Reading Bob Woodward

Woodward's side, however, is laid out for the world to examine.

Felt "seemed like a man who dreaded my presence," Woodward writes of an early visit to his source's Virginia home. Concerned about the repercussions should he be discovered to have aided The Post, he set up the famously elaborate system under which they were to communicate: The need for a meeting was to be signaled by moved flower pots or marked newspapers; the meetings themselves were to be held late at night in a Rosslyn parking garage.

What's more, he said, he would not give Woodward new information: "The trick was to use him as a backstop or second source for information and conclusions gathered elsewhere."

To read "The Secret Man," however -- along with "All the President's Men," Woodward and Bernstein's mesmerizing 1974 book on their Watergate reporting -- is to notice that Woodward wasn't afraid to challenge Felt's rules. He telephoned Felt when he really needed to. And during his very first visit to the underground garage, at a point where his source had suddenly stopped talking, the reporter "grabbed his arm and said we were playing a degrading chickenshit game pretending that he was not passing original, new information to me."

"Okay," Felt said -- and gave him the new information he needed.

Without question, this was great reporting: It's not easy to be so aggressive without scaring off a source. And should one have qualms about applying this much pressure, Woodward has a justification at hand. Deep Throat himself had encouraged him to push harder.

"Felt said I shouldn't worry about pushing him," he writes. "The payoff for pushing hard was evident in his own career."

To read the two books is also to notice something else about Woodward. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, his future influence would come more from writing books than from daily reporting. In the white hot center of the still-breaking Watergate story, he was already laying the groundwork for this shift.

"All the President's Men" includes a remarkable passage in which he and Bernstein tell the tale of the worst reporting mistake they made. They had correctly named Nixon's powerful chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, as one of the people controlling a secret fund used to pay for the Watergate break-in. But they had misunderstood a source and attributed this information, in part, to grand jury testimony that didn't exist.

The source denied that he had testified about Haldeman -- and all hell broke loose. It could have been the end of the Watergate story, or at least the reporters' part in it. Nonetheless, Woodward and Bernstein -- who had stayed up most of the night working on a book proposal -- decided not to cancel their lunch with Simon & Schuster head Dick Snyder, "but to hurry through it instead."

In "The Secret Man" there is an even starker example of the tension between their Watergate reporting and their work on the book.

They'd signed a contract for $55,000 -- a larger sum then than it is today, though hardly a fortune. But the day-to-day story stayed so hot that a year later, they had almost nothing written. With their book deadline approaching, they decided to write what they knew best: not a conventional narrative of White House actions and reactions, but "the story of covering Watergate as Post reporters." Naturally, they wanted to include Woodward's secret source.