Reading Bob Woodward

He did call Felt after his indictment -- and again, after his conviction -- to express regret. The conversations were difficult. They were two ambitious men, forever linked yet headed in different directions, one up, one down.

For 18 years after Felt's 1981 pardon, they did not talk at all.

Meanwhile, the curious pursued the mystery that "All the President's Men" had created: Who was Deep Throat?

For Woodward, keeping Felt's secret was both an ethical obligation and a professional asset. Powerful people talked to him, in part, because he'd proved he could keep his sources to himself. "This is a 'Deep Throat' conversation," he'd sometimes say. He lived in fear that Felt's name would come out.

Then-Assistant Attorney General Stanley Pottinger took him to lunch one day and told him he knew Deep Throat was Felt from observing his testimony in a grand jury proceeding. "I was jumping out of my skin but trying to keep a poker face," Woodward writes. He refused to confirm Pottinger's deduction. Pottinger kept the secret because he didn't believe anonymous sources should be revealed.

Post columnist Richard Cohen guessed Deep Throat was Felt and said he was going to write a column saying so. Woodward lied to him to head him off.

James Mann, a former Post reporter and friend of Woodward's, wrote a smart piece for the Atlantic concluding that Deep Throat had to have been from the FBI -- in part, he said, because he'd heard Woodward speak in 1972 about having a source there.

Woodward told Mann he didn't think he'd been so careless, but even if he had, it wasn't right for Mann to reveal those conversations. The friendship cooled.

When former White House counsel Leonard Garment wrote a book that fingered Nixon staffer John Sears, Woodward shot down the theory. Not long after that, with the pool of possible Deep Throats shrinking, he adopted a policy of not commenting at all.

'I Used Mark Felt'

The endgame began with an article in the Hartford Courant, in 1999. Felt was quoted. "No, it's not me," he said. Woodward saw the piece and decided he should get in touch.

Still, he procrastinated. In January 2000 he finally phoned Felt in Santa Rosa, Calif., where he lived with his daughter, Joan. After identifying himself, he told Felt that he would be taping the call.

In the conversation that ensued -- and the ones that occurred when Woodward followed up by traveling to Santa Rosa -- Felt was sometimes lucid, sometimes not. Readers with elderly friends or relatives will understand. Woodward sounds calculating at times, focused on his own interests. More often, he seems uncertain what to do, and genuinely moved.

He was relieved to be welcomed as a friend again -- even by a man whose memory was largely gone.

A couple of years after his California trip, he got calls from Felt's son and the family's lawyer. Felt had told them he was Deep Throat, they said. Woodward consulted his wife, his own lawyer and Ben Bradlee, his old editor at The Post, who'd also kept the secret all those years. He concluded that Felt was in no shape to release him from his pledge of confidentiality, no matter what he'd told his family.

This meant he couldn't even confirm to Joan Felt that her father was Deep Throat. As they talked, he told her she shouldn't try to "read" him on the subject.

It's an amazing piece of advice, coming from a man who deconstructs his sources' words for a living. But Woodward has worked hard to be straightforward in "The Secret Man," even when he looks bad doing it. "The portrait of me is not all that admirable," he writes near the end of the book. "I was pushy, secretive; I used Mark Felt. . . . But I wanted this account to be the antidote to Watergate, which had always been so convoluted, things always being concealed."

He's tried. But we're going to have to wait for an insightful Woodward biographer to understand the secret man that he himself remains. And that biographer, when the time comes, might want to remember Deep Throat's advice:

There's always a payoff for pushing hard.