NORE: This from John Dean:
I have little doubt that one of my former Nixon White House colleagues is history's best-known anonymous source — Deep Throat. But I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly which one.
We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.
Without confidential sources, much of what people need to know in a democracy would never be reported, so unless there is a higher reason, journalists must be able to protect such sources who are willing to impart such information. That said, no news person should agree to provide confidentiality unless it is essential to obtain information that the public should be told and there is no other way to obtain the information. A scoop per se does not justify a pledge of confidentiality.
As for Deep Throat, well, we will all soon learn if Woodward has been protecting a criminal for three decades, or merely a source who gave him some good information and some bad information — when history's greatest source was wrong — that Woodward has never corrected. (To pick just one of Throat's many errors, I randomly opened "All the President's Men," scanned until I came to the passage in which Woodward reports Throat as giving him this: "Dean talked with Sen. [Howard] Baker after [the] Watergate committee [was] formed and Baker is in the bag completely, reporting back directly to the White House." It never happened.)
I suspect that Throat's identity may prove a cautionary tale for all news gatherers. Stay tuned.