What seems important, with two decades of hindsight, is that in our national preoccupation with personality and celebrity in the nation's capital, we have concentrated too much on Deep Throat as an individual and not enough on the underlying bureaucratic forces. To be sure, Deep Throat may have had personal motives for his parking-garage meetings with Woodward. Several top FBI officials, including Felt, hoped to take over Hoover's job. Moreover, Woodward demonstrated great skill in cultivating and preserving Deep Throat as a source and a friend. But the institutional motivations at work would seem to have been at least as important as the personal interests or idiosyncrasies of an individual source and a newspaper reporter.