I am just glad it wasn't John Sears.
Mr. Bradlee, in a brief telephone interview only hours after the disclosure this afternoon, said, “The wisdom of the ages cries out for silence.” Mr. Woodward, who still works at The Post, and Mr. Bernstein, who does not, both at first issued brief statements declining, as they have for decades, any comment on the identity of Deep Throat until his death. But with the statements of Mr. Felt himself, and remarks by his relatives, they apparently felt released from their pledge.
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His family said he had been torn since then about whether to reveal his role as the mysterious guide who met Mr. Woodward in a parking garage and encouraged him to pursue the scandal up the ranks of the Nixon administration, and about whether his actions were appropriate for a law enforcement officer.
But Mr. Felt's grandson Nick Jones, a 23 year-old law student, read a statement on his family's behalf today, explaining: “As he recently told my mother, 'I guess people used to think Deep Throat was a criminal, but now they think he's a hero,'” and adding that “the men and women of the F.B.I. who have put their lives at risk for more than 50 years to keep this country safe deserve more recognition than he.”
Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein both declined at first to be drawn into any discussion of the matter.
“There's a principle involved,” Mr. Bernstein said in a telephone interview from New York. “Reporters may be going to jail today for upholding that principle, and we don't and won't belittle it now.”
The reality may be a bit more complex. The Vanity Fair article, written by a Felt family friend and lawyer, John D. O'Connor, portrays a polite but persistent dialogue between the Felt family and Mr. Woodward in recent years over who should control the rights (and benefits) to such a sensational story.
In encouraging her father to tell his own story, Mr. Felt's daughter, Joan, spoke of the money it might make to help pay tuition bills for her children. For his part, the article says, Mr. Woodward, who has built a lucrative a career as a best-selling author, had expressed repeated concerns about whether Mr. Felt, his memory fading and faculties diminished after a stroke, was really in a position to release a reporter from any confidentiality agreement he may have made.
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Although Mr. Felt's name had long been bandied about as a possible Deep Throat, it gained credence in 1999, when The Hartford Courant published an extensive article prompted by a teenager's assertion that Mr. Bernstein's son, Jacob, had named Mr. Felt as Deep Throat during a summer camp conversation in 1988. Mr. Felt denied the claim in an interview with the newspaper, and Mr. Bernstein “laughed it off,” The Courant reported at the time.