| Deep Throat (watergate) |
Article Index for Deep Throat |
Website Links For Deep |
Information AboutDeep Throat (watergate) |
|
, on the set of CBS's '' Face The Nation '' in 1976 .]] ''Deep Throat'' is the Pseudonym that was given to a secret source who leaked information about the involvement of U.S. President Richard Nixon 's administration in the Watergate First Break-in and subsequent events that came to be known as the Watergate Scandal . "Deep Throat" was an important source for '' Washington Post '' reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein , who together wrote a series of articles on the scandal that played a decisive role in exposing the misdeeds of the Nixon administration. The scandal would eventually lead to the resignation of President Nixon as well as prison terms for White House Chief Of Staff H. R. Haldeman , G. Gordon Liddy , chief counsel Charles Colson , and presidential adviser John Ehrlichman . In 2005 ''' W. Mark Felt ''', a former Associate Director of the US Federal Bureau Of Investigation , confirmed that he was "Deep Throat". Howard Simons , the managing editor of the ''Washington Post'' at the time, dubbed the secret informant " Deep Throat ", an allusion to a Pornographic Movie of the same name that had become a minor cultural phenomenon during the period; it was also a word play on the term " Deep Background ", used in journalism to mean information provided by a secret source that may not be reported directly. "Deep Throat" came to public attention when Woodward and Bernstein wrote '' All The President's Men '', a book also made into an Academy Award -winning movie. In the movie, "Deep Throat" was portrayed by Hal Holbrook . The identity of "Deep Throat" was one of the biggest mysteries of American Politics and Journalism in recent times, and for more than 30 years, the source of much public curiosity. Woodward and Bernstein insisted they would not reveal his identity until he died or consented to have his identity revealed. However, on May 31 , 2005 , after William Mark Felt, Sr. himself revealed his identity in a '' Vanity Fair '' magazine article, Woodward, Bernstein, and former ''Post'' executive editor Ben Bradlee confirmed that Felt was the Watergate source known as "Deep Throat". ROLE IN WATERGATE On building in Washington , D.C. , inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee . Police had arrived on the scene after being alerted by Frank Wills , a security guard, who noticed that a door leading into the hotel had been taped open. The five men were unusual: they carried between them $2,300 in Hundred-dollar Bill s with serial numbers in sequence, some lock-picks and door-jimmies, one walkie-talkie, a receiver capable of tuning in to police frequencies, two cameras, 40 rolls of unused film, tear-gas guns, and sophisticated devices capable of tapping in to all conversation that might be held in the offices. At least one of the men was a former CIA employee. This person, Jim McCord, Jr. , was at the time of his arrest a security man for President Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). On two of the men, meanwhile, were found notebooks containing the telephone number of one E. Howard Hunt , whose name in the notebooks was accompanied by the inscriptions “W House” and “W.H.”. The scandal immediately attracted some media scrutiny. A protracted period of clue-searching and trail-following then ensued, with reporters and eventually the U.S. Senate and the judicial system probing to see how far up the Executive branch of government the Watergate scandal, as it had come to be known, extended. A pair of young ''Washington Post'' reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, wrote the coverage of the story over a period of two years. The scandal eventually was shown to involve a variety of legal violations, and it implicated large numbers of the Nixon White House and State Department . With increasing pressure from the courts and the Senate, President Nixon eventually became the first and only U.S. President to resign, in disgrace, over the affair, narrowly avoiding Impeachment by the House Of Representatives . Woodward and Bernstein had an advantage over their competitors in writing their stories: the trust of a highly placed individual who happened to oversee the federal investigation of the crimes perpetrated by the Nixon Administration. Woodward had befriended this man years earlier, and had eventually come to see him as something of a mentor. This man provided Woodward with detailed tips and hints about how the investigation was proceeding, where to look for the clues, and how to proceed with uncovering the scandal on the pages of their newspaper. This man was the legendary informant, "Deep Throat". Secrecy was key Woodward, in '' All The President's Men '', first mentions "Deep Throat" on page 71. He describes him as "a source in the Executive Branch who had access to information at CREEP as well as at the White House." The book also calls him "an incurable gossip", "in a unique position to observe the Executive Branch", and a man "whose fight had been worn out in too many battles." Woodward claimed that he would signal "Deep Throat" that he desired a meeting by moving a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment. When "Deep Throat" wanted a meeting he would make special marks on page twenty of Woodward's copy of '' The New York Times ''; he would circle the page number and draw clock hands to indicate the hour. They often met "on the bottom level of an underground Garage just over the Key Bridge in Rosslyn ," at 2:00 in the morning. The garage is located at 1401 Wilson Boulevard. Many were dubious of these cloak and dagger methods. Adrian Havill investigated these claims for his 1993 Biography of Woodward and Bernstein and found them to be factually impossible. He noted that Woodward's apartment 617 at 1718 P Street, Northwest, in Washington faced an interior courtyard and was not visible from the street. Havill said anyone regularly checking the balcony, as "Deep Throat" was said to have done daily, would have been spotted. Havill also said that copies of ''The Times'' were not delivered to individual apartments but delivered in an unaddressed stack at the building's reception desk. There would have been no way to know which copy was intended for Woodward. Woodward, however, has since claimed that in the early 1970s the interior courtyard was an alleyway and had not yet been bricked off, and that his balcony was visible from street level to passing pedestrians. It was also visible, Woodward conjectured, to anyone from the FBI in surveillance of nearby embassies. Also revealed was the fact that Woodward's copy of the '' New York Times '' had his apartment number indicated on it. Former neighbor Herman Knippenberg stated that Woodward would sometimes come to his door looking for his marked copy of the Times, claiming "I like to have it in mint condition and I like to have my own copy" {Link without Title} . Further, while Woodward in his book stressed these precautions, he also admits to calling "Deep Throat" on the telephone at his home. Motives In public statements following the disclosure of his identity, Felt's family called him an "American hero," stating that he leaked information about the Watergate scandal to the ''Washington Post'' for moral and patriotic reasons. This view has been echoed by a large number of commentators and historians familiar with the details of the Watergate history who feel that Felt's contributions were vital in exposing the illegal actions and cover-ups of the Nixon White House. Some media commentators, however, have suggested that Felt bore Nixon a personal animus for having passed him over when appointing a successor to J. Edgar Hoover as Director of the FBI . Others have claimed that Felt acted mainly out of institutional loyalty to the FBI, whose independence many believed had been constrained by the Nixon administration. Conservatives who worked for Nixon such as Patrick Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy castigated Felt and asserted their belief that Nixon was unfairly hounded from office. They claim that Felt was a traitor. This opinion is considered by most to be a very minority view propagated by those still loyal to Nixon's memory. HINTS TO HIS IDENTITY According to Woodward in his book, ''The Secret Man'', released in July 2005, "Deep Throat"'s identity was known only to seven people: "Deep Throat" himself, Woodward and his wife Kathleen Woodward, Bernstein, their editor Benjamin C. Bradlee , his successor Leonard Downie Jr. , and by a perspicacious Assistant US Attorney General named Stanley Pottinger . Woodward said in repeated interviews that the identity of "Deep Throat" would be kept confidential until "Deep Throat" died or agreed to let his real name be made public. Plans, however, fell apart, and Woodward revealed in ''The Secret Man'' that during a 1976 grand jury appearance over break-ins that Felt ordered, a grand juror asked Felt, "Were you 'Deep Throat'?" Felt "seemed to go white" and answered no. Pottinger, present at the questioning, requested the stenographer stop typing and then whispered to Felt: "You are under oath so you have to answer truthfully. On the other hand, I consider the question to be outside the bounds of our official investigation, so if you prefer, I'll withdraw the question. What would you like me to do?" Felt had the question withdrawn. At a lunch meeting with Woodward, Pottinger recounted his uncloaking to an astonished Woodward. In the years prior to Felt's disclosure, there was much speculation about the identity of "Deep Throat." Woodward would only confirm that "Deep Throat" was a specific man (and not a woman) in Nixon's administration — not a composite of several secret informants — and who smoked heavily and liked drinking Scotch . Woodward gave specific denials to six other possibilities, at the request of those people:
Criticism Following the disclosure in May 2005 of "Deep Throat"'s identity, '' Slate '' writer Tim Noah claimed in a column that some of Woodward's characterizations, including the claim that "Deep Throat" was a heavy smoker, were misleading. Woodward in ''The Secret Man'', however, said that Felt as he knew him was a heavy smoker, and speculates that the pressures on Felt had caused him to revert to heavy smoking habits. DEEP THROAT REVEALED '' June 1 2005 cover displaying W. Mark Felt ]] Although confirmation of "Deep Throat"'s identity remained elusive for over 30 years, there were a few suspicions that Felt was indeed the reporters' elusive source long before the public acknowledgment in 2005.
On May 31 , 2005 , ''Vanity Fair'' magazine reported that William Mark Felt, then aged 91, claimed to be the man once known as "Deep Throat." Later that day, Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee released a statement through the ''Washington Post'' confirming that the story was true, finally bringing to rest the most enduring mystery in modern American politics. On and career advisor, and so he got Felt's phone number and kept in touch with him. After deciding to try a career as a reporter, Woodward eventually joined the ''Washington Post'' in August , 1971 . Felt, who Woodward writes had long had a dim view of the Nixon Administration, began passing pieces of information to Woodward, although he insisted that Woodward keep the FBI and Justice Department out of anything he wrote based on the information. The first time Woodward used information from Felt in a ''Washington Post'' story was in mid-May of 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, when Woodward was investigating the man who had attempted to assassinate Presidential candidate George C. Wallace of Alabama. Nixon had put Felt in charge of investigating the would-be assassin as well. A month later, just days after the Watergate break-in, Woodward would call Felt at his office, marking the first time Woodward spoke with Felt about Watergate. Commenting on Felt's motivations for serving as his "Deep Throat" source, Woodward wrote, "Felt believed he was protecting the bureau by finding a way, clandestine as it was, to push some of the information from the FBI interviews and files out to the public, to help build public and political pressure to make Nixon and his people answerable. He had nothing but contempt for the Nixon White House and their efforts to manipulate the Bureau for political reasons." Interestingly, in 1980 , Felt himself was convicted of ordering illegal break-ins at the homes of Weathermen suspects, and their families. Ironically, Richard Nixon testified on his behalf — for the man who did so much to expose the multiple abuses and criminality of his Administration. COMPOSITE CHARACTER THEORY Although speculation always tended to focus on identifying "Deep Throat" as an individual, it was periodically suggested that the famous source was actually a composite character combining information the reporters obtained from several sources. When various accounts tried to identify the source based on the information provided by Woodward and Bernstein, they generally also sought to rebut alternative theories. The resulting evidence against each candidate suggested that either the reporters' tale was inconsistent, or that no single person fit the facts. Some analysts believed that the "Deep Throat" character was primarily a dramatic device used by the reporters to liven up their book's narrative. Before his admission, on previous occasions Felt himself had said he thought the character was likely a composite. OTHER SUSPECTED CANDIDATES Fred Fielding 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. [http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues03/dec03/presence.html Fielding was the assistant to John Dean and as such had access to the files relating to the affair. Gaines felt 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 Ronald 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: : ''LUKAS: Do you resent the implication by some critics that your sources on Watergate — among them the fabled "Deep Throat" — may have been people in the intelligence community?'' : ''WOODWARD: I resent it because it's untrue.'' Quote from ''Playboy'' interview, 1979 In retrospect, it appears that Woodward was only excluding the CIA, NSA, DIA, etc., with that statement, and not the FBI. Other credible candidates Other suggested candidates included:
Famous, but less credible, candidates
POPULAR CULTURE REFERENCES Television:
Film:
The printed word:
Video games: In the video game '' Metal Gear Solid '', a character claiming to be Deep Throat anonymously contacted protagonist Solid Snake at several points in the game with insider information about Snake's location. Music: Several days after the identity of Deep Throat was revealed, a ''"? Simon, who has refused to answer this question countless times, exclaimed with a laugh: "It's about Mark Felt!" {Link without Title} LITERATURE ]]
REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|