Felt and Woodward
From the "Wolf Blitzer Reports" staff
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An award-winning journalist's relationship three decades ago with source and reporter ultimately led to the downfall of a presidency.
But as Bob Woodward writes in Thursday's Washington Post, that relationship didn't blossom overnight.
Woodward recounts first meeting W. Mark Felt in 1970 in a waiting room outside the White House situation room. Woodward was a Navy courier and Felt was a rising official in the FBI.
Woodward describes Felt as distant and formal, yet friendly and even paternal.
Woodward was looking for career guidance and asked for Felt's phone number.
Over the course of the next year, Woodward says Felt became his mentor and Woodward, now a cub reporter, began to learn about Felt -- that he was an admirer of then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and deeply suspicious of the Nixon White House.
By 1972, Woodward made it to The Washington Post and Felt, now No. 2 at the FBI, had already tipped Woodward on important stories.
Felt guided Woodward and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein along the path that led to the White House.
"I called Felt and said, 'Is there something here?' and he said, 'There's no doubt Howard Hunt is involved.' So with that kind of checking and backstop, you can go with the story, as Bradlee did, above the fold saying this is the first White House connection," Woodward told NBC Thursday.
As depicted in the movie "All the President's Men," they would meet only in the middle of the night in a parking garage.
Woodward could call a meeting -- only if it was urgent -- by moving a flower pot on his balcony.
Felt would summon Woodward by having his copy of The New York Times intercepted and page 20 circled.
Bernstein describes the meetings as furtive and brief.
"We had very little time -- Bob and Felt in the garage together had very little time to have meetings and conversations in the course of a couple years. The object was to get as much information, as much context, as much certainty of things we had obtained elsewhere," Bernstein told NBC.
Woodward says he felt apologetic for pressing his source, but he says Felt encouraged him to persevere, which both reporters did all the way to the historic day in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned.
To this day, Woodward and Bernstein remain somewhat puzzled by Felt.
"We had no idea of his motivations," Bernstein said. "And even now some of his motivations are unclear."
Yet they defend his role in uncovering one of the greatest scandals ever to rock the White House.
"This is the old crowd kind of re-launching the wars of Watergate, and saying let's make the conduct of the sources we used the issue, rather then their own. The record of Watergate crimes is staggering, voluminous and irrefutable" said Woodward.
