I couldn't help it. I purchased and devoured John Dean's on-line e-book about Deep Throat (the informant, not the porn film) that is currently being hawked over at www.salon.com. Dean originally announced he would reveal on June 17, the name of the secret source within the Nixon administration who abetted Woodward and Bernstein in their research. When he said this, he intended to finger a man named Jonathan Rose who worked under Nixon, and who would have been Dean's third (at least) identification of the mysterious snitch. He previously named Earl Silbert and Alexander Haig, then backed off on both. On the way to those public announcements, he briefly believed it was Al Wong and several others.
This time, after he'd committed to a revelation on 6/17 but before it could happen, his target denied it, threatened to sue and convinced Dean he was wrong. Stuck with the deadline and a book without a pay-off, Dean went ahead and, in this version, he proudly boasts that he has winnowed it down to several candidates and that one of them is absolutely, definitely, positively Deep Throat. Maybe.
But it all made me realize what it is I find interesting about the search for Woodstein's famed tattletale; it's that it's a mystery that probably has an answer. The reporters swear that there was a Deep Throat and that, when the person dies or releases them from their pledge of confidentiality, they will name him. Having read dozens of articles and books in which learned men have analyzed the data and concluded that D.T. is definitely this guy or that guy, I think I'm less interested in the right answer than I am in who was wrong, and why.
Years ago, I spent many wasted hours/days/weeks/etc. reading up about the Kennedy assassination and watching as intelligent and wise individuals came logically and assuredly to wildly different conclusions. Some of these folks were well-credentialed educators or experienced journalists — i,e., the kinds of people from whom we learn so much of what we "know" — and many penned essays that seemed to make absolute sense; that, taken in standalone fashion, seemed to nail down precisely how many dozens of shooters were on that grassy knoll or scurrying about in Oswald masks. You could almost become convinced by some of them, but for the fact that there were other, equally-credible works that came to totally different conclusions. (I especially loved the authors — and there were several — who came to finite, irrefutable conclusions about who killed J.F.K. and how it was done…and later authored other books saying it was someone else using a different plan. And they would defend both books to the death, even though if A was right, B was wrong and vice-versa.)
But they could get away with that to a great extent because we were long past the stage when any assassination theory would or could ever be proven. Today, if you came up with movie film of the shooter actually pulling the trigger, most folks would just say, "Aah, coming to light so late, it's gotta be fake," and press on with their old conspiracy theories. I believe a lot of those who've written about the Kennedy killing have done so in full confidence that, no matter what silly thing they write, they'll never be proven wrong.
It's not quite that way with the Deep Throat Mystery. Someday, I like to believe, Bernstein and Woodward will single out the guy. And while a number of folks will loudly claim they're lying, no matter who they name, most of the world will probably accept it as final, especially if nothing about the person contradicts anything they said in the book of All the President's Men. I'm interested in what all the wrong guessers will then say. How did all those smart people get it so wrong?
John Dean is an extremely smart man. I can't vouch for his ethics, especially back in his Nixonian days, but one of the reasons that administration went bye-bye was that Dean was a terrific witness. When he testified, Republicans were poised to find the teensiest discrepancy in his testimony and use it to smear and discredit him. If he'd said Nixon drank tea and it was actually coffee, you'd have had Howard Baker decrying, "If a man can't tell the difference between tea and coffee, we cannot take his word for anything, so I demand that his testimony be totally disregarded." That Dean was so letter-perfect accurate — that he didn't make even the microscopic errors that any honest witness might make — is one of the reasons Gerald Ford got to be prez.
So here's this guy who knows Washington — at least during the Nixon era — as well as anyone. He's very smart. He's a lawyer. And he keeps being wrong about who Deep Throat was. After all the names he's tossed out, he may still be wrong. Dozens of others, equally savvy, have been wrong…and if anyone turns out to be right, it may only be via the stopped-clock principle. In the long run, I don't think it matters much who Deep Throat was, unless it turns out to be someone like Henry Kissinger. I just think it's great that, for once, a public controversy is actually going to turn out to have a right answer.