My inclination is the same as astorian’s: Deep Throat was a fiction.
Having said that, I must admit that this is not an area of great expertise for me. I’m sure I could reconsider my position if someone could offer some piece of information that supposedly came from Deep Throat that Woodward or Bernstein could not have reasonably acquired by just thinking through the possibilities.
So help me out here. How many times did Woodward meet with Deep Throat, and what specific information has Woodward claimed that Deep Throat gave to him? A link to a site will do, I suppose.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned my favorite nominee – Pat Nixon.
As to Nixon books, for people like me who are unabashed Nixon haters, The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers. It is clearly a hatchet job, but the guy is a real artist with his hatchet. It follows Nixon’s career from 1947 (according to Summers, on the take as a freshman Congressman) through his resignation as President.
Dean, quoted by Salon: "I have placed Deep Throat, I believe irrefutably, in the Nixon White House, and I have shown the very few people privy to the information that Throat gave Woodward when he did so. "
There’s another question which might point us in the right direction:
Why would Deep Throat still want his identity concealed even after 30 years?
My inclination would be to reveal myself, be lauded in the media as a hero, write a lucrative book, sell the movie rights, and live the rest of my life in an elevated celebrity status.
There must be a legitimate reason for keeping his identity a secret - and even dying with the secret…
I can think of a very good reason why DT would want to remain hidden. If DT is a prominent Republican, still active in the party, then he/she would want to avoid exposure. Think about it. Deep Throat would become a pariah to the Republican party. After all, he/she ratted out one of the most powerful and (at the time,) influential Republican presidents in the history of the U.S. and precipitaed his downfall. It could possibly end whatever career in conservative politics that DT might have and reduce his/her clout to nil.
But then, that is only conjecture on my part. For all I know, DT was a White House janitor.
Let me ask the Teeming Millions again to help me out here. The thing that would help me the most with this matter would be a site that listed what Deep throat said and when he said it. Google offers lots of Watergate chronologies but nothing quite what I’m looking for.
bnorton Dean’s $8 .pdf file, available at Salon.com, may do just that sort of exercise.
Another source would be to dig up the report by the “university students in Illinois”.
I suspect you want something more condensed though.
FWIW, Dean claims that he initially believed that Deep Throat was a composite; obviously, he’s changed his mind. Woodward and Bernstein continue to maintain that he’s an actual person.
What I would like to see, and what I think would be useful to anyone trying to fugure this out would be a simple list of the dates of each meeting and the information that was provided on each of those meetings.
I saw a fairly convincing investigative report on TV on the 20th anniv. of the break-ins. Unfortunately, I now can’t remember if it was A&E, CBS or ABC that ran it. They leaned pretty heavily toward Pat Gray.
They cross-checked all the dates for the meetings in “All the President’s Men,” which Woodward stated were accurate, against the travel schedules of all the leading Deep Throat candidates. Only Gray was in town for all the meeting dates.
Also, Gray was a very moralistic man who hated the way the white house was conducting itself and forcing executive branch agencies to play along. To this day he will not comment on anything related to Watergate out of sheer disgust with the whole affair, which may well point to his being DT, since DT was also disgusted with the way Nixon et al conducted themselves.
Some people motivated by principles actually do end up in government service, although very few stay there.
Broodha and particlewill, read the link provided by beagledave. Points right at a conservative who wouldn’t want it revealed because it would indeed potentially end his influence as a conservative: Pat Buchanan.
Gray’s an interesting candidate, though.
