More thoughts on the identity of Deep Throat, which John W. Dean says he will expose in an upcoming book. This will be Dean's third "unmasking" of the famed shadowy source. I said he'd previously fingered Alexander Haig but I forgot that, before that, he was peddling the notion that the man who gave Woodward and Bernstein their inside info on the Nixon Administration was U.S. attorney Earl Silbert.
The problem with Dean's revelation, of course, is that it will be just another guess in a long line of supposedly well-investigated guesses by folks who ought to know but probably don't. Former Nixon insider Leonard Garment wrote a book that spent many pages arguing that D.T. was Republican strategist John Sears. Others have identified FBI agent Mark Felt and a CBS News inquiry claimed — rather foolishly, I thought — that it was L. Patrick Gray, who was then the acting director of the bureau. That was foolish because their main bit of "evidence" was that the parking garage wherein Woodward met Deep Throat had been described in terms that seemed to match the parking garage of the building wherein Gray was living at the time. Leaving aside the fact that half the parking garages in America could have fit the description, there's this: Does anyone think that Deep Throat held clandestine meetings in the garage of his own building? That he left the privacy of his own apartment, took the elevator down to the cold, less-private garage and stood there for hours talking to Bob Woodward, hoping not to be seen?
Still others have offered up names as bizarre as Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman. You could actually build a strong case for Kissinger, who certainly had a great many mixed feelings about Nixon and who was obviously wary of how their mutual history would be written. But apart from that being such an incredible possibility just because it's Kissinger, there's one clue that doesn't fit. In All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that Deep Throat was a smoker…and Kissinger never was. Matter of fact, when Oliver Stone's film of Nixon came out, Kissinger complained mightily that the actor portraying him was always seen with a big cigar and that he'd never touched tobacco in his life.
I am inclined to disagree with those who speculate that there was no Deep Throat or that he was a composite. First of all, it was a dangerous lie for Woodward and Bernstein to tell their editor. If Ben Bradlee had demanded to know who it was, what would they have said? A promise of confidentiality to a source doesn't mean you can't tell your editor and, in fact, they eventually did. I also find it hard to believe Bradlee would have gone along with a phony source. The Washington Post had too much riding on two relative novices. The paper would have been humiliated if the Woodward/Bernstein reporting had proven bogus and doubly humiliated if it got out that it had been based on a phony source. Moreover, a number of people have died who could have been Deep Throat. If it had been a fraud, I think Bernstein and Woodward would have seized on one of those opportunities to say, "That's the guy. He was Deep Throat. Now, get off our backs about this."
So Dean will make his guess. Bernstein and Woodward will either "no comment" or, if the subject gets upset and convince them to do so, they'll announce no, it was not him…and the mystery will continue until the right guy dies and they say it was him. What I hope is that, along with a name, we eventually get a couple of Whys — why he did it, why he insisted on not being identified for 30+ years — and also a What: What did he think of what occurred as a result of his leaking? Unless they manage to restore the famed 18-and-a-half minute gap on one of Nixon's tapes, as one lab is reportedly attempting, those will be the final secrets of Watergate. It's about time we put the last of them to bed.