Not Much Interested in Deep Throat?
When Professor Hoff was at Ohio University I took a graduate seminar from her that focused solely on Watergate. Hoff is a bit of a contararian and has been skeptical of just about everything that passes for common wisdom on Watergate. In the class we traced the history of the event and did as much investigation as was possible from Athens, Ohio. Obviously as a huge part of that work, we looked into Deep Throat. And I have never forgotten Professor Hoff talking about something that astounded me, and which she mentions in her article: The proposal for All the President’s Men apparently had no mention of Deep Throat, or of any one mysterious interloper who filled in the missing pieces as the story progressed. Their agent asked some questions. Lightbulbs went on. Suddenly and coincidentally the two intrepid reporters either found or remembered Hal Holbrooke standing hidden by shadows in parking garages.
Hoff admits that we do not know the chronology of Deep Throat’s emergence, but it would not surprise me if he (or she) is not yet either a figment of their imaginations or, as has long been suspected, a composite. I would guess that this story will play out further in the weeks to come. Apparently Woodward and Bernstein are fessing up. I remain unconvinced. At some point someone else is going to come forward and say, “Wait a minute, I gave some information on the down low as well. Where is my fifteen minutes?” And on top of this, there are many figures for whom being seen as Deep throat would be catastrophic. Perhaps upon their deaths we’ll find out that they too provided information attributed to the character named after Linda Lovelace in the eponymous porn film.
Truth be told, there is an enormous part of me that does not care. It is an inconvenient fact of history that Woodward and Bernstein opened the story but got most of it wrong. Go and read ATPM again. Then go find one of the many histories of Watergate, such as Stanley Kutler’s work, and compare. Woodward and Bernstein did some fine (if at times questionable) investigative journalism to get the ball rolling, but their story of Watergate was not really the story of Watergate. Theirs was largely about something as prosaic as money. The real story went far deeper and had substantially more significance. This being the case, Deep Throat is not really all that important; certainly not as much so as the mystery surrounding it has made it seem. And it has been in the interest of Bernstein, and especially Woodward (a glory whore who has never met an anonymous source who could not further his career, facts and evidentiary standards be damned) for Deep Throat to remain a shadowy figure, enshrouded in danger and romance and cigarette smoke. If he has revealed himself in the form of Felt, and if that really is the end of the story, then fine. A piece of the puzzle has emerged, but despite the seemingly central location of that piece, we already knew what the picture looked like.