I drive by the Watergate every day. Despite my proximity to the scene of the crime, I've never had an idea about Deep Throat's identity. Not everyone was so clueless. In 1972 and 1973, H.R. Haldeman told Richard Nixon that Mark Felt was leaking information damaging to the White House. The Washingtonian magazine pegged Mark Felt as Deep Throat in 1974. In 1992, The Atlantic Monthly strongly suggested that Deep Throat worked in the FBI and pointed to Felt as the best candidate. Deep Throat "could well have been Mark Felt, who admitted that he harbored ambitions to be the FBI director," the Atlantic Monthly piece theorized. Felt's hometown newspaper, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, suggested to its readers in 2002 that Deep Throat lived amidst them. That same year, CNN dubbed Felt "a leading candidate." Ronald Kessler's 2003 book, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (buy it here), identified Felt as Deep Throat as well. Vanity Fair may have scooped Woodward and Bernstein in revealing Deep Throat's identity, but numerous writers beat Vanity Fair to the punch too.
I always thought that Deep Throat was really 2 ditzy, blonde teenage girls... and Woodard & Bernstein were bumbling idiots... no, wait! That was the 1999 movie "Dick." (Very funny movie, by the way.)
Dan, great research, and a great piece of investigation. You probably did more actual work than either Woodward or Bernstein!
Another commenter said in one of the other posts that this is all about cult of personality. Right on. "All the President's Men" springs to mind. Heck, "Capricorn One" springs to mind, with Elliott Gould (rotfl) doing the crusading hero reporter bit in exposing a fake mission to Mars. (Hal Holbrook is the conspiracy mastermind. I'm half-convinced the whole movie was actually a send-up of President's Men, a huge joke that nobody quite got.)
Anybody else read Woodward's big peice today? Anybody else feel like they were reading poor quality gay romance novel? Yound navy lieutenant meets an older, mysterious man, and ... exchange phone numbers, start a fawning mentoring relationship, and set up clandestine meetings. I'm sure Woodward thought they were acting like G-men; but it all sounded really gay to me.
It did. It read like one of the gay love novels Mr. Garrison from South Park wrote.
From the NYTimes story today: "Mr. O'Connor, the Felt family lawyer, said on the ABC program "Nightline" on Tuesday that his client had no memory of the elaborate signals - a red flag in a flowerpot, a clock's hands scrawled on Page 20 of Mr. Woodward's home-delivered copy of The New York Times - that Mr. Woodward said were used to arrange meetings with Deep Throat."
Now it's implied that this is because Felt is old and showing signs of diminished mental capacity. It is also the most fantastic element of Woodward's story. Are the flower pot and newspaper signals true? Hmmm. Woodward's whole peice rang a bit fictionalized in my ears. I do think he's a bit of a DB.
