New book explores origins of Watergate’s Deep Throat

Author and journalist Max Holland accessed the Ransom Center’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein Watergate Papers while researching his book Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (University Press of Kansas, 2012), which is now available. Holland describes his work at the Center:

The genesis of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat began when I read a news item in 2007 about the opening of materials relating to Mark Felt in the Woodward and Bernstein Papers at the Ransom Center. Having done research in archives for years, one thing I’ve learned is that newly opened papers invariably contain new insights into a historical event, no matter how much it has already been written about.

I wasn’t disappointed after perusing the collection.

The single-most important documents, of course, were Bob Woodward’s typewritten notes from his encounters with W. Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat. Other Woodward notes from contemporaneous interviews with L. Patrick Gray III and Donald Santarelli were useful too. Early drafts of All the President’s Men, particularly those portions about Deep Throat that were excised from the published book, illuminated the Woodward/Felt relationship. Finally, an interview that Carl Bernstein and Woodward conducted with the late Howard Simons was vital for my book, since he was the only Post editor I could not interview myself.