's race director, to Michelin�s request for a chicane to be introduced, in which he scorned their failure to supply "correct tyres", is likely to be a mere taster of the FIA's response.
'We are very surprised that this difficulty has arisen,' he continued. 'As you know, each team is allowed to bring two different types of tyre to an event so as to ensure that a back-up (usually of lower performance) is available should problems occur. It is hard to understand why you have not supplied your teams with such a tyre given your years of experience at Indianapolis.
'That the teams you supply are not in possession of such a tyre will also be a matter for the FIA to consider in due course under Article 151c of the International Sporting Code.'
Under the terms of Article 151C, penalties can be applied for "any fraudulent conduct or any act prejudicial to any competition or to the sport in general".
Michelin's apparent incompetence could not be worst timed, coming just days after the FIA published proposals to limit tyre supply to just one organisation for 2008 and beyond.
Moreover, 'Michelin's failure to supply its teams with safe and durable tyres less than two weeks after it was warned by the FIA not to sacrifice safety for performance [after Kimi Raikkonen's tyre failure at the Nurburgring] could force the French tyre company's withdrawal from the sport,' noted The Guardian.
However, in mitigation, Michelin publicly announced their mistake nearly 48 hours before the grand prix began.
That the sport could then not reach a compromise for the sake of its reputation and image damns those far beyond the confines of Michelin.
"The bottom line is Michelin made a mistake. But after that the FIA had it in their hands to find a solution and ensure we all raced out there. The most important people, the fans, have been forgotten in all of this," noted Coulthard.
Jacques Villeneuve, meanwhile, blamed Ferrari for their failure to agree to the introduction of a chicane: �We could have raced with a chicane, if a chicane had been put before the banking, but Ferrari didn't accept."
Michael Schumacher's comment, "I don't know what Michelin's problem is, but this wasn't our problem," spoke volumes about Ferrari's intransigence ahead of F1's race of shame.
F1's blame game is set to explode in the coming days but the damage has already been done. On Sunday this was a sport that imploded.
The cost, which will perhaps never be fully appreciated, will be borne by all those shamed by their association to this reprehensible debacle
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
FIA statement on US GP
Racing series F1
Date 2005-06-20
2005 UNITED STATES GRAND PRIX
Formula One is a sporting contest. It must operate to clear rules. These cannot be negotiated each time a competitor brings the wrong equipment to a race.
At Indianapolis we were told by Michelin that their tyres would be unsafe unless their cars were slowed in the main corner. We understood and among other suggestions offered to help them by monitoring speeds and penalising any excess. However, the Michelin teams refused to agree unless the Bridgestone runners were slowed by the same amount. They suggested a chicane.
The Michelin teams seemed unable to understand that this would have been grossly unfair as well as contrary to the rules. The Bridgestone teams had suitable tyres. They did not need to slow down. The Michelin teams' lack of speed through turn 13 would have been a direct result of inferior equipment, as often happens in Formula One. It must also be remembered that the FIA wrote to all of the teams and both tyre manufacturers on June 1, 2005, to emphasise that "tyres should be built to be reliable under all circumstances" (see correspondence attached).
A chicane would have forced all cars, including those with tyres optimised for high-speed, to run on a circuit whose characteristics had changed fundamentally -- from ultra-high speed (because of turn 13) to very slow and twisting. It would also have involved changing the circuit without following any of the modern safety procedures, possibly with implications for the cars and their brakes. It is not difficult to imagine the reaction of an American court had there been an accident (whatever its cause) with the FIA having to admit it had failed to follow its own rules and safety procedures.
The reason for this debacle is clear. Each team is allowed to bring two types of tyre: one an on-the-limit potential race winner, the other a back-up which, although slower, is absolutely reliable. Apparently, none of the Michelin teams brought a back-up to Indianapolis. They subsequently announced they were flying in new tyres from France but then claimed that these too were unsafe.
What about the American fans? What about Formula One fans world-wide? Rather than boycott the race the Michelin teams should have agreed to run at reduced speed in turn 13. The rules would have been kept, they would have earned Championship points and the fans would have had a race. As it is, by refusing to run unless the FIA broke the rules and handicapped the Bridgestone runners, they have damaged themselves and the sport.
It should also be made clear that Formula One Management and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, as commercial entities, can have no role in the enforcement of the rules.
-fia-
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The Wailing Wall In Jerusalem
By ALAN WOLFE
Ever since the first Jew arrived on American shores 350 years ago, one question has persistently been asked but never definitively answered. Should Jews accommodate themselves to the culture of the United States, even if so doing carries the risk of serious, sometimes fatal revisions to the traditions that have long defined Judaism? Or should preservation of the traditions come first, even if that means never really fitting into American culture as other groups, primarily Christian, have done?
In recent times, from roughly the 1940s to the 1970s, the predominant response among American Jews was assimilation and cultural adaptation. For many that process continues unabatedindeed, to the point of intermarriage, conversion to Buddhism, adherence to nonbelief, or any one of the myriad ways in which Jewish identity has come to be an ethnic marker, at best, and a label to be avoided, at worst.
But there has also taken place in recent years a searching inquiry about the costs of assimilation. By no means confined to the ultra-Orthodox, some American Jews have wondered out loud what it means to be Jewish unless one takes one's obligations to the traditions seriously. Among those for whom Jewish identity is first and foremost, there exists a palpable sense that American culture is, on the one hand, too seductive and, on the other, too frivolous. People of this persuasion are inclined to believe that earlier generations of assimilated Jews were too willing to leave their heritage behind and too sanguine about what modern, secular, liberal, and, above all else, assimilationist America offered.
While insisting that Jews as individuals offer an American success story, for example, the law professor Alan M. Dershowitz argued as the last century came to a close, in The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century (Little, Brown, 1997), that "American Jews -- as a people -- have never been in greater danger of disappearing through assimilation, intermarriage, and low birthrates." The distinguished group of scholars who contributed to Manfred Gerstenfeld's American Jewry's Challenge: Addressing the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) also say that Jews face a set of new problems -- including increasing anti-Semitism, hostility toward Israel on the campuses, and secularization among younger Jews -- that make older models of assimilation problematic. Suggestions about what to do about all that differ according to the suggester: Focus more of Jewish philanthropic efforts on Jewish-community building, turn more attention to efforts to halt intermarriage, put resources into defending Israel, and so on.
As much as I appreciate that effort to insist on Jewish identity, I want to make a case for all the things that American culture would lose if American Jews were to turn their backs on it. Jews made so many contributions to American culture during their "Golden Age" of assimilation that it is difficult to imagine what American life would have been without them. Those contributions, furthermore, raise the question of what kind of culture the United States would have if American Jews turn increasingly inward in the future. Four cultural contributions stand out.
The first was in the arts, especially in the musical theater. It remains a fact of still surprising significance that Jews played a role in celebrating the statehood of a frontier territory like Oklahoma: As Andrea Most points out in her lively history of the Jewish contribution to musicals, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard University Press, 2004), Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein drew on the themes of Jewish exile to depict the evolution of American culture in Oklahoma! According to Most, the message they conveyed was: "Cowboys must settle down and become farmers; the frontier must be 'tamed' into a useful agricultural resource; young people must marry and bring up new Americans."
Together with others like Irving Berlin and George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed the American musical from dancing chorus lines to something resembling European opera. Still, one wonders how many Americans who woke up to a beautiful morning understood that their entertainment was being created by people who, not that long before in America's past, would have been viewed as suspicious because of the mere fact that they were not Christian.
In her book, Most calls attention to the political liberalism that shaped the themes of so much of Broadway musical comedy, culminating in the sermon against racial discrimination put to unforgettable melody in South Pacific. By the time Jews began to arrive in the United States in significant numbers in the early 20th century, they had already established an affinity with political liberalism in Europe. In the United States, the fit was even more perfect. Was it because the United States took such a significant shift to the left during the Great Depression and the New Deal that Jews began to feature so prominently in the liberal life of the nation? Or was it because Jews featured so prominently in the liberal life of the nation that the country shifted to the left?
In either case, a second way Jews had an impact on America was by exercising influence in the Democratic Party, as well as in the interest groups and ideological configurations closely associated with it. Early in the 20th century, Louis Brandeis weaned America from its faith in laissez-faire with legal briefs documenting the actual conditions workers faced on the job. By mid-century, Jews had become prominent actors in the struggle for civil rights. And during the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League played a role in protecting the First Amendment's commitment to separation of church and state. Identifying so closely with liberal causes, Jews became, along with African-Americans, the most reliable Democratic voters in America. Ultimately, for the first time in American history, a Jew, Joseph Lieberman, became the party's candidate for vice president in 2000.
A third distinctive contribution made by Jews to American culture was psychoanalysis, which in many ways was linked to Jewish liberalism just as Jewish liberalism was linked to Broadway theater. Psychoanalysis, as Eli Zaretsky has written in Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Knopf, 2004), contains both an element of social control and an element of liberation, but it was primarily the latter strain that influenced American culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the work of thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rieff, the ideas of Sigmund Freud permeated the very fabric of American popular and academic culture. Large numbers of Americans began to find in Freud what they increasingly failed to discover in Marx: a way to transform oppressive institutions and practices into an expansion of the sense of personal fulfillment.
Without the arrival of psychoanalysis on these shores, it is hard to imagine how the popular-front politics of the 1930s could have been turned into the identity politics of the 1990s. Each new group that found itself victimized -- women and homosexuals most significant among them -- looked to the Freudian tradition for explanations of the problem that, as Betty Friedan famously put it, had no name. (Although Friedan herself, I hasten to point out, dismissed Freud as hopelessly biased against women.)
All of these contributions made by Jews to American culture were accompanied by a fourth overlapping trend: the transformation of American academic life. Whether you admire his policies or consider him a dangerous threat to the republic, you have to recognize, as he himself does, that George W. Bush might not have gotten into Yale if he had been born a few years later. To their eternal credit, beginning in the 1960s academic leaders like Yale's president, Kingman Brewster Jr., understood that their institutions could not continue to be great universities unless they looked beyond a small number of WASPy prep schools and began to admit students based on merit.
Jews would not only be admitted to universities that had once excluded them; they would also, by the fact of their admission, make the academic research university into a new kind of institution. Peer review, strict standards for tenure, highly selective admissions processes, financial aid based on need -- all those facts of the sociological life in the modern research university follow from the decision to use achievement, rather than background, as the basis for the distribution of academic rewards. When research universities came under attack in the 1960s by radical students, many of whom were Jewish, those who rose to defend the university -- Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Bell, among others -- were also Jewish.
A t the present moment all four of those cultural venues, which once seemed to reflect the Jewish contribution to American culture, are in either serious decline or in the process of transforming themselves into something radically different from what they were during the decades from the 1940s to the 1970s. Let me proceed in reverse order.
The effort to establish merit as the main operating principle by which American academic life would be governed lasted about one generation. Ascription has once again become an important element in the way universities understand their mission, even if the ascribed circumstances that give preference these days tend to be those marked by experiences of racial discrimination and poverty more than by breeding and class. There are many sides to the affirmative-action issues -- and Jews have been predominantly featured on all of them. But there is also a way in which the decision by elite universities to open themselves up to underrepresented groups is perceived by many Jews as an effort to establish quotas, raising the question of whether the kind of university they had come to love still exists.
Freud could never have known that pharmacology would be able to perform, at lower cost and with more rapid results, what his method promised, but once it did, psychoanalysis lost much of the mystique that had made it so popular in the post-World War II era. Not only did Freudian methods lose scientific credibility, but they also lost their cultural cachet. To be sure, thinkers like Jacques Lacan continued to inspire theorists in both Europe and the United States, but the great moments of Freudian literary criticism and historical speculation had come to an end. One of the most popular kinds of therapy these days can be found in the self-help books written by Christian evangelicals, not exactly a terrain in which a specifically Jewish contribution can be noted.
Jewish liberalism continues to flourish; not even President Bush's strong support of Ariel Sharon produced a significant shift in the 2004 presidential election. Yet there is no doubt that American politics has turned decidedly more conservative in the years since 1980 -- or that Jewish intellectuals of a neoconservative bent have played a major role in that change.
There are many explanations for the rise of neoconservatism. Race was clearly a factor; important Jewish intellectuals, including the future best-selling author Allan Bloom, left Cornell University in the early 1970s, for example, in dismay over what, in their view, was the president's failure to confront armed black students. And no one can doubt the importance of foreign-policy considerations to the rise of neoconservatism, especially as the Middle East has assumed such importance for American national security. Still, it would have been difficult to predict that the near axiomatic association between liberalism and America identified by Louis Hartz and Trilling would be broken -- or that Jews would play such a prominent role in breaking it.
The Jewish contribution to the Broadway stage is an exception to many of the trends I have been describing here; it has lasted well beyond South Pacific, culminating in the astonishing work of Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and, most recently, Tony Kushner. Still, as vibrant as the works of those musical and artistic geniuses are, Broadway theater itself is increasingly running revivals of the successful musicals of the Jewish golden age, including Oklahoma! Broadway today is having a difficult time finding what Jewish composers and lyricists of yesterday mastered: music that is neither highbrow and inaccessible nor lowbrow and unfulfilling.
I do not claim to be making a causal argument here, to the effect that an increasing tendency among Jews to withdraw from mainstream American culture in favor of Jewish identity is responsible for the artistic collapse of Broadway, the accession to power of Tom DeLay and J. Dennis Hastert, Freudianism's collapse of credibility, and the turn to affirmative action. Some areas of American life in which Jews once played a major role -- the kind of comedy that produced Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks, for example -- are even more alive now than a few decades past, as the success of a Jerry Seinfeld or a Joan Rivers testifies. No one could seriously claim, moreover, that Jewish contributions to literature are poorer because writers like Allegra Goodman and Nathan Englander pursue specifically Jewish themes.
Each of the developments I have traced has independent causes: Pharmacology did more to harm psychoanalysis than any cultural transformations, for example, and neoconservatism became more attractive because liberals, Jews and non-Jews alike, really did become elitist in the way they treated issues like crime, race, and poverty.
Still, the decline of so many cultural arenas in which Jews once played such a crucial role is more than coincidental. Jews from Central Europe brought the United States forms of high culture -- philosophy, classical music and opera, literary modernism -- that, when blended with American concerns, produced something entirely new. Who today could envision a philosopher of Hannah Arendt's accomplishments writing for what was a quintessential WASP magazineThe New Yorkeror a character like the late Saul Bellow's Herzog writing letters to Arendt's teacher, Martin Heidegger? Jews from Eastern Europe gave us movie classics like Casablanca, an all-American love story taking place in one foreign country occupied by another one. That kind of blending would be threatened if Jews become so focused on their own identity that they lose a zest for blending with the non-Jewish culture around them.
Each of the facets of American culture upon which I have focused was to one degree or another marginal to American life before massive Jewish immigration in the 20th century. We were generally an anti-intellectual culture that looked to Europe for the idea of the research university; our political system was more likely to have been dominated by Harding-Coolidge-Hoover conservatives than FDR or JFK liberals; psychoanalysis was too foreign to be viewed as attractive to Americans; and our styles of popular theater lacked musical and lyrical sophistication. Jews transformed themselves by adapting to American culture so enthusiastically, but they also helped transform America. There really was a golden age of American culture, and it was a direct product of the blending of immigrant experience with classic American themes.
New ways will be found to revitalize American culture as new immigrants arrive; we are already witnessing an extraordinary flourishing of literature produced by Indian and Asian writers, a blending of Latino and American culture in popular music, and fascinating examples of religious syncretism. There are many golden ages, and a new one is growing out of the multicultural energies unleashed in the wake of the immigration reforms of 1965.
Still, there is something to be said for the particular kind of contribution that earlier generations of Jews brought here. Shaped by Enlightenment ideals, it was liberal in the best sense of the term. One need not subscribe to Freud's ideas to recognize the importance of helping individuals to shape lives under their own control. It gave a whole new meaning to middlebrow art. It helped make American universities the model for the rest of the world to follow. It would be a great shame if such cultural contributions were lost.
No matter how important it may be for Jews to focus on their own identity so that their Judaism does not disappear, I hope they do not do so in ways that would further undermine the survival of a form of American culture that speaks to the mind and the heart the way the culture of the great Jewish-American synthesis did over the past half-century.
Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and professor of political science at Boston College. His most recent book is Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005).
