Vanity Fair Claims A Big Exclusive Revealing the True Identity of “Deep Throat”; That Is NOT Where the Kudos Should Go – They Belong to The Washington Post For Protecting Their Source These Long 30 Years.

Philip Stone June 2, 2005

Sometimes journalism can be very cruel to itself. The Washington Post honored its agreement with W. Mark Felt that it would not name his as “Deep Throat” – the secret source who confirmed many of the details in the Post’s Watergate coverage that eventually ended with the resignation in disgrace of Richard Nixon as President of the United States in 1974. Yet a phone call from a lawyer representing Deep Throat’s family two years ago to Vanity Fair asking if they would buy the story eventually gave the magazine its “exclusive.”

If the story was to break then the Washington Post is where it belonged. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Post’s two principal writers covering Watergate, gave their word to Felt, then number 2 in the FBI, that they would never divulge his name unless he gave permission. Felt, always worried that the public might have seen him as a traitor, denied several times to journalists over the years that he was Deep Throat; he never let the Post out of its promise, and the Post has always kept its word.

 It was only after the story appeared in print in Vanity Fair with the apparent assistance of Felt, now 91 and suffering the after effects of a stroke, that the Post  believed its promise was no longer valid, and the Post confirmed Felt’s identity.

The real story everyone wants to read, however, is what Woodward and Bernstein write for the Post detailing their inside relationship with “Deep Throat.” And that is the publication that hopefully becomes the real best seller, not Vanity Fair’s promise spoiler.

For those aged 40 and younger none of this may make much sense – and who cares about history anyway -- but the world, not just the US, was enthralled in 1972 when a seemingly little burglary attempt gone wrong at the Watergate complex in Washington which housed the Democratic National Committee started a series of events that produced new stories almost daily of wrong-doing at the highest levels of government. Twenty-six months later Richard M. Nixon, president of the United States, who had previously told the American people their president “was not a crook” resigned when it was obvious the House of Representatives had enough votes to impeach him.

For almost that entire time, Woodward and Bernstein had a secret source who, during the early days, would confirm details the reporters had discovered, and then as Watergate started to fully develop he fed them leads on where they needed to look for stories. It was such gripping stuff that the two wrote a huge bestseller “All the President’s Men” which in turn was made into a box office winning movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman with Hal Holbrook playing who we now know to be Felt.

“Who was Deep Throat?” had become journalistic folklore, and it’s a pity it didn’t remain that way. Now we know who he was questions are already being asked about his motives (Nixon passed him over and appointed an outsider as director of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died so did he do this to spite Nixon?).The pundits are already debating whether he was a hero or as Nixon supporters claim, he committed treason because the FBI was not supposed to be giving out such information to the media. Better the folklore had continued.

The question always asked of Nixon was what did he know and when did he know it. Once he learned that some White House aides and some senior Republican Party officials had a hand in the burglary he participated in the cover-up, and lying to the American people was not what they expected of their President. If he had told them that people who worked for him had done wrong and he had cleaned house, he probably would have served out his term.

At the time this writer was a correspondent for an American news agency in Europe. It was the time of the Vietnam War and most Europeans hated Nixon for continuing the war he inherited from Lyndon Johnson. So when Nixon ran into trouble with Watergate Europeans were delighted, but privately they would often say they never understood why the American public was so upset about Watergate. So the President lied – it’s to be expected from politicians!

Europeans today often ask this writer why American journalists appear to be so hostile at news briefings and news conferences. Before Watergate it really wasn’t that way, but Watergate changed forever the relationship between government and the media. And what had previously been a rather cozy relationship turned into one of outright hostility during Watergate.

Benjamin Bradlee
one of four who knew
Deep Throat's identity

And yet for all that media hostility and Nixon’s resignation in disgrace, when he died 20 years later much of the media and many politicians gushed with praise for a man they said had rehabilitated himself in those 20 years as a senior statesman. You would have to look far and hard for a notable to say something bad about him.

A couple of months after Nixon’s death, I asked Benjamin Bradlee, Washington Post managing editor during Watergate and who was therefore Woodward and Bernstein’s boss, what he thought of all those obituaries that praised Nixon.  Bradlee, who was a speaker at a World Association of Newspapers breakfast, was beside himself with anger.  He said he could not believe how people could forget in just 20 years what Nixon had done and that they had chosen instead just to emphasize the positive (opening relations with China) rather than detailing all the wrong he had done to become the only president to resign in disgrace.

Today, a little more than 30 years after Nixon’s resignation, the final piece of the puzzle is put in place. We now know who Deep Throat is.

But unless you actually lived through it, do you really care?