Y’know, I was just talking about how they got information in All The President’s Men.
One way I didn’t mention in that post was how Woodward got info from the source dubbed "Deep Throat."
Now come to find out that they’ve up and revealed who Deep Throat was/is.
YEE-HAW!
I love a real-life mystery, and I’ve been fascinated by who Deep Throat was for years. I read John Dean’s e-book trying to crack the mystery, and I’ve ready I don’t know how many articles on it.
Turns out he was a former #2 guy at the FBI named W. Mark Felt (above). That explains how he had the dirt he did: The FBI was investigating the Watergate break-in, and Felt had access to the info that the investigation was turning up. He then used that info to carefully help steer Woodward in the right direction.
At the behest of his family Felt, now 91, finally spilled the beans in A VANITY FAIR ARTICLE.
When I first encounted the claim in press reports yesterday, I was a bit hinky as the same accounts quoted Carl Bernstein (Woodward’s former partner and one of three people other than Throat himself to know Throat’s identity) refused to confirm that Felt was Throat, saying that the existing deal with Throat would be honored and his identity wouldn’t be revealed until his death.
This set off alarm bells for me that the identification might be fake, since Woodward has said that Throat’s identity would be revealed if Throat altered the terms of the agreement and allowed it to be known earlier.
Bernstein might have been simply playing for time, though, not wanting to confirm it on his own without consulting Woodward, who was the real contact for Deep Throat.
Or Bernstein might have been fearful that Felt was being pressured to do this by his family and was not now, at 91, in a proper frame of mind to make a fully free decision in the matter.
However that may be, late in the day yesterday Woodward, Bernstein, and Ben Bradley (the third person known to know Deep Throat’s identity) CONFIRMED THAT W. MARK FELT WAS INDEED DEEP THROAT.
Bradlee, who apparently cusses as much as Jason Robards does when portraying him in All The President’s Men, said: "The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long."
While the secret lasted, it wasn’t as if nobody had speculated that Felt was Deep Throat. Reportedly, he was the person Richard Nixon most suspected. Others suspected, too. And there was a brush of suspicion a while back when it was revealed that Bernstein’s son had blurted out the identification to a friend at summer camp. (Bernstein’s then-wife tried to smooth this over by claiming that the boy had just hear he "speculating" about Deep Throat’s identity.)
While I’m pleased that we now finally know Deep Throat’s identity–and that all those who claimed that there was no Deep Throat or that the character was a composite of different sources, despite vigorous denials by Woodward and company, have been shown wrong–I must confess that I’m a little disappointed.
I look forward to learning more about Felt, but I’d always secretly harbored a kind of hope that Deep Throat would be revealed to be someone with a more prominent public profile. For example, there was considerable speculation that Pat Buchannan was Deep Throat, and I always found this an intriguing suggestion. Buchannan is such a maverick that you could easily imagine him turning on Nixon if he felt his principles required it of him. A large number of other "high-name" guesses were also made for who Deep Throat was.
I think I was attracted to such suggestions simply because I knew the names of certain people being touted as possible Deep Throats. I didn’t turn as much attention to the theories that held Deep Throat was in the FBI or the CIA because, frankly, these people weren’t as famous and I didn’t know them, so it was less intriguing to think that they might be Deep Throat. I thus tended to hurry through analyses pointing to such individuals as possible candidates.
But all’s well that ends well, and we now know who Deep Throat was.
Though I’ll always harbor a suspicion that Deep Throat was really . . . Hal Holbrook!
