Posted on 05/31/2005 6:05:51 PM PDT by lowbridge
Next month sees the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and a fresh flurry of books and articles “unmasking” the man referred to by cognoscenti simply as “Throat”. The former White House counsel John Dean, who testified against Nixon, claims he will identify him on the Internet on June 17. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Gaines is offering A Finder's Guide to Deep Throat, the fruit of two years’ study by a team of journalism students which he compares to the Warren Report. Deep Throat, Gaines insists, is “a middle-level White House official. It’s not anybody a lot of people know.” Ronald Kessler, another former Post reporter, is bringing out a book which identifies the source as Mark Felt, a former FBI assistant director, now 88.
Dean’s “revelations” would be more convincing if he had not identified two other Deep Throats, with deep conviction, in the past: Earl J. Silbert, an original Watergate prosecutor, in 1975, and Alexander Haig, who was Nixon’s chief of staff and then Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, in 1982.
Felt, who was disgruntled after being passed over as FBI chief on the death of J. Edgar Hoover, was first named as a possible Deep Throat in 1974, the year All the President’s Men was published. Kessler claims that parts of Woodward’s account were “lifted almost verbatim” from FBI reports to which Felt had access. In 1999 it was reported that Woodward paid a secret visit to Felt in California, and was greeted as “an old friend”. Nora Ephron, Mr Bernstein’s former wife, has long argued that Felt is Deep Throat. Felt was a non-smoker, but it is entirely possible that Woodward and Bernstein’s depiction of a nicotine-coated Sore Throat was just a smokescreen.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-292880,00.html
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The 25th anniversary of Nixon's resignation (Aug. 9) has passed and with it the story of the young man from New York who maintains that Carl Bernstein's son Jacob revealed Deep Throat's identity to him during a casual conversation at day camp in 1988. News sources all over the country -- all over the world, in fact -- picked up on 19-year-old Chase Culeman-Beckman's claim, broken a few weeks ago by the Hartford Courant, that Jacob Bernstein, then around 9, told him he was "100 percent sure that Deep Throat was Mark Felt. He's someone in the FBI."
W. Mark Felt, a former FBI associate director long on the list of possible Deep Throat candidates, now 86 and living in California, laughed off the frisky young fellow's allegation. Bernstein denied that he ever told his kids who Deep Throat was. And speculation that Bernstein's ex-wife, writer Nora Ephron, may have planted the alleged identity -- true or false -- in her kiddies' ears fluttered and faded. (Bernstein said he never told her either.)
http://www.salon.com/people/col/reit/1999/08/18/deepthroat/
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W. Mark Felt is 88 years old now, and reportedly in ill health. He doesn't return repeated phone calls or answer a message delivered to his front door. A housekeeper says yes, he's home, but he's sleeping and can't be disturbed.
This is the man whom Richard Nixon believed was "Deep Throat," the secret source who helped reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein crack the Watergate scandal and bring down the 37th president.
Felt has denied it over the years. As early as 1974, he told the Washingtonian magazine, "It was not I, and it is not I."
-snip-
Felt's name comes up twice on tapes from Nixon's Oval Office, first on Oct. 19, 1972, and again on Feb. 28, 1973. On the first tape, Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman tells his boss, "...we know who leaked it."
"Somebody in the FBI?" the president asks.
"Yes, sir. Mark Felt," Haldeman says.
On the second tape, Nixon and Dean talk about Felt, and how people would view an FBI agent who snitched on his president.
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/evergreen/coursey/coursey.html
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According to interviews Woodward and Bernstein have granted over the years, Deep Throat -- named after a '70s porn film -- is a man, is still alive, held a highly sensitive post within the executive branch, and was fond of Scotch and cigarettes.
-snip-
Here's a look at several Deep Throat suspects put forth over the years:
MARK FELT: The former FBI official is considered a leading candidate. White House tapes from 1972 recorded Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman telling the president that most of the leaks were coming from Felt. Also, the Hartford Courant newspaper reported that a 19-year-old it interviewed in 1999 said Bernstein's son Jacob had told him that Felt was Deep Throat. Bernstein and his ex-wife, Nora Ephron, deny he ever told his son.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/06/17/deep.throat.facts/
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To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Salon has published an e-book by John Dean, former White House counsel to (and chief Watergate witness against) Richard Nixon, called Unmasking Deep Throat. The book is largely a fiasco because the candidate whom Dean originally intended to "unmask," a Nixon White House staff assistant named Jonathan C. Rose (whose father, Chappie Rose, provided Nixon legal assistance on Watergate), threatened to sue, and, in follow-up research, Dean "learned in confidence from 'a highly reliable [but apparently second-hand] source' that Rose was not Deep Throat." Chatterbox does not know what to make of all this.
Dean's book contains the most comprehensive list Chatterbox has ever seen of candidates whom Bob Woodward has ruled out as his famous secret source. (Click here to read why Chatterbox, pace David Obst and Edward Jay Epstein, believes that Deep Throat is real.) Most notable on the list is L. Patrick Gray, whom CBS fingered plausibly as Deep Throat in 1992. Apparently Woodward nixed Gray in TV Guide sometime after the CBS report aired.
-snip-
Notably absent from Woodward's list is W. Mark Felt, then the No. 3 man at the FBI. Felt is still Chatterbox's preferred candidate, in spite of his having denied it to this column three years ago. (Richard Nixon thought Felt was Deep Throat, and even Felt's children have apparent suspicions.) More broadly, Chatterbox continues to believe (with James Mann) that Deep Throat worked in the FBI.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2067081/
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I know that these points have been made probably a dozen times by the astute members of freerepublic, but these thoughts have been germinating in my head all day, and if I don't get them out, I may explode:
1. The same people who are calling Felt a hero, were excoriating Ken Starr for leaking information about an ongoing investigation to the press. It was never proven about Starr. Felt just admitted it.
2. Okay, so they got Nixon for corruption and criminal activity. I've got no great love for Nixon. But, isn't Felt's action a crime on the same par as Nixon's? What? The ends justify the means?
3. I've been hearing how this vindicates Woodward and Bernstein. To me, this makes them look like a couple of putzes. Investigative journalists? Having the FBI do the investigation and having it leaked to you is not exactly the kind of get-down-in-the-muck-and-drag-the-story-out that W & B would have had you believe that it was. Hell, I would be embarrassed to call myself an investigative journalist if I just was regurgitating an official police investigation.
Heh, heh. As if anybody will actually ask him that.
I think, following your logic, Felts crime would be on par with Ken Starr's.
Chris Matthews was absolutely orgasmic about this story tonight and was salivating over his reliving of the Watergate "scandal".
On the talk shows, Liddy and Buchanan were the only ones telling the truth, as usual.
Felt, the weasel, scurried out of his hole long enough to greet reporters at his door. What a louse--no wonder he's been hiding for thirty years.
Like Liddy said, it's all about the money, and the greedy kids pumping the old man for as much as they can get before he kicks off.
I'll go a step further: if Mark Felt is a hero, so is Linda Tripp. Felt just created an atmosphere in which the President of the United States was going to be -- but never was -- impeached; Linda Tripp not only got the President impeached, but he ended up admitting to perjury.
Who are the traitors in the Clinton impeachment? The Republican Senate majority.
Funny how some things don't change.
This is good.
Their "default" content is BUSH IS STUPID AND EVIL.
While they're congratulating themselves for a coup no one under 40 remembers, W's poll number can drift back up.
You give investigative journalists way, WAY too much credit.
That's closer to the truth than you know...
From the Vanity Fair article:
At one lunch at a scenic restaurant overlooking the Pacific, Joan and Mark sat their father down to lay out the case for full, public disclosure. Felt argued with them, according to his son, warning them not to betray him. “I don’t want this out,” Felt said. “And if it got in the papers, I’d guess I’d know who put it there.” But they persisted. They explained that they wanted their father’s legacy to be heroic and permanent, not anonymous. And beyond their main motive— posterity—they thought that there might eventually be some profit in it. “Bob Woodward’s gonna get all the glory for this, but we could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I’ve run up for the kids’ education,” Joan recalls saying. “Let’s do it for the family.” With that, both children remember, he finally agreed. “He wasn’t particularly interested,” Mark says, “but he said, ‘That’s a good reason.’”
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