The greatest trick that the director Alan J. Pakula ever pulled was convincing the world that Bob Woodward looked like Robert Redford. The second was portraying “Deep Throat,” Woodward’s super-secret source for the reporting that would contribute to President Richard Nixon’s downfall, as having had altruistic motives.
In 1970, Woodward was a 26-year-old navy lieutenant waiting outside the White House Situation Room to deliver a package of classified documents to National-Security Advisor Henry Kissinger when, as he relates in Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir, “a tall, smartly dressed man with perfectly combed, slicked-back gray hair came in and sat down beside me.” The man, an assistant director at the F.B.I. named Mark Felt, took an instant liking to the “serious, disciplined young kid” sitting next to him. The chance encounter, Woodward writes, would become “one of the most important in my life.”