According to University of Illinois investigative journalism professor William Gaines, along with several semesters worth of his journalism students, Fred Fielding, who was the first assistant to former Nixon White House special counsel John Dean.
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Very interesting.
Oh, if this is in the wrong forum, sorry. Move it as you wish.
I heard an interesting theory a while back that Deep Throat was Ben Stein and that his eventual Hollywood career was payment for his silence.
W&B have said that when he dies, they will reveal who he was. I wonder what proof they will provide, or if we are supposed to take them at their word.
BTW, great username for a video game dude, Justin Bailey.
Yeah, I’ve heard W&B say that, but really it’s almost pointless to speculate. Like who really shot Kennedy.
My favorite is a guy, who in all serious, said Kennedy was killed by the CIA because the next day he was travellnig to Houston and in front of NASA he would announce to the world that aliens existed.
And thanks, I love it when people get the meaning behind my username.
The University of Texas knows who it is.
http://www.utexas.edu/admin/opa/news/03newsreleases/nr_200304/nr_watergate030407.html
First of all, why would they lie about something like that? It would be completely and utterly against both of their characters to do so.
Second, yeah, the bit about revealing who it is after the person dies is true, but they also said that they would reveal it if the person came to them and said ti was okay to do so.
On the contrary- Bob Woodward has proven himself quite capable of falsifying stories and making ridiculously implausible claims.
I mean, does ANYBODY really believe his preposterous claim that he talked to a dying William Casey, who explained his actions with a last dying gasp of “I believed”?
I do not believe that Deep Throat exists. I think Bob Woodward made him up. Now, I am NOT saying that he got the Watergate story wrong. On the contrary, I think he and Bernstein got almost everything right. I think they did a lot of hard work, obtained loads of information from a wide range of sources, and pieced together what must have happened. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough- they needed ONE highly placed source who could confirm what they’d deduced.
At that point, I think Woodward cut corners, and fabricated that one source.
I thought Deep Throat was Ken Clawson.
<d&r>
Completely fabricating a source wouldn’t have helped them. In fact, it would have completely unmade their story if a single thing they’d attributed to him proved wrong.
It helps to believe once you remember that Fred Fielding once thought he was dying and then admitted to being Deep Throat.
Is there a handy cite for the story that Fielding confessed to being Deep Throat while under the impression he was dying? I am not challenging the truth of the story, but would merely like to read more on this.
in any case, people are known to confess to the darnedest things while under the impression they are dying. People used to confess to being Jack the Ripper and John Wilkes Booth, for instance. Deathbed confessions are considered exceptions from hearsay under certain circumstances. But the law, while treating them as admissable, does not assume that they are necessarily accurate; the fact that someone makes a deathbed confession that he was someone or did something doesn’t really prove anything by itself.
I once read a lengthy, and apparently learned, article on how an obscure insurance industry figure was Deep Throat.
During the Watergate scandal there was some speculation that it was “energy Czar” William Simon.
After the book The Final Days was published, there was widespread speculation that David Eisenhower had fed Woodward information for that book. It seemed within the realm of possibility that he had been Deep Throat as well.
In his wonderfully funny book Why Not Me?, Al Franken mentions in passing that numerous insiders provided him with information, but that Al Haig, the actual Deep Throat, had not.
Years ago when I was in an MBA program it fell to me to interview the man who was personnel manager and plant engineer (it was a small operation) of a local factory. For reasons which were never entirely clear to me he got to talking about Deep Throat within a few minutes of our first meeting, and told me he was David Rockefeller. The notorious gap on the Oval Office tapes was where Nixon announced his intention to nationalize Mobil Oil.
Asked how he knew this, he replied loftily that it was “well known within the oil industry”.
The Supreme Court held during the Korean War that the President does not, as a general principle, have the authority to nationalize a company and, in any case, it appeared my informant was…not well. He also spent a lot of time showing me the documents which lined his office for his plans to launch an independent space program; he intended to fly to Alpha Centauri.
Political columnist Richard Reeves was quite outspoken that there never was any Deep Throat, Sure enough, it appears Woodward would not have needed any clandestine meetings with an anonymous insider to write what he did. IIRC, Deep Throat mostly was credited with saying things like “dig deeper” and “keep looking”.
As noted before, Woodward’s writing in other instances has been somewhat suspect. Aside from the notorious business with the dying William Casey, there is his continual unnerving habit of revealing via clairvoyant retrovision what a person was thinking at a particular moment, something Franken lampoons at length in the book mentioned above.
While I have been interviewed rarely, I have come to expect that I will be quoted as saying things I never said, and making statements which, while they are a fair paraphrase of what I meant, don’t even sounded remotely like the way I talk. Suffice it to say that many reporters adopt the view that facts aren’t the Bible, and Woodward seems to be a leading figure in this movement.
It also seems possible that Deep Throat was, in some sense, a composite character.
The news report I heard or read - there have been a raft of them in the last few days - definitely said that Fred Fielding had confessed on his deathbed.
The original article, however, just gives the rumor and attributes it to Fielding on the basis of the claim made by William Gaines and his students.
That’s what happens when you report on a report. The facts get compressed and tidied with each iteration.
I don’t know, but…
I presume DT is a composite character, a literary device. That deing said the FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray seems to be the most likely suspect.
I don’t know, but…
I presume DT is a composite character, a literary device. That being said the FBI Director, L. Patrick Gray seems to be the most likely suspect.
There are five people who know who **Deep Throat ** is.
Deep Throat themself, whomever he/she is.
Bob Woodward
Carl Berstein
Ben Bradlee
Catherine Graham–deceased
Now, do you honestly think that Ben Bradlee would have published an article in which Deep Throat was used as a source if he knew that the person didn’t exist?
Not a chance.
Bradlee was the one who stood in the firing line during the whole Janet Cooke affair and said that the Post had made a mistake and it was wrong etc. and he wouldn’t hesitate to do so again if he had the slightest shred of proof that Woodward was lying about Deep Throat.
As for the Woodward-Casey business, it’s not implausible, in fact considering what has gone on around Washington, it’s rather likely that it did happen.
Woodward has a ton of contacts around the city.
You’re all wrong. It’s Kirsten Dunst and that other girl. This was all revealed in that Dick movie.
i go for made up. from the little stuff that i know of the whole tale, he didn’t do anything. just a shadowy figure in a drama. by a writer. saying vague things…hmmm…also, let’s be real-1972 some GUY calling himself Deep Throat?
Orrrrrrr…some dork just glomming on to some writer to get some sort of recognition…and woodward buying into it.
Dork: you’re close…
Woodward: Wow! this info is great!
Dork: I’m seeing someone-oops, i mean check on someone-with an N in his name…he’s doing something…not nice!!
Woodward: Oh, man! is it the president??? Is he handing out hush money to liddy to give to hunt?
Dork: you’ll have to find that out on your own…
This is probably more Great Debates territory than GQ, so I’ll shoot this thread over there.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Katherine Graham did not know the identity of Deep Throat. She discusses this fact in her (excellent) autobiography. However she firmly believed in the existence of Deep Throat as a single individual who was a secondary source for much of the information published by Woodward and Bernstein. Had she and Ben Bradlee not believed that there was a Deep Throat, they would not have published some of the Watergate stories, since they required confirmation from two sources before they would publish. There were Watergate stories (some of them later found to be accurate) which were not published at the time because there was no second source to confirm them. Had Deep Throat been an invention, it would have been easy for Woodward and Bernstein to claim that he had confirmed those stories in order to get them published.
Deep Throat was not a literary device created for the book version of “All the President’s Men”. He existed before the book was written as the source given to Woodward and Bernstein’s editors to support their stories in the Post. If he seems shadowy in the book and movie, that is because Woodward was careful not to reveal anything about him that might potentially give away his identity. It is true that the information Deep Throat provided was not new information – he was used primarily to confirm information that the reporters had already obtained elsewhere.
I don’t know the identity of Deep Throat, but I am confident that it will be revealed as soon as he dies. There are plenty of people who fit all the necessary criteria. One of the things that makes this mystery better than many other great mysteries of the past century is that it will probably be definitely solved within my lifetime.
What if Woodward and Bernstein die first?