Tonight, CNN is rerunning a Larry King Live from last Tuesday on which King interviewed Mark Felt, the gent who was recently revealed to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's infamous source, "Deep Throat." The interview was pre-taped (i.e., not aired live) at Felt's home and it comprised part of the show. The rest of the hour was a live panel discussion with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and members of Felt's family.
The panel discussion is of little interest due mainly to King's lazy interviewing style. At one point, he asked, referring to Felt, "What manner of man is this?" Which might have been an interesting question if he'd directed to Woodward, who had the friendship with Felt and who met him in that parking garage many times and who visited him recently. But King put it to Bernstein, who never met Felt and who speculates with as much authority as you or I might have had. Then King asked Ben Bradlee if he ever had any doubts about Felt's validity and he lets Bradlee get away with talking about how perfectly accurate Felt was as a source. The moment cried out for an interviewer who would cite some of the questionable "facts" Deep Throat is quoted as providing in All the President's Men…but King obviously didn't know about them.
By contrast, in the interview with Felt, King asked most of the right questions, perhaps because he was reading them (in some cases, as if he'd never seen them before) from notes prepared by someone else. The discussion, which looks like it was heavily edited, is actually a pretty decent chat with Felt, who's a lot more lucid than one might expect from some recent accounts. It also may be the only one we're ever going to get so if the story of Deep Throat and Watergate interests you, you might want to catch the replay tonight. Felt praises J. Edgar Hoover and even Richard Nixon…and while I got the feeling that some of his answers were learned for the interview (the whole show is about promoting a new book), what emerges is a somewhat different set of motives than we might have expected. Felt has bad words for no one, which you have to suspect was not his attitude back when he was helping Woodward. He seems to have had a powerful devotion to the law, which more than any goals involving politics or personal benefit may have been his dominant reason for doing what he did.
In the panel discussion, Carl Bernstein couldn't resist making a couple of comments about how he wished more public servants today were like Mark Felt, placing duty to the truth above duty to the boss. A lot of us feel that way.