Flower pots, hand-drawn clocks

When Bob Woodward wanted to meet Deep Throat, he’d move a flower pot with a red flag to the rear of his apartment balcony. Even more my...

When Bob Woodward wanted to meet Deep Throat, he’d move a flower pot with a red flag to the rear of his apartment balcony. Even more mysteriously, when his top-secret source wanted to meet him, Woodward would open his New York Times, check page 20, and look for a hand-drawn clock to tell him when to rendezvous at an underground parking garage.

Now, it seems like detail from a corny potboiler. But in the 1970s, with public skepticism of the government peaking, it did not seem paranoid to take such extreme precautions to avoid detection. The Vietnam War was going badly. Protesters were filling the streets. A presidential campaign was raging. There were lingering suspicions over the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

‘‘There was a powerful feeling of cynicism and skepticism about the government,’’ said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian now working on a book about Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger. ‘‘There was a kind of pot that was brewing with all these unpleasant doubts and questions.’’

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W Mark Felt did not single-handedly bring down the Nixon administration. But he helped. And when he was dubbed ‘‘Deep Throat’’ in the book All the President’s Men by Woodward and fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein — and played by actor Hal Holbrook in the movie of the same name — he became a symbol of one of the most tumultuous periods in US political history.

As the No. 2 official at the FBI, Felt was helping to lead the federal investigation of the June 17, 1972, break-in and illegal wiretapping at Watergate. But he was also leaking information to the Washington Post, providing direction, confirming or denying information and sometimes encouraging them to push harder in their investigation. The story behind a Post article that ran Sept. 18, 1972, just days after the indictment of seven Watergate burglars, illustrated Deep Throat’s role.

At the time, the White House had dismissed the incident as the work of a rogue group whose importance was being exaggerated by Democratic presidential candidate George S McGovern. But Woodward and Bernstein continued to chase the origin of the money that paid for the bugging and break-in at Watergate. The men wrote the first paragraph of a story suggesting that top Nixon officials were involved in funneling money to the burglars. Woodward called Deep Throat, read him the story, and asked for his reaction.

‘‘Too soft,’’ Deep Throat told Woodward, according to All The President’s Men.’ ‘‘You can go much stronger.’’ Two days later, after further reporting, the men wrote the Sept. 18 story. It reported that two of Nixon’s top campaign officials had financed the wiretapping operations from a secret political fund. It was the first story that provided a concrete indication that burglary and bugging was only a small piece of a much larger puzzle, one that extended to the White House.

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