After the Fact

by Owen J. Hurd

  With the help of Medgar Evers of the NAACP, Meredith appealed to Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP’s legal defense team. But even the attorney whose brilliant handling of the Brown v. Board of Education case, which in 1954 resulted in the ruling that secured for Meredith the legal right to attend any school he wanted, was taken aback by Meredith’s audacity. Concluding, “This guy’s gotta be crazy,” Marshall assigned the case to legal counsel, Constance Baker Motley.

  Meredith lost his first legal battles, but Motley eventually won a federal court appeal. Despite the efforts of Mississippi’s grandstanding governor, Ross Barnett, to block the schoolhouse door, Meredith was finally admitted on September 30, 1962. Many people may remember the tense but relatively peaceful public school standoffs in other southern states, for example, the Little Rock Nine and George Wallace’s stand at the University of Alabama, but Meredith’s enrollment triggered a massive riot. Irate segregationists attacked the five hundred federal marshals on hand with bats, rocks, and even guns. When the smoke cleared, two people were dead and more than a hundred marshals were injured. Though largely forgotten today, the riot was, according to author William Doyle, “the biggest domestic military crisis of the twentieth century.” Kennedy sent another five thousand federal troops to make sure Meredith was safely enrolled, and a detail of armed federal marshals escorted Meredith on campus for the rest of his tenure.

  Perhaps the reasons few know or talk about these events today have to do with the afterlife of the drama’s protagonist, the inscrutable James Meredith. The same traits that enabled him to penetrate the University of Mississippi—courage, determination, and fierce independence—would take him on an unpredictable journey, confusing and sometimes alienating those who would otherwise identify and sympathize with his plight. Meredith resisted the pull of the civil rights movement from the very beginning. In an editorial printed in the Ole Miss student newspaper, Meredith claimed that his mission was personal, not social. He was merely interested in getting the best education possible for himself, he said, and professed “little concern for the phenomenon of integration and desegregation.” (It’s worth noting that these claims run contrary to other comments he made before and after his successful bid to integrate the University of Mississippi.)

  Meredith graduated in three semesters, having transferred numerous credits earned at a variety of other institutions over the years. In a final attempt to foil Meredith, Governor Barnett attempted to block Meredith’s graduation on a technicality, but the State College Board voted 6–5 in Meredith’s favor.

  Meredith next studied in Nigeria for a year. Returning to the United States, he enrolled in Columbia University’s law school in 1966. But before classes even began, he embarked on his quixotic “March Against Fear,” a one-man trek from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, designed to promote voter registration in the African American community. He didn’t get far. On the first day of the march, the lone Meredith, flanked by a handful of reporters and photographers, was shot by a white assailant. Associated Press photographer Jack Thornell snapped a Pulitzer Prize–winning image of a prone Meredith writhing in pain from buckshot wounds to the head, neck, and legs.

  Meredith was visited in the hospital by a phalanx of civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael, who were at the time vying for opposing factions of the civil rights movement. Taking up Meredith’s cause, they continued the march without him. Having recovered from his injuries, Meredith joined the march on its last day, when marchers entered Jackson. During the month-long march, more than two thousand African Americans had registered to vote.

  In a sign of things to come, in 1967 Meredith ran as a Republican against Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a popular African American U.S. Representative to New York. Inexplicably, he also endorsed Ross Barnett in his reelection campaign for governor of Mississippi.

  Meredith graduated from law school in 1968 but never sat for the bar or practiced law. Instead, he performed a series of unrelated jobs over the years, such as tree farmer, nightclub manager, financial adviser, and campaign manager. The University of Cincinnati once hired Meredith to be a guest lecturer, but decided not to renew the contract after several unorthodox—and poorly attended—lectures.

  In 1989 Meredith’s career took one of its strangest turns, when he took a job as a domestic policy adviser to U.S. Senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms. A staunchly conservative Republican, Helms was a persistent critic of civil rights initiatives who spoke out in favor of South Africa’s apartheid government and who openly opposed the Martin Luther King national holiday. Two years later, Meredith went too far even for the most accommodating civil rights leaders when he endorsed the campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman running for governor of Louisiana. At one point, NAACP leader Benjamin Hooks bemoaned that Meredith had “obviously lost his way—if, in fact, he ever had one.”

  Ever difficult to pin down, Meredith offered various explanations for his counterintuitive maneuvers. At times, he claimed that civil rights members were blinded by their own prejudices against these misunderstood politicians. At other times, he suggested that any actions perceived as contrary to the civil rights movement were motivated more by his Choctaw Indian heritage than his African American heritage. Other times still, he implied that maybe he was cannily trying to keep his friends close and his enemies closer or simply using Helms for unfettered access to Library of Congress archives.

  Of his endorsement of Duke, he said, “I would much rather sit at the table with a former Ku Klux Klansman swearing that he would never do anything to my people than to have him in the bush trying to shoot somebody.”

  One thing is for sure: Meredith was consistently opposed to affirmative action programs. “Our main roadblocks in the ’90s,” Meredith wrote in Newsweek magazine, “are ones that have been created by our own so-called leadership.” He believed that programs intended to assist blacks in making social advances did so at the expense of their self-sufficiency.

  In 1997 Meredith founded the Meredith Institute to provide young black males with courses designed to teach them how to speak proper English.

  “The No. 1 reason” that blacks lag behind socially and politically, Meredith claimed, “is because 99.9 percent speak black English, which is not proper English.” The Meredith Institute no longer seems to be an active enterprise, having lost its nonprofit status.

  A Washington Post reporter in 2002 found Meredith back in Jackson, Mississippi, at the time the proprietor of a hopelessly ill-conceived auto rental and taxi service business. Meredith talked about his life and ambiguous legacy. A month later he would return to the University of Mississippi for the unveiling of a memorial to him on the fortieth anniversary of his crowning achievement, the integration of public education in Mississippi. Meredith attended but did not address the assembled masses. For his money, the proof of the pudding had been tasted earlier in the year, when his son, a graduate of Harvard University, earned a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Mississippi, graduating with highest honors.

  LOOSE ENDS

  Having lost his bid to be reelected governor in 1967, Ross Barnett returned to practicing law in Jackson, Mississippi. Many of his clients were African Americans who had difficulty finding legal representation. Lest this be interpreted as a change of heart, Barnett continued to preach the benefits of segregation throughout his life and was known to tell explicitly racist jokes in public. Barnett once pronounced that giving in to desegregation was tantamount to self-destruction. “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration,” he claimed. “We will not drink from the cup of genocide.” Barnett died on November 7, 1987, at the age of eighty-nine.

  Meredith’s attorney in the integration fight of 1961–1962, Constance Baker Motley, went on to become the first African American woman to serve as a federal judge, when Lyndon Johnson appointed her to federal court in New York State. She was also the first African American woman to
become Manhattan borough president, to serve as a New York state senator and to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, where she won nine of the ten cases she brought to the nation’s highest court. Motley died of congestive heart failure on September 28, 2005.

  John Doar, who worked in the civil rights division of Kennedy’s Department of Justice, was one of the government officials who escorted Meredith throughout the violent ordeals of 1962. During the Watergate scandal in 1974, Doar helped write the articles of impeachment presented by the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.

  Deep Throat Busted

  On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into an office in the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington, DC. Junior Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was sent to the courthouse to perform what promised to be a routine bit of reportage. He soon learned he had instead just been dispatched on what would turn out to be the most sensational news scoop of the decade. For, it wasn’t just any office—it was the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The burglars weren’t run-of-the-mill hoods, either. They were found in possession of lock-picking tools, walkie-talkies, and sophisticated electronic bugging equipment.

  Questioned by the judge, one of the defendants identified himself as James McCord, a name that meant nothing to Woodward. But when the judge asked for the defendant’s profession, McCord dropped the bombshell.

  “CIA,” he said.

  “Holy shit!” Woodward gasped.

  Back at the newspaper, Woodward and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein learned that several of the burglars were former CIA operatives, some with ties to the White House, and at least one on the payroll of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Over the next two years and two months, Woodward and Bernstein would unravel the layers of this political scandal, discovering evidence that the break-in and subsequent coverup were authorized by members of the White House staff. It would change their lives and the lives of political figures at the highest levels of government.

  On August 9, 1974, to avoid the ignominy of becoming the first U.S. president successfully impeached by Congress, Richard Nixon instead became the first U.S. president to resign from office.

  Woodward and Bernstein wrote the bestselling book All the President’s Men, which chronicled the tortuous path of their investigation, following leads, many resulting in dead ends, others paying off. They were aided by persistence; dumb luck; and a benevolent secret source, code-named Deep Throat because he refused to go on record. Instead, he provided “deep background”—verification of hunches, cryptic encouragement to follow certain leads—doled out in furtive late-night meetings at an underground parking garage.

  In 1976 the book was made into a motion picture starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Jason Robards won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of crusty Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. Hal Holbrook’s turn as Deep Throat also created a sensation, as did the famous line, “Follow the money,” which was invented by the film’s screenwriter, William Goldman, who won the Academy Award for his screenplay.

  For the next thirty years, the authors have continued to ply their craft—Woodward more successfully—all the while honoring their pledge to conceal Deep Throat’s identity, until his death or until he released them from their oath. It remained the best-kept secret in Washington history—that is, until a 2005 article in Vanity Fair magazine spilled the beans. It turned out that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, second in charge at the FBI. Felt had been in line to take over when J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972. But Nixon passed him over, putting an outsider, L. Patrick Gray, in charge. Whether miffed by the snub or, as Felt claimed, offended by Nixon’s attempts to use the FBI as the White House’s covert political instrument (Hoover’s FBI had refused to do Nixon’s dirty work), Felt leaked damaging information to Woodward, a reporter with whom he’d become acquainted years earlier.

  As long as he remained anonymous, Deep Throat was lionized by people on all points of the political spectrum—especially the left—who decried Nixon’s illegal intelligence gathering through so-called black bag operations. As the shadowy figure divorced from contextual reality, Deep Throat seemed like a hero.

  The real Deep Throat, Mark Felt, was another matter. At about the same time that All the President’s Men was hitting movie screens across the country, Felt was in deep legal jeopardy. Under new FBI chief Gray, Felt had orchestrated a series of his own black bag operations, employing the same means that he so deplored in the Nixon White House, but for different ends. At the same time that he was squealing to Woodward, Felt instructed FBI operatives to break into private homes of friends and relatives of suspected members of the Weather Underground Organization, a radical antiwar group implicated in bombings of government buildings. Felt hoped to uncover information that would lead to the whereabouts of Weather Underground fugitives.

  In 1976 government investigations spearheaded by the new Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter uncovered the FBI’s illegal activities. Felt appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation to publicly defend the tactics. From the beginning, Felt never denied authorizing the break-ins. In fact, he said he was “proud of what I did.” In what must have seemed like a bizarre twist to the two allies in bringing down the corrupt Nixon administration, Woodward and Felt were thrown together once again, but in starkly different circumstances. Woodward and another Washington Post reporter went to interview Felt about the allegations. Again, Felt was forthcoming.

  “You’ve got to remember that we were dealing with murderers, terrorists, people who were responsible for mass destruction…the key word is violence. They were planning mass destruction…. Please emphasize the viciousness of these people. We were dealing with fanatics.” Somehow, Felt failed to see the parallels between his actions and Nixon’s. The difference he believed was that Nixon broke the law to further his political agenda, whereas Felt did so to protect the safety of U.S. citizens and preserve public order.

  The federal grand jury wasn’t buying it. On April 10, 1978, Deep Throat was indicted for conspiracy “to injure and oppress citizens of the United States who were relatives and acquaintances of the Weatherman fugitives, in the free exercise and enjoyments of certain rights and privileges secured to them by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.”

  The ironies didn’t stop there. At Felt’s 1980 trial, Nixon not only testified on behalf of his old nemesis but also contributed money to Felt’s defense fund.

  What isn’t clear is why. A review of subsequently released Nixon White House tapes proves Nixon knew as early as October 9, 1972, that Felt was leaking to reporters and may have been Deep Throat.

  “Now why the hell would he do that?” Nixon fumed.

  “It’s hard to figure,” admits Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “Maybe he’s tied to the Kennedy set….”

  “Is he a Catholic?” Nixon asked.

  “I think he’s Jewish,” Haldeman guessed (incorrectly).

  “Christ! I’m not going to put another Jew in there. Mark Felt is certainly a Jewish name. Well, that could explain it, too.”

  Whether Nixon let bygones be bygones or was acting in a purely self-serving capacity, on the witness stand he defended Felt’s use of dirty tricks to track down homegrown terrorists. Employing the sort of warped logic that helped him justify his own crimes, Nixon testified that as long as it was authorized for a “good cause,” an action that “would otherwise be unlawful or illegal becomes legal.”

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that Nixon’s testimony failed to sway the jury, and Felt was convicted of a felony on November 6, 1980. Republican President Ronald Reagan pardoned Mark Felt on March 6, 1981. Shortly thereafter, a bottle of champagne was delivered to Mark Felt’s house, along with a note saying, “Justice ultimately prevails.” It was signed Richard Nixon.

  The Vanity Fair article disclosing the identity of Deep Throat represents one of the few times Bob Woodward was ever
scooped in his successful career. In anticipation of Felt’s death, Woodward had long been working on a book about Deep Throat, which he quickly released in the wake of the unveiling. In The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat, published several months later, Woodward offers a tale of regret, sadness, and frustration. He can’t help wondering if he took advantage of Felt in some way and hated to see it happening all over again, this time at the hands of Felt’s family. Clearly suffering from dementia, the octogenarian agent was now being trotted out before the media by relatives hoping to cash in on the story before Deep Throat’s death. Felt died in 2008 at the age of ninety-one.

  Woodward’s book revealed some other interesting facts about the thirty-year mystery of Deep Throat’s identity. Though many tried, nobody successfully deduced who it was. The only people who knew Deep Throat’s identity were Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Bernstein apparently told his then-wife, Hollywood writer-director Nora Ephron, as well as his son, Jacob, who blabbed it to a friend at summer camp. The only other person who found out did so accidentally.

  As one of the prosecutors working on the case against Mark Felt, attorney Stanley Pottinger was questioning Mark Felt before the grand jury. During the deposition, Felt made an offhand remark that he spent so much time at the White House that some speculated he was Deep Throat. It was one of Felt’s counterintelligence tricks—to throw off suspicion by casually acknowledging it.

  At the end of the deposition, Pottinger invited grand jurors to pose their own questions.

  “Were you?” one of the jurors asked Felt.

  “Was I what?”

  “Were you Deep Throat?”

  Caught off-guard, Felt stammered, “No.”

  But Pottinger was convinced that he had inadvertently made a major discovery. There was only one problem. Felt was still under oath. If he was indeed Deep Throat, he could be convicted of lying to a grand jury. Taking pity, Pottinger approached Felt and off the record reminded him of his oath. Offered an opportunity to change his response or request that the irrelevant question and answer be stricken from the record, Felt opted for the latter. Pottinger later confronted Woodward with his theory in a private meeting. Woodward refused to confirm the story. Unswayed, Pottinger graciously promised to keep the information under his hat. Presumably, it was enough for him to know the truth about one of the most enduring secrets in American politics.