Maybe it's like being shocked that a duck quacks, but I continue to be amazed at how reporters will try to manufacture a story where none exists. The other night, KNBC news in Los Angeles did a sizzling "exclusive" investigation that revealed that a person who has no way to knowing any of this is sure he knows who Deep Throat is, that Deep Throat is not ill, and that it's not George Herbert Walker Bush, Gerald Ford or Alexander Haig. Woodward, Bernstein and Haig have all said it's not Haig, so that last one is not much of a scoop.
They broadcast a brief, newly-conducted interview with Donald Segretti, who was one of the political pranksters employed by the Nixon campaign during the 1972 election. (This is the guy played by Robert Walden in the movie, All the President's Men.) As Watergate figures go, it would be hard to find anyone farther from the action than Segretti, who was in California throughout most of that investigation. Not only that but once it came out that he'd done some unethical things on behalf of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, everyone in the Nixon White House wanted to distance themselves from the guy. So he was not exactly in close communication…and even if he was, it was with folks who didn't know who Deep Throat was, either.
At first, I couldn't figure out why KNBC thought this fellow's guesses are any better than anyone else's guesses…and then I realized: They don't. They just knew they could get a segment out of it that sounded like inside information if you didn't stop to think about it for more than a few seconds. In the news biz, a worthless story is still worth more than no story at all.
One other thought about the hunt for Deep Throat: The vast majority of guesses and speculations about his identity have been based on who had access to the information he is known to have passed on to Bob Woodward. For instance, Deep Throat told the reporter about the gap on a crucial Nixon tape at a time when only a handful of people had that information…so most of the hunters have presumed that it had to be one of those folks. But secrets get leaked and shared all the time in Washington. Why couldn't it have been someone who heard about it from someone in that handful? If we buy the premise that one of them revealed the secret to the Washington Post, why wouldn't someone in that handful have told the guy with the office across the hall from his? Why couldn't Deep Throat have been an aide to someone in that handful who accidentally overheard something he wasn't supposed to hear? I'm not sure there's ever been a known fact about D.T. that absolutely rules out that he was a White House janitor who was within earshot when Henry Kissinger was yelling at Alexander Haig.
Almost every news story about Deep Throat has gotten caught up in the idea that it had to be someone with direct knowledge. In much the same way, they also claim that the informant's identity is known only to Woodward, Bernstein and Post editor Benjamin Bradlee. Well, uh, there's at least one other person…Throat, himself. And maybe he told his wife and his kids and his lawyer and his clergyman and a few friends. Deep Throat has been under no promise of confidentiality, and he must know that the day after he dies, everyone around him is going to be peppered with questions, and asked to confirm or deny.
But that's not as interesting a story. It's more interesting if it's a secret known to only three human beings on the face of the planet. And it's a better detective novel if you restrict the suspect list to those who could have gotten the information first-hand and then snuck out in the middle of the night to meet Woodward in that parking garage. (I always thought that parking garage was a tipoff of something. Why not have Woodward come to his apartment where there was less chance of them being spotted together? Logic would suggest that D.T. had a spouse or roommate he didn't want to implicate in his leaking at the time…or maybe he lived across the hall from John Mitchell. But maybe he just liked the 007 nature of meeting in a garage.) I'm still guessing it's Mark Felt or perhaps Fred Fielding…but we may all learn a lesson about how worthless deductions can be when you aren't careful about what you assume to be the underlying facts.