Could That Person Sitting Next To You Be Your Deep Throat?

How many times have you taken a seat next to an anonymous soul in the courtroom or CLE seminar, averted your eyes and opened up your Palm Pilot or newspaper to entertain yourself while waiting for the session to start?  I’ve done that more times than I should, but I won’t be doing it anymore.  Yes, that person next to me could be dullard or a jerk.  But he or she could also be my next big break, just like the older gentleman who Bob Woodward struck up a conversation with in a White House waiting room back in 1970 turned out to be for him (from Woodward’s piece How Mark Felt Became Deepthroat, Wash Post, 6/2/05) (long excerpt follows, then my comments):

In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy
and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I
sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.

One
evening I was dispatched with a package to the lower level of the West
Wing of the White House, where there was a little waiting area near the
Situation Room. It could be a long wait for the right person to come
out and sign for the material, sometimes an hour or more, and after I
had been waiting for a while a tall man with perfectly combed gray hair
came in and sat down near me. His suit was dark, his shirt white and
his necktie subdued. He was probably 25 to 30 years older than I and
was carrying what looked like a file case or briefcase. He was very
distinguished-looking and had a studied air of confidence, the posture
and calm of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed
instantly.

I could tell he was watching the situation very carefully.
There was nothing overbearing in his attentiveness, but his eyes were
darting about in a kind of gentlemanly surveillance. After several
minutes, I introduced myself. "Lieutenant Bob Woodward," I said,
carefully appending a deferential "sir."

"Mark Felt," he said.

I
began telling him about myself, that this was my last year in the Navy
and I was bringing documents from Adm. Moorer’s office. Felt was in no
hurry to explain anything about himself or why he was there.

This was a time in my life of considerable anxiety, even
consternation, about my future. I had graduated in 1965 from Yale,
where I had a Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship that
required that I go into the Navy after getting my degree. After four
years of service, I had been involuntarily extended an additional year
because of the Vietnam War.

During that year in
Washington, I expended a great deal of energy trying to find things or
people who were interesting. I had a college classmate who was going to
clerk for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, and I made an effort to
develop a friendship with that classmate. To quell my angst and sense
of drift, I was taking graduate courses at George Washington
University. One course was in Shakespeare, another in international
relations.

When I mentioned the graduate work to
Felt, he perked up immediately, saying he had gone to night law school
at GW in the 1930s before joining — and this is the first time he
mentioned it — the FBI. While in law school, he said, he had worked
full time for a senator — his home-state senator from Idaho. I said
that I had been doing some volunteer work at the office of my
congressman, John Erlenborn, a Republican from the district in Wheaton,
Ill., where I had been raised.

So we had two connections — graduate work at GW and work with elected representatives from our home states.

Felt and I were like two passengers sitting next to each other on a
long airline flight with nowhere to go and nothing really to do but
resign ourselves to the dead time. He showed no interest in striking up
a long conversation, but I was intent on it. I finally extracted from
him the information that he was an assistant director of the FBI in
charge of the inspection division, an important post under Director J.
Edgar Hoover. That meant he led teams of agents who went around to FBI
field offices to make sure they were adhering to procedures and
carrying out Hoover’s orders. I later learned that this was called the
"goon squad."

Here was someone at the center of the secret world I was only glimpsing
in my Navy assignment, so I peppered him with questions about his job
and his world. As I think back on this accidental but crucial encounter
— one of the most important in my life — I see that my patter
probably verged on the adolescent. Since he wasn’t saying much about
himself, I turned it into a career-counseling session.

I was deferential, but I must have seemed very needy. He was friendly,
and his interest in me seemed somehow paternal. Still the most vivid
impression I have is that of his distant but formal manner, in most
ways a product of Hoover’s FBI. I asked Felt for his phone number, and
he gave me the direct line to his office.

I believe I encountered him only one more time at the White House. But
I had set the hook. He was going to be one of the people I consulted in
depth about my future, which now loomed more ominously as the date of
my discharge from the Navy approached. At some point I called him,
first at the FBI and then at his home in Virginia. I was a little
desperate, and I’m sure I poured out my heart. I had applied to several
law schools for that fall, but, at 27, I wondered if I could really
stand spending three years in law school before starting real work.

Felt seemed sympathetic to the lost-soul quality of my questions. He
said that after he had his law degree his first job had been with the
Federal Trade Commission. His first assignment was to determine whether
toilet paper with the brand name Red Cross was at an unfair competitive
advantage because people thought it was endorsed or approved by the
American Red Cross. The FTC was a classic federal bureaucracy — slow
and leaden — and he hated it. Within a year he had applied to the FBI
and been accepted. Law school opened the most doors, he seemed to be
saying, but don’t get caught in your own equivalent of a toilet-paper
investigation.

Of course, we all know what happened after that.

As I’ve written here, it’s always amazing to me how the smallest, most mundane act can send us on a path that we could have never imagined for ourselves.  For one young reporter, that journey began because he was curious or bored or lonely or desperate enough to make a connection with the person sitting next to him.  Why couldn’t the same be true for any one of us?