IT'S 1937, AND Lt. Col. Jean-François Mercier is the French military attaché in Warsaw. A minor nobleman and former cavalry officer, he’s rather restive in his largely desk-bound assignment—as one would expect from a man decorated with the Croix de Guerre, a passing acquaintance of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle is taller, but otherwise not a patch on Mercier. "He had fair skin, pale, and refined features, all of which made him seem younger than he was, though these proportions, classic in the French aristocrat, were somehow contradicted by very deep, very thoughtful, gray-green eyes. Nonetheless, he was what he was, with the relaxed confidence of the breed and, when he smiled, a touch of the insouciant view of the world common to the southern half of France." Insouciant enough, that is, to prefer Simenon to Stendhal, and intelligent enough to enjoy both.

An old war wound causes Mercier to limp. Nevertheless, he’s able to hold his own on the tennis court at doubles. More to the point, he’s capable of slipping into the Black Forest to spy on German tank maneuvers. Although a widower and the father of two grown daughters, he’s only 46. For all his courtliness and sense of duty, he remains, let us say, as manly a man when he takes his uniform off as when he keeps it on. He is, after all, a Frenchman—50 million of whom can’t be wrong (well, other than about the Maginot Line).

Even if Mercier weren’t French, he’d still be an Alan Furst hero, which basically amounts to the same thing.

The heroes of Mr. Furst’s preposterously readable espionage novels of the entre-deux-guerres could form a rump League of Nations—Soviet and Italian journalists, a Bulgarian NKVD agent, a Dutch sea captain, a Hungarian businessman, a Polish officer. At heart, though, they’re all of them as French as Mercier: lovers of good wine, good food, good women and, certainement, a good cause. "Mercier felt the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air—air scented by black tobacco and fried potatoes and charged with the restless melancholy of the city at the end of its day." Listen closely, and behind that description you can almost hear the Hot Club of Paris. Look closely, and you can almost see the marvelously atmospheric Julien Duvivier or Marcel Carné films of the period, like Pépé le Moko or Quai des brumes.

There’s action in Mr. Furst’s novels, of course—a tryst here, an interrogation there—but relatively little plot development. True, Night Soldiers (1988), Dark Star (1991) and The Polish Officer (1995), the first three of the 10 novels Mr. Furst has set during the ’30s and World War II, were almost muscle-bound with intrigue. But then he realized what made his books special were mood and setting. He could rely on readers’ knowledge of the actual history to provide much of the development his narrative needs. So now he gives us a train of vignettes and episodes separated by well-oiled elisions. (A most handsomely appointed train: "The dining car, each table lit by candles, was even more romantic than [Mercier’s] compartment—well-dressed couples and foursomes gathered over white tablecloths, conversation low and intimate, the rhythmic beat of wheels on rails perfecting a luxuriant atmosphere of suspended time.")

Rather than Eric Ambler thrillers or Graham Greene entertainments, the comparisons Mr. Furst’s novels most often draw, they might more accurately be seen as extended series of Talk of the Town pieces. There’s the same soupçon of irony, the expert deployment of detail and, above all, a thick helping of knowingness—only with military secrets, machine pistols and Gestapo agents instead of celebrity quirks or outer-borough oddities.

Like a good Talk piece, Mr. Furst’s novels are suave, expert and very nearly weightless (which is both a compliment and not). The Spies of Warsaw is no exception. It almost misses the point to go into particulars. There’s a beautiful Franco-Polish lawyer. A disaffected former Nazi is tracked down in Czechoslovakia. A pair of Soviet spies flee Stalin’s purges. And so on.

These are merely ingredients, though, and the soufflé Mr. Furst has cooked up is what matters. "The evening of the twenty-ninth found [Mercier] stretched out on the chaise longue in the study, finishing The Red and the Black, a swing band on the radio, a fire in the fireplace, a brandy at his side. The cook had left earlier." Of course she had. Who needs a cook with Alan Furst wielding his whisk and dagger?

Mark Feeney, an arts writer for The Boston Globe, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

There are not-crooks, and then there are not-crooks.

Richard Nixon carried that famously self-proclaimed status to the grave. How long Conrad Black will keep it is for a federal jury to decide. The Canadian media tycoon is currently on trial in Chicago on multiple counts of fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Lord Black alludes to that litany of charges (the last two of which carry a nice whiff of Watergate) in the acknowledgments to his massive, muscular and somewhat demented life of the 37th President. With uncharacteristic delicacy, he mentions his “very distracting circumstances” and “serious judicial problems.” Being charged with criminal behavior is not the worst preparation for the Nixon biographer.

In writing about Nixon, Lord Black joins a very long line of predecessors. All Presidents are worthy of our attention—but some better repay that attention. It’s often preferable that a President not be all that compelling (witness the genuine feeling displayed in so many of the tributes offered Gerald Ford last December). Certainly, Nixon would have been better off—the country and world, too—if he hadn’t had the unique ability to be both bull and toreador in a blood sport largely of his own making. But he did, and in a sense still does: Frost/Nixon is the toughest Broadway ticket of the season, and now we have this quartet of new books.

As Presidential subjects go, not even Nixon can compare to Franklin Roosevelt. Lord Black’s previous book was a biography of F.D.R. This makes him doubly suited to write about Nixon. Criminality helped end Nixon’s Presidency; Roosevelt helped drive it. He was the President under whom Nixon came of political age and, as such, the one Nixon measured himself against. For all that he had highly charged relationships with several other Presidents—Truman, who loathed him; Eisenhower, who elevated him; Kennedy, who defeated him; Ford, whom he elevated—it was the relationship with F.D.R. that did the most to form him.

“Relationship,” at least in the interpersonal sense, may be the last word ever associated with Richard Nixon. He was the Melvillean “isolato” as most powerful man in the world. Richard Reeves knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the subtitle for his fine study President Nixon: Alone in the White House. Yet it’s a relationship that defines Robert Dallek’s exhaustive Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, which concerns itself with the most important relationship of Nixon’s Presidency—and very likely the most singular between any President and subordinate in U.S. history. A far different relationship concerns Jules Witcover in Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. If Mr. Dallek’s book is a tragedy of global proportions, Mr. Witcover’s verges on lugubrious comedy as it details the now largely forgotten pas de deux between not-crook President and nolo contendere Vice President.

Elizabeth Drew’s Richard M. Nixon has a good deal about Nixon’s dealings with both men, of course. Her book is part of the American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. When Nixon lived in New York in the early 80’s, his townhouse backed onto Schlesinger’s. Strange things like that kept happening to Nixon. (When he moved to New York in the early 60’s, the apartment he bought was in the same building as Nelson Rockefeller’s.) He had a stunning propensity for the bizarre, something Ms. Drew wastes no time acknowledging. She begins her book thusly: “Richard Milhous Nixon was an improbable President.” That sentence is indicative of her restrained, nicely compressed style. That style is also rather gray, though she does have the occasional purple patch. Sometimes the purple justifies itself. “Nixon’s tumultuous presidency,” she writes, “was for those of us who lived through it the most riveting of our lifetimes, and, perhaps, in all of American history.” Other times, she just gets carried away. The members of the House Judiciary Committee, Ms. Drew declares, “rose to the task before them and some of them became giants—it seemed at times akin to the Founding Fathers—though in most cases and under other circumstances they were actually not even close to that stature.”

Nothing was more improbable about Nixon’s Presidency than his partnership with Henry Kissinger. The two men did great and lasting things together, also ghastly and inexplicable things. Squabbling and scheming, they tried to turn the making of U.S. foreign policy into their own personal prerogative, a secret society of two—and, for a time, effectively succeeded. It was folie a deux masquerading as Realpolitik. Their collaboration has been much written about. What distinguishes Mr. Dallek’s book is how extensively he’s drawn on the vast archive these two otherwise most secretive of men left: not just documents but also Nixon’s tapes and Mr. Kissinger’s transcripts of his telephone conversations. Although Mr. Dallek frequently acknowledges their great foreign-policy strengths and the often-impressive results that came of them, the overall portrait is damning in the extreme. Both men display a degree of duplicity, deviousness and personal instability that would seem utterly implausible—except for the overwhelming evidence of it they presented against themselves.

An oddity of Mr. Dallek’s book is that throughout it he refers to Mr. Kissinger as “Henry.” Lord Black, whose tone is that of a man on a first-name basis with the Deity, does not indulge in such familiarity. That’s one of the few indulgences he doesn’t allow himself in The Invincible Quest. He has an often-hilarious weakness for extraneous information and weirdly pedantic parentheticals. Having brought up the all-but-nonexistent possibility that Lyndon Johnson might have declined the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1964, Lord Black points out that his Presidency would have been in that case “the third shortest in history, after William H. Harrison and James A. Garfield.” Or, after quoting Nixon’s 1965 warning that a North Vietnamese victory would mean “The Pacific will become a Red Sea,” Lord Black offers the useful clarification: “He meant ideologically, not geographically.”

Lord Black (one keeps wanting to call him “Lord Copper”) also has a penchant for dumbfounding obiter dicta. Had Ike not chosen to run for re-election, he declares, Nelson Rockefeller—who had yet to hold any elective office—was Nixon’s “only plausible rival” for the nomination. Replacing John Foster Dulles with Nixon as Secretary of State “would have been a brilliant appointment.” Or if, rather than resigning, “Nixon had mounted a fighting defense on the facts, the animosity of most of the press, the hypocrisy of many of the Democrats, and the precedent of former presidents, he might have clawed his way back to a chance of finishing his term.” Lord Black neglects to add that Pat Nixon was Marie of Romania.

Still, he can bring the reader up short with a startling insight—or, rather, he does so frequently, and every once in a while for the right reasons. There’s a jarring brilliance to his noting “the dark, ironic, recondite cynicism that was often one of [Nixon’s] most attractive qualities.” The man is nothing if not a lively writer, and his prose often achieves a kind of loony splendor. In noting the replacement of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s delegation to the 1972 Democratic convention, Lord Black describes Jesse Jackson as a “rutting panther of an African-American nonconformist clergyman and racial militant.” The subject of the 1960’s excites in him a goatish sententiousness. “Oral contraception vastly facilitated premarital sex among young people, relieving their ancient risks and frustrations, and leading to a great deal of sexual exhibitionism, much of it agreeable to most people—thigh-high skirts and exiguous coverage of the most erogenous female areas.”

As a phrasemaker, Lord Black could have taught even Spiro Agnew a thing or two. That’s no small tribute. Hard to believe though it may now seem, such Agnew sound bites as “effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism” briefly made him the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee in 1976 and a cynosure of American conservatism. (Ronald Reagan? He was the guy who’d raised taxes in California and made abortion legal there.) Nixon enjoyed the benefit of his rhetorical muscle-flexing, but quickly realized what an unimpressive No. 2 he’d saddled himself with.

That unimpressiveness colors Very Strange Bedfellows. There’s little Mr. Witcover can do to make Agnew interesting or his career seem other than grimly absurd. Soon enough, Nixon began scheming to unburden himself of Agnew. Quoting a White House tape, Mr. Witcover describes Nixon calling up Presidential counsel John Dean to find out what the 25th Amendment says about the naming of a new Vice President. Ever cagey, Nixon didn’t want Mr. Dean to infer why he was interested. “[O]ne of my daughters is doing a paper,” he explained. At least he didn’t say King Timahoe had eaten her homework.

Mark Feeney is the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief (University of Chicago Press).

Above all, there’s the pair of pieces on which his reputation rests. The two-part 1978 profile of Ahmet Ertegun is a tour de force that’s even better than its title, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse.” Two years later came “Within the Context of No Context,” a one-of-a-kind meditation on America falling and television rising, which is almost as good as its title. “Context” is, among many other things, surely the only jeremiad (and make no mistake, that’s the tradition it belongs to) ever to dwell at length on People magazine, the Pointer Sisters, the 1964 World’s Fair and the impossibility of now wearing a fedora without irony.

Trow had an impeccable, fedora-filled pedigree. This is where the earlier of his two author photos comes in. It appears on the dust jacket of Bullies (1980), a collection of stories; on the book version of Context (1981); and on an oddly inert novel, The City in the Mist (1984). Trow, who also wrote several plays and had two film scripts produced, could pass in that early photo for a more effete version of Dick Cavett in his who-ever-heard-of-Charlie-Rose heyday: grinning, blond, suffused with a wholly unaffected preppie enthusiasm. It was a look he came by naturally. The scion of a well-to-do publishing family, Trow grew up in the pages of a Cheever gazetteer: Greenwich, Cos Cob, Bedford. He went to Exeter, like his father. At Harvard, he was president of the Lampoon. Later, he helped found National Lampoon.

Trow’s Harvard timing could hardly have been better. The West Point class of 1915 came to be known as “the class stars fell on,” owing to the many cadets who later became generals; the Harvard class of 1965 was the one Eustace Tilly fell on. Its members included Trow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Jacob Brackman, Jonathan Schell and Wallace Shawn (who qualifies as a legacy, if not a hire). After a stint in the Coast Guard, Trow remained on staff at The New Yorker until he quit in disgust over Tina Brown’s depredations. His Times obituary quoted her arch response to his resignation: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.” Trow had the last laugh. Soon after Brown decamped for Talk, he was back in The New Yorker with two long pieces excerpted from what would be his final book. My Pilgrim’s Progress (1999) simultaneously sharpens, expands upon and occludes the themes of “Context.” It says a great deal about Trow’s capacity to astonish that the hero is someone as square as Ahmet Ertegun is hip: Dwight Eisenhower.

My Pilgrim’s Progress bears the other Trow author photo. He’s bald now, not so much aged as worn down. Boyish charm has given way to a well-muscled wariness. He looks far more like a truck driver than a New Yorker writer, let alone one so highly mannered. There was such rigor to Trow’s stylization that it became an almost solid thing on the page, as likely to affect content as form. He became increasingly fond of coming up with highly opaque categories, or “Big Topics,” as he calls them in Progress. A mild tendency in “Context,” this fondness for categorization verges on mania in Trow’s last book: “Big Human Interest,” “Modern Academic Vectors,” “Mainstream American Popular Artifact.” They sound like a parody of sociological jargon, except that Trow deploys them in all sincerity. Part of what makes his writing so unnerving at times is its blending of earnestness and hauteur. And the hauteur can be breathtaking. He was that rarest of things, a true American aristocrat.

Mandarin prose and mandarin pose often coincide, of course. What’s rare is their sharing the page with an abiding sense of civic virtue. That idea of patriotic engagement sets him apart from Henry James, with whom one might think Trow would neatly align. James often seemed slightly pained at being American. Trow would have fit right in as a James character, except that he would have terrified James. Even if there weren’t something forbidding about the intensity of scrutiny in Trow’s best writing, the fierceness of its intelligence, James would have been confounded by so profound an attachment to the public realm. That attachment may have been the least complicated thing about so exquisitely complicated a man—unexpected, yes, but also direct and heartfelt. Edmund Wilson once described Robert E. Lee as having belonged to “the Roman phase of the Republic.” However anachronistic, Trow belonged to it too, even if he lived in an age closer in spirit to Roman decadence. Robert E. Lee, after all, never went to Studio 54 with Diana Vreeland for Bianca Jagger’s birthday party.

America, Trow wrote in the class report for his 15th Harvard reunion, “is a glory of a country, and a glorious idea for a country, and we would be saved now by the love of it if the idea of the love of it hadn’t been strip-mined and left ugly.” Imagine that Henry Adams’ and Edith Wharton’s friendship had taken an intimate turn; Trow could have been their grandson. The dates line up nicely. So do the obsessions and the sorrows.

Mark Feeney is the author of Nixon at the Movies (University of Chicago Press). Next spring he will be Robbins Professor of Writing at Princeton.

Andreas Killen definitely thinks so. An assistant professor of history at the City College of New York, he has a good eye for detail, an impressive appetite for research and a weakness for overstatement. All come into play in 1973 Nervous Breakdown, which bears the presumably unique distinction of sharing a title with a Lester Bangs rock review (of the Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup). It’s not unique in making great claims for the 70’s: Bruce Schulman and David Frum, to name two, have published books doing so. And they’re absolutely right. The 60’s may get all the attention, but it’s that decade’s polyester-clad kid brother that saw the real transformation of American culture. One of the emblematic 60’s lines is Bob Dylan’s “But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have / To stand naked” (the words don’t scan any better sung). With Watergate, it came to pass. However badly, the Vietnam War did end. Feminism came of age. And Hollywood demonstrated the wonders of trickle-down aesthetics.

Mr. Killen’s first chapter gives a good sense of his cannily associative method: He begins with the news on Jan. 1 of the plane crash that killed Roberto Clemente, the star Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder. This takes him to the opening later that year of Dallas/Forth Worth Airport. He then dwells on the growing dissatisfaction with air travel, also noting that 1973 saw the first female copilot in an airliner and the first male flight attendant. Skyjackings proliferated, which provides his next section. Finally, Mr. Killen ponders the year’s most-talked-about book, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.

As an organizing principle, this is smart, stimulating and sometimes startling. (Who knew that DFW hired the pioneering earth artist Robert Smithson as a consultant? Smithson, by the way, died in a plane crash—and, yes, that was in 1973.) It can even be illuminating. There’s an eerie suggestiveness in the fact that the World Trade Center, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, opened four months before the final decision to level Pruitt-Igoe, the notorious St. Louis public-housing project, also designed by Yamasaki. Too often, though, Mr. Killen seems to be playing a critical-studies parlor game: six degrees of 1973 separation. (And it’s not always 1973. The first demolition at Pruitt-Igoe took place in 1972. Nixon didn’t resign, of course, until 1974. It was in 1969 that Andy Warhol founded Interview, whose status as the Almanach de Gotha of 70’s celebrity culture accounts for the artist’s presence in Mr. Killen’s alliterative subtitle.)

Furious, often incongruous juxtaposition is the engine that drives 1973 Nervous Breakdown. It’s not furious enough. For an enterprise like this to succeed, it needs a crazed sense of obsession, the centrality of 1973 as not just construct but compulsion, a calendrical equivalent to Rocket 00001 in Gravity’s Rainbow: A screaming comes across the sky, and that screaming needs to be 1973. Instead, Mr. Killen has hyperbole do the work of mania. “These days,” he tells us, “scarcely a week goes by without some further reminder [of the 70’s].” That depends on how scarce your definition of “scarcely” is. “Lance Loud’s coming out on television [as part of the PBS reality-TV series An American Family] would become one of the landmark events in the medium’s history.” Well, there are landmarks and there are landmarks. Blaxploitation movies were “immensely popular.” Yes, in the sense the New York Dolls enjoyed “wild popularity” (the better-selling of their two albums peaked on the U.S. charts at No. 116).

Andreas Killen hasn’t so much rehabilitated 1973 as overinflated it. Still, he demonstrates notable forbearance in at least one respect: This must be the only book on the 70’s that ignores disco—this despite the fact that the first disco record, Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” became a hit in (when else?) 1973.

Mark Feeney, the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief, is on the staff of The Boston Globe.

Andreas Killen definitely thinks so. An assistant professor of history at the City College of New York, he has a good eye for detail, an impressive appetite for research and a weakness for overstatement. All come into play in 1973 Nervous Breakdown, which bears the presumably unique distinction of sharing a title with a Lester Bangs rock review (of the Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup). It’s not unique in making great claims for the 70’s: Bruce Schulman and David Frum, to name two, have published books doing so. And they’re absolutely right. The 60’s may get all the attention, but it’s that decade’s polyester-clad kid brother that saw the real transformation of American culture. One of the emblematic 60’s lines is Bob Dylan’s “But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have / To stand naked” (the words don’t scan any better sung). With Watergate, it came to pass. However badly, the Vietnam War did end. Feminism came of age. And Hollywood demonstrated the wonders of trickle-down aesthetics.

Mr. Killen’s first chapter gives a good sense of his cannily associative method: He begins with the news on Jan. 1 of the plane crash that killed Roberto Clemente, the star Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder. This takes him to the opening later that year of Dallas/Forth Worth Airport. He then dwells on the growing dissatisfaction with air travel, also noting that 1973 saw the first female copilot in an airliner and the first male flight attendant. Skyjackings proliferated, which provides his next section. Finally, Mr. Killen ponders the year’s most-talked-about book, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.

As an organizing principle, this is smart, stimulating and sometimes startling. (Who knew that DFW hired the pioneering earth artist Robert Smithson as a consultant? Smithson, by the way, died in a plane crash—and, yes, that was in 1973.) It can even be illuminating. There’s an eerie suggestiveness in the fact that the World Trade Center, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, opened four months before the final decision to level Pruitt-Igoe, the notorious St. Louis public-housing project, also designed by Yamasaki. Too often, though, Mr. Killen seems to be playing a critical-studies parlor game: six degrees of 1973 separation. (And it’s not always 1973. The first demolition at Pruitt-Igoe took place in 1972. Nixon didn’t resign, of course, until 1974. It was in 1969 that Andy Warhol founded Interview, whose status as the Almanach de Gotha of 70’s celebrity culture accounts for the artist’s presence in Mr. Killen’s alliterative subtitle.)

Furious, often incongruous juxtaposition is the engine that drives 1973 Nervous Breakdown. It’s not furious enough. For an enterprise like this to succeed, it needs a crazed sense of obsession, the centrality of 1973 as not just construct but compulsion, a calendrical equivalent to Rocket 00001 in Gravity’s Rainbow: A screaming comes across the sky, and that screaming needs to be 1973. Instead, Mr. Killen has hyperbole do the work of mania. “These days,” he tells us, “scarcely a week goes by without some further reminder [of the 70’s].” That depends on how scarce your definition of “scarcely” is. “Lance Loud’s coming out on television [as part of the PBS reality-TV series An American Family] would become one of the landmark events in the medium’s history.” Well, there are landmarks and there are landmarks. Blaxploitation movies were “immensely popular.” Yes, in the sense the New York Dolls enjoyed “wild popularity” (the better-selling of their two albums peaked on the U.S. charts at No. 116).

Andreas Killen hasn’t so much rehabilitated 1973 as overinflated it. Still, he demonstrates notable forbearance in at least one respect: This must be the only book on the 70’s that ignores disco—this despite the fact that the first disco record, Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” became a hit in (when else?) 1973.

Mark Feeney, the author of Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief, is on the staff of The Boston Globe.

The Secret Man, Bob Woodward's absorbingly anticlimactic
Deep Throat book, has two revelations to offer. One is small, though rather
marvelous. The other—hidden in plain sight in the title—is bigger, if also
highly diffuse and inconclusive.

Revelation
No. 1 is that someone who wasn't supposed to know the identity of Deep Throat
knew. And kept the secret for 29 years.

The
rest of us have been wondering about Deep Throat since 1974 when he first
popped up in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's All the President's Men. Hal Holbrook's portrayal of him in the
movie version two years later guaranteed iconic status for the secret source.
“Follow the money,” he counseled Robert Redford's Woodward, a breathtakingly
concise capturing of the essence of Watergate—as well as a sign of how
political fact was already becoming pop-culture legend: The words, which
appeared nowhere in the collected works of Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein, were
the formulation of screenwriter William Goldman.

Pop-culture
legend was also fast becoming pop-culture mania. For more than three decades, trying
to unmask Deep Throat was a minor Washington cottage industry. “Minor” may not
be quite accurate: Deep Throat Industries has always had an enviable P/E
ratio—“P,” in this case, standing for “publicity.” (Witness NBC's hour-long
prime-time special scheduled to coincide with the book's publication.)

Minor
or not, Deep Throat Industries found itself unexpectedly acquired, as one might
say, by Condé Nast on May 31, when news broke that the July issue of Vanity Fair contained an article
headlined, “I'm the Guy They Called Deep Throat.” The guy was W. Mark Felt, the
onetime No. 2 man at the F.B.I. and someone who'd long been thought a prime
candidate for Deep Throat–hood (Washingtonian
magazine had fingered him as early as 1974).

No
small part of the thickly encrusted lore surrounding Deep Throat was that only
a handful of people could identify him. It was well known that, besides Messrs.
Woodward and Bernstein, former Washington
Post executive editor Ben Bradlee knew. Mr. Woodward relates that he'd also
told both his wife and Mr. Bradlee's successor, Leonard Downie Jr. Somewhat
sheepishly, he adds that Stanley Pottinger knew, too.

Stanley
Who? Mr. Pottinger served as an assistant attorney general in the Ford
administration. He was present one day in 1976 when Mr. Felt was testifying
before a grand jury about break-ins he'd ordered in the early 70's at the homes
of relatives of members of the radical Weathermen group. Mr. Felt airily
mentioned that some people actually thought he
was Deep Throat. “Were you?” a grand juror asked. Suddenly looking stricken,
Mr. Felt perjured himself—that is, he said no. An alert Mr. Pottinger, seeing
at once what was up, whispered to the witness that if he wished, since the
matter was “outside the bounds of our official investigation,” both question
and answer could be expunged. A relieved Mr. Felt very much so wished, and at
that moment Mr. Pottinger joined the board of Deep Throat Industries.

Still
safely anonymous, Mr. Felt in 1978 flatly denied to The Wall Street Journal that he was Deep Throat: “I'm just not that
kind of person,” he said (a denial wonderfully adamant in its vagueness). Mr.
Woodward recalls thinking at the time, “Did he know who he was? Did I?” Note
how the second sentence allows for two readings: Did Bob Woodward know who Mark
Felt was—or who Bob Woodward himself was?

This
is revelation No. 2: The Secret Man on display in The Secret Man is as much Bob Woodward as Mark Felt. No, more: Just
as Mr. Felt helped Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein to reveal the intricacies of
Watergate, so he now helps Mr. Woodward to reveal the intricacies of Bob
Woodward. The resultant self-portrait “is not all that admirable,” he
confesses. “I was pushy, secretive, I used Mark Felt and I lied.” A weirdly
mechanical self-doubt plagues him as he keeps fretting over his relationship
with Mr. Felt, like the ethical equivalent of a sick tooth. Watching him nag
and probe and refuse to take no for an answer, one can see in good measure what
makes him such an extraordinary reporter. What's so odd is that he himself is
the object of all the nagging and probing and refusing.

Self-revelation
isn't something one expects (or necessarily seeks) from Bob Woodward. As a
fitting grace note, The Secret Man
includes an afterword from Carl Bernstein. With knowing fondness, Mr. Bernstein
describes his former partner as “the staid man from the Midwest,” a disciplined
overachiever “prone to complete his homework before it is due or even
assigned.” Mr. Woodward long ago became the Joe Friday of big-foot American journalism,
the dean of due diligence, using his unrivaled access to the inner sanctums of
government and a just-the-facts approach to crank out a succession of
best-selling books that manage to be both weighty and weightless, all-knowing
and (insofar as they shrink from context or perspective) clueless. Not for
nothing did Joan Didion famously dismiss him as the author of “books in which
measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

Well,
the heart has its reasons reporting knows nothing of. “No longer the
30-year-old reporter chasing the story,” Mr. Woodward writes, he had “naturally
become more interested in motive.” The
Secret Man might best be described as what does (or doesn't) happen when
Joe Friday finds himself wanting to be Graham Greene. But motivation is a
tricky business, and never more so than when the motivation is one's own. And
even if exposing the whys and wherefores of Mr. Felt's actions had been Mr.
Woodward's sole aim, there isn't all that much he could tell us: Their
encounters were few and, invariably, for lack of a better term, other-directed.
The young Bob Woodward was generally looking for one of two things: the goods
on Richard Nixon or career advice. That's how they first met, one evening in
late 1969 or early 70, on “the lower level of the West Wing,” as each cooled
his heels waiting to meet with a higher-up. Mr. Woodward, then a Navy
lieutenant, was delivering a package from the Pentagon. He struck up a
conversation seeking guidance on his future … and barely three years later,
there they were in late-night parking garages, the dark fields of the Republic
updated, helping determine the outcome of our long national nightmare.

After
Watergate, they spoke a few times on the phone—never comfortably. Mr. Woodward
watched with mounting concern as Mr. Felt was convicted in 1980 of violating
the civil rights of the Weathermen relatives whose homes were broken into.
(President Reagan soon pardoned him.) The most extensive meeting between them
came 20 years later—this is as close as The
Secret Man comes to having a climax—when Mr. Woodward showed up unannounced
at Mr. Felt's door, in Santa Rosa, Calif., and took him out to lunch. There
were no hard feelings on Deep Throat's part, and Mr. Woodward was mightily
relieved.

Unfortunately,
there were hardly any feelings—or
memories. By then, Mr. Felt was suffering from senile dementia. There's
something at once painful and ludicrous in Mr. Woodward's repeated efforts to
quiz his secret source about their shared past. All the President's Men keeps peeking out from the pages of The Secret Man, but in this regard the
more resonant Woodward title is Veil,
his 1987 book about C.I.A. covert activity during the Reagan years. Veil ended with Mr. Woodward slipping
into the hospital room of the dying William Casey, former head of the C.I.A.,
and trying to get him to admit he knew of the diversion of funds to the
Nicaraguan contras. “I believed,” Casey says, “I believed,” before drifting off
into sleep.

What
did Deep Throat believe and when did he believe it? Mr. Woodward can never
know, and it drives him crazy. And it's not just the larger issues of motive
and rationale. Mr. Woodward can't determine—and, for the Watergate buff, this
is the book's deepest disappointment—how Mr. Felt managed to spot the flag on
Mr. Woodward's balcony that signaled a desire to meet, or how Mr. Felt got to
Mr. Woodward's copy of The New York Times
to signal his own need for a meeting.

Excellent
reporter that he is, Mr. Woodward sets out the various elements that might have
moved Mr. Felt to be Deep Throat: jealousy that not he but L. Patrick Gray had
been named J. Edgar Hoover's successor as F.B.I. director; revulsion over the
misdeeds of the Nixon White House; a desire to protect the bureau and its
Watergate investigation; a fundamental commitment to seeing justice done; and
so on. What Mr. Woodward can't do—no one can now, not even Mark Felt—is work
those elements into a coherent, fully nuanced moral portrait. It's both
touching and exasperating to watch Mr. Woodward try—touching because he's
striving for a degree of moral imagination otherwise lacking in his work,
exasperating because he's so clearly incapable of succeeding.

The
stumbling block isn't just Mr. Felt's dotage. It's the author's own implacable
Woodwardness. Near the end of his book, he remarks on the frequent inability of
insiders—White House insiders, he means, not media insiders like himself—to get
at the truth of a political or historical situation. He adds that “at times,
the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture
of an era.” “Even”? Even? Joe Friday
might want to be Graham Greene, but he just can't bring himself to respect him.
In his heart he's still just after the facts. And Deep Throat—both in his
revealed identity and in his enduring cultural resonance—greatly transcends the
facts.

Mark
Felt may have understood that. Unlike Mr. Woodward, he had an artist's
imagination. When Mr. Woodward called him two months before that impromptu
lunch in Santa Rosa, the conversation was inconclusive. “I'll hang up,” Mr.
Felt said, ending it. “And this closet door can be a closed door.” It's the
single best line in the book, almost spookily good. Equally striking is the
bold, sweeping “F” that Mr. Felt used to sign F.B.I. memos. Mr. Woodward reproduces
it in the book: It's like the mark of Zorro, a Deep Throat ideogram,
simultaneously assertive and inscrutable. Pace
Bob Woodward, we require a novelist to decode it.

Mark Feeney, a reporter
with The Boston Globe, is author of Nixon at the Movies: A
Book about Belief (University of Chicago
Press).