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Deep Throat (Watergate)

Deep Throat is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information in 1972 to Bob Woodward, who shared it with Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein were reporters for The Washington Post, and Deep Throat provided key details about the involvement of U.S. president Richard Nixon's administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal. In 2005, 31 years after Nixon's resignation and 11 years after Nixon's death, a family attorney stated that former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat. By then, Felt was suffering from dementia and had previously denied being Deep Throat, but Woodward and Bernstein then confirmed the attorney's claim.

Background[edit]

Deep Throat was first introduced to the public in the February 1974 book All the President's Men by The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. According to the authors, Deep Throat was a key source of information behind a series of articles that introduced the misdeeds of the Nixon administration to the general public. The scandal eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon, as well as to prison terms for White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Egil Krogh, White House Counsel Charles Colson, former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell, former White House Counsel John Dean, and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman. The film based on the book was released two years later; nominated for eight Academy Awards, it won four.


Howard Simons was the managing editor of the Post during Watergate. He dubbed the secret informant "Deep Throat", alluding to both the deep background status of his information and the widely publicized 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat.[1] For more than 30 years, Deep Throat's identity was one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity and speculation. Woodward and Bernstein insisted that they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to reveal it. J. Anthony Lukas speculated that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt in his book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976), based on three New York Times Sunday Magazine articles, but he was widely criticized. According to an article in Slate on April 28, 2003, Woodward had denied that Deep Throat was part of the "intelligence community" in a 1989 Playboy interview with Lukas.[2]


On May 31, 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that Felt was Deep Throat in an article on its website by John D. O'Connor, an attorney acting on Felt's behalf. Felt reportedly said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." After the Vanity Fair story broke, Woodward, Bernstein, and Benjamin C. Bradlee, the Post's executive editor during Watergate, confirmed Felt's identity as Deep Throat.[3] L. Patrick Gray, former acting Director of the FBI and Felt's overseer, disputed Felt's claim in his book In Nixon's Web, co-written with his son Ed. Gray and others have argued that Deep Throat was a compilation of sources characterized as one person to improve sales of the book and movie. Woodward and Bernstein, however, defended Felt's claims and detailed their relationship with him in Woodward's book The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat.

Composite character theory[edit]

Prior to Felt's revelation and Woodward's confirmation, part of the reason historians and other scholars had so much difficulty in identifying the real Deep Throat is that no single person seemed to truly fit the character described in All the President's Men. This had caused some scholars and commentators to come to the conclusion that Deep Throat could not possibly be a single person, and must be a composite of several sources. Woodward and Bernstein consistently denied the theory.[26]


From a literary business perspective, this theory was further supported by David Obst, the agent who originally marketed the draft for All the President's Men, who stated that the initial typescript of the book contained no reference to Deep Throat.[26] Obst believed that Deep Throat was invented by Woodward and Bernstein for dramatic purposes.[26] It also led to speculation that the authors condensed history.[26]


Ed Gray, the son of L. Patrick Gray III, stated in In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate that his examination of Woodward's interview notes pertaining to Deep Throat at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin provided "convincing evidence that 'Deep Throat' was indeed a fabrication".[27] According to Gray, the file contained notes regarding four interviews that were attributed to either Felt, "X", or "my friend", and a fifth interview dated March 24, 1973, that was unattributed.[27] He said he discovered that he had already seen the paper in 2006 after Woodward released interview files with people who were not Deep Throat.[27] Gray wrote that he contacted Stephen Mielke, the archivist who oversees the Woodward-Bernstein collection at the University of Texas, who said that a carbon copy of the paper contained a note in Woodward's handwriting attributing the interview to Donald Santarelli, an official with the Department of Justice during the Watergate era.[27] Gray wrote that he contacted Santarelli who confirmed that the March 24 meeting was with him.[27] Other interview notes attributed to "X" were interpreted by Gray as containing content that could not have been known by Felt.[27]


Regarding Gray's allegations, Woodward wrote that the March 24 notes were obviously not from an interview with Felt because Felt is referred to by name twice in quotes from the source and that he never stated or wrote that he met with Deep Throat on that date.[28] According to Woodward, Mielke said the page was likely misfiled under Felt due to a lack of source.[28]

Other suspected candidates[edit]

Fred Fielding[edit]

Another leading candidate was White House Associate Counsel Fred F. Fielding. In April 2003 Fielding was presented as a potential candidate as a result of a detailed review of source material by William Gaines and his journalism students, as part of a class at the University of Illinois journalism school.[29][30] Fielding was the assistant to John Dean and as such had access to the files relating to the affair. Gaines believed that statements by Woodward ruled out Deep Throat's being in the FBI and that Deep Throat often had information before the FBI did. H. R. Haldeman himself suspected Fielding as being Deep Throat.


Dean had been one of the most dedicated hunters of Deep Throat. Both he and Leonard Garment dismissed Fielding as a possibility, reporting that he had been cleared by Woodward in 1980 when Fielding was applying for an important position in the Reagan administration. However, this assertion, which comes from Fielding, has not been corroborated.


One reason that many experts believed that Deep Throat was Fielding and not Felt was due to Woodward's apparent denial in an interview that Deep Throat worked in the intelligence community:

portrayed Deep Throat in the film adaptation of All the President's Men (1976), in which he uttered the catchphrase, "Follow the money" (which was not referred to in the book).

Hal Holbrook

In the video game (1998) the character Grey Fox uses the codename "Deepthroat" in reference to Watergate to provide advice to the main character Solid Snake.

Metal Gear Solid

In the comedy film (1999), Deep Throat is revealed as being two teenage Washingtonian girls who worked as Nixon's dog walkers.

Dick

In the coming-of-age supernatural comedy horror television series (2022), Episode 6, Jenna Ortega portrays the character Wednesday Addams and makes the remark "Seems like our wannabe Deep Throat is already here."[34]

Wednesday

In the comedy film , Mike and Tony are jokingly referred to as “Woodward and Bernstein”, prompting Mike to retort “I guess that makes you Deep Throat”.

Dazed and Confused

In , Fox Mulder uses some of the same techniques as Woodward to communicate with a government informant nicknamed "Deep Throat". It is left unclear if this character is supposed to be the same as the Watergate informant.

The X-Files

(June 8, 2005), "Woodward does Washington".

Ann Coulter

a June 2, 2005 article from The New York Times

"In the Prelude to Publication, Intrigue Worthy of Deep Throat"

from The Washington Post

Special Reports page on Deep Throat

a June 5, 2005 article from the Albany Times-Union

Former FBI agent says 3 FBI officials helped W. Mark Felt leak information about Watergate probe to the press